I'm real excited about getting my house done,” Earnhardt says. “I've never really built a house before, so this has been an interesting experience. It's going to be fun when it is done. There are a lot of cool things that I've added. The basement will be a lot of fun, with a pool table and a poker room and a music room. That's going to be a lot of fun down there.”
The sanctuary will give Earnhardt a place to escape the demands that come from his popularity, even though it's his ease in front of the camera, his off-the-cuff comments and his Generation X appeal that makes him the idol of the “Junior Nation.”
While the house may be lavish by everyday standards, there are other drivers in the series who have built bigger, more elaborate homes, according to Mike Davis, a close personal aide to Earnhardt. “You have to remember,” Davis says, “that for most of his career, Junior has lived in a two-level modular home. So this is something that he's been waiting to build. It's going to be nice, but it won't be as elaborate as one might expect.”
Earnhardt would also be happy if less were expected of drivers. Case in point. At a recent round-table discussion involving the track promoters of Speedway Motorsports Inc. (SMI), several stressed that they'd like to see drivers do more to help the fans and the tracks in order to sell more tickets at those facilities.
Upon hearing that during a break in his commercial shoot, Earnhardt fired back with a message of his own.
“The race track owners want drivers to do more? Yeah, right. They need to go back to work,” he said. “They forgot what it's like to sell tickets. That's their problem. They ain't had to sell tickets for a long time and none of them remember how or knew how or ever learned how.
“They need to get back to working hard and doing their promotions and putting packages together for race fans. They don't want to cut the ticket price but they probably should and get these hotels to quit gouging these people. They can dump that responsibility on drivers all they want but the responsibility really lies in their hands to sell race tickets and they have to get creative in doing it. We already do a lot. We do [bleeping] plenty and they are full of [bleep].”
Earnhardt believes the risk versus reward for a driver offering his opinion often leads to ridicule. That is why some drivers don't open up to the fans and the media.
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/bruce_martin/01/30/dalejr/?eref=sircrc
There is no place like home, as George Bush will soon discover when he moves permanently into his new post-presidential neighbourhood in Dallas to discover an active fan club - surely one of the few on the planet.
The signs now dotting the Preston Hollow neighbourhood, where thick shrubbery and wrought iron gates with shining monograms shield the McMansions and verdant football-field-sized lawns from unwelcome eyes, are the work of an entrepreneurial-minded college student. The student, since Christmas, has since sold nearly 800 signs at $20 (£13) each - most to supporters of Barack Obama, according to his father, Bill Bibb. About $2 from each sign goes to a local primary school. [snip] Unlike some of their neighbours, whose homes include Olympian-scale swimming pools and helicopter pads, the Bush home on Daria Place is a fairly modest four-bedroom ranch style home.
But their reduced circumstances do not seem to have affected the neighbours' enthusiasm for the former first family. "Ninety per cent of the homes on Bush's street have a sign," Bibb said. Bush's realtor alone bought 20. Other neighbours, some of whom have been generous donors to Bush's political campaigns, have supplemented the signs with banners.
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