Racing loses a giant

A great common man is gone Billy France is gone.

He was Bill France Jr. only because he had to be.

It was a sort of inherited title he had to live up to.

And did he ever.

The obituaries, tributes, testimonials and condolences are flying over the airwaves, off the presses, all over the Internet, for Bill France Jr., "the brilliant intellect and blinding force behind NASCAR's incredible growth," as NBC's Dick Ebersol put it, "one of the true giants in the history of American professional sports."

But I still call him Billy. Always have. Always will.

That comes from knowing how far he came, how hard his road was, carrying NASCAR on his back out of the backwoods into the mainstream, staring down Detroit and Madison Avenue with his unblinking eyes, transforming a Podunk traveling show into the Fortune 500's favorite sports league.

William Clifton France wasn't really a junior, being the elder son of William Henry Getty France, founder of NASCAR. He had himself called Bill France Jr. because he thought it was clearer for the dynasty.

Back when everybody called him Billy, back when he labored (literally, with shovels and on bulldozers) in the shadow of Big Bill