Cale The Courageous

   A pal and I were waiting out a rainstorm in a golf course shelter the other day and started talking racin'.

   "Who is the toughest, bravest driver you've seen and known in all your years of covering NASCAR?" he asked.

   I replied that there have been plenty of super-tough, daredevil drivers.

   I named some examples:

   Seven-time champions Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt drove several time while suffering a variety of broken bones that were excruciatingly painful.

   Bobby Allison competed through a stretch of one season with so many multiple injuries that he had to be lifted in and out of his race car by special handles sewn onto his uniform.

  Buddy Baker and Sterling Marlin both ran events while recovering from painful burns.

  "But overall," I said, "I've got to rank Cale Yarborough as both the toughest and most courageous." 

   

   "Tell my why," said my friend.

   "Well, because both in his youth and then as a race driver, Cale experienced a number of life-threatening incidents that would have cowed a lesser person.  But they never caused him to shy away from danger.  Not once that I know of."

   "Wow," said my golfing buddy.  "Looks like it's going to be raining a while.  Tell me the story of Cale The Courageous."

   Okay...

   Cale Yarborough once flew over the railing and out of Darlington Raceway.

   He was swept into the midst of a grinding, horrific 23-car crash at Alabama's Talladega Superspeedway, an accident in which he saw cars sailing over his head "high as a telephone pole."

   He rode through a stunning flip in the midst of a run that made him the first driver to qualify at more than 200 miles per hour at Daytona International Speedway.

   However, Cale, a three-time Winston Cup champion, winner of 83 races, including four Daytona 500s, doesn't consider any of these his closest calls.

   "I can tell tales that make a lot of peoples' hair stand on end," Cale once recalled.  "Tales that make driving a race car seem like riding a merry-go-round."

   Yarborough then readily reflected on these terrors.

   "Personally,"  said Cale, "I feel the closest I ever came to you-know-what was in my late teens down at Jacksonville, North Carolina.

   "It was 1958 and I was working with an air show as one of the skydivers.  I jumped out of the plane at about 5,000 feet and did my diving number down to about 2,000, the altitude where I always deployed the parachute.  I tugged the ripcord and nothing happened.  For some reason, the dadgum 'chute had become fouled.

   "I told myself, 'Don't look down.'"

   Cale kept pulling and pulling on the ripcord, but nothing happened.  Finally, at about 200 feet above the ground, his parachute billowed.  But by now he was going so fast the force of the wind blew half the canopy away!

   "Even so," continued Cale, "there was enough of the 'chute left to slow me down a little bit.  Luckily, I landed in a patch of high grass in a muddy field, which provided some cushion.  I came out of it with only a chipped bone in my elbow."

   How did a self-described farm boy from tiny Timmonsville, S.C., come to be a skydiver?

  "Pretty funny story," said Cale.  "Me and another ol' boy, a buddy, bought us a used airplane, an old J-4 Cub.  We kept it in a barn near the cornfield on my folks' farm.  One day a neighbor who had been a paratrooper in the military came by with a parachute and convinced us that jumping was a really enjoyable thing to do.  We started trying it and found that, sure enough, it was a lot of fun.

   "Usually, we only jumped when the ex-paratrooper was around to oversee things.

   "One day he wasn't there and I decided to make a jump.  I spread the 'chute out in a cotton patch and folded it into the pack--crammed it in, actually.  When I jumped out of the plane and pulled the ripcord, it looked like a tornado way up there in the sky.  Cockleburrs, pieces of stalks, cotton leaves and dirt came flying out of that parachute.

   "It was some sight."

   Cale went on to jump 214 times, but the failure of his 'chute that day at Jacksonville was in no way his first encounter with the Grim Reaper.  He'd already escaped the swipe of the scythe.

   When Cale was a kid, one night beneath a full moon he was walking barefoot through the yard at his family's home when he suddenly encounted a snake coiled before him.

