This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human. This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

Very rarely can one man encapsulate the image of a particular sport to the average observer.

In basketball, perhaps Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Magic Johnson.

Notice it's not a singular name, but in NASCAR, only one name comes to mind for most people.

And that's Dale Earnhardt, who died on this day in February of 2001, and the millions of us who were watching, well, we'll never forget that day. Here to tell the story of Dale is Jay Busby, a lead writer at Yahoo Sports,

and the author of Earnhardt Nation. Take it away, Jay.

Daytona International Speedway can house as many as 150,000 fans, and on this day, the entire track was sold out.

It was a beautiful day, a blue

skies, warm weather, it's the kind of weather that everybody else in the country is

looking at Daytona and saying, man, I wish I was there. Down below on the pits,

you could see the cars lined up in a row one after the other and on pit row

it's absolute chaos. There are drivers there, there are

crew chiefs there, there's family there, there is media there, but right there by

the number three, right there by Dale Earnhardt's Black Goodrich number three is

Teresa Earnhardt. Sharp and business-like in a deep purple blazer, black slacks and

sunglasses. She kisses him once, her right hand

curled around the back of his head, then she kisses him again. They're not long

kisses or deep meaningful ones. There's a loving but routine kisses a wife

gives her husband as he heads off to his job. Broadly speaking, the Daytona 500

is called NASCAR Super Bowl, but that's not quite fair for a number of reasons.

First of all, the Daytona 500 is older than the Super Bowl, and second of all, the Daytona 500 can house more people in the track than the Super Bowl can, sometimes by as much as a factor of three.

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