   "I tried to jump away," recalled Cale.  "But the snake struck and hit me right behind my big right toe.  My stepfather opened the wound up, put a tourniquet on my ankle and rushed me to the hospital."

   For the next week Cale was "about the sickest" of anytime in his life.  Upset stomach.  Headache and soreness.

   A few days later, they found the snake, dead in the hedges near the house.  "It was a rattler," said Cale.  "We figured we ran over it heading to the hospital and it crawled into the shrubbery and died."

   Not too long afterward Cale and a bunch of his buddies were down at a creek on the Yarborough farm, taking a dip.

   "There were no swimming pools around Timmonsville in those days," he continued.  "So we swam in the creek.

   "A bad storm was brewing, so all of us went home.

   "I was standing at a window, watching as the wind and rain swept across our fields.  Suddenly, a bolt of lightning hit at the edge of the yard and what looked like a fireball bounced up, broke the panes out of the window and hit me in the chest.  It threw me backwards across the room and knocked me out.  I'm not sure for how long.  When I came to, I smelled smoke.  But there was no fire."

   A year or so later Cale went raccoon hunting one night with his uncles and some friends.  Their hounds treed a 'coon and Cale volunteered to shinny up the tall tree and try to shake the critter out.  But when he shook too hard, it was Cale that fell, not the raccoon.

   Back to the hospital, where several days and nights of recovery were necessary for the concussion Cale suffered.

   During his senior year in high school, Cale, a star running back on the football team, again found himself being registered in a hospital emergency room.  He had a leg injury, but not from football.

   "I was out on a date with Betty Jo," he said of the childhood sweetheart who would become his wife.  "We went to a drive-in for burgers and soft drinks.  A guy got out of a car and started acting ugly.  I told him to watch himself, that a lady was present.

   "Danged if that rascal didn't pull out a pistol and shoot at me.  The bullet ricocheted off the pavement and went through the calf of my leg, then out the bottom of my boot.

   "It just as easily could have hit me in the head or the heart."

   Ironically, despite the hundreds of thousands of miles he drove in a career stretching from 1957-1988, Yarborough never spent a night in a hospital bed because of a racing injury.

   "It they hospitalized you for being shook up, it would have been a different matter," he said with a laugh.  "I've been shaken a lot by racing accidents, especially that big pileup at Talladega."

   Cale admitted to experiencing still another close call that has become a colorful part of NASCAR lore.

   "In 1977 I did something very dumb that involved a twin-engined plane I'd bought," related Cale.

   "I was driving for Junior Johnson at the time, and I happened to mention to some of the crew guys, who were mountaineers from Wilkes County (N.C.) that I would like to have a pet bear.  A few days later I got a phone call from the race shop and was told I should come up to Wilkes County immediately to pick up my bear.

   "I thought the crew boys, Henry Benfield and Bud Green and Mike Hill and that crowd, were playing a practical joke on me."

   Even so, Cale flew to Wilkes County.  He found it was no joke.

   The crewmen had enticed someone to trap a young bear weighing about 150 pounds for them to give to Cale.

  "I wondered how I was going to get it back to Timmonsville," said Cale.  "Henry and Bud said it was no problem.  They tied the bear up real tight with plastic rope and put it in the back seat of my plane."

  About halfway through the flight home to South Carolina, the bear wiggled free enough to start gnawing at the rope.

   "I started sweating," conceded Cale.  "By the time I managed to land the plane and taxi it to where people were waiting with a cage, the bear was down to the last strands and almost free!

   "Can you imagine having a wild bear loose in the cockpit of an airplane?!  I was wishing I'd brought my old parachutes along!"

   Yarborough surviving so many escapades certainly is testimony to his toughness.

   But Cale, who still farms the family fields among many other businesses he owns and oversees, said he feels there's another reason he has come through so many close calls on the race track and off.

   "The Man Upstairs intervened on my behalf," he said.  "I really believe that.  Otherwise, about any of the incidents I was involved in could have gone the other way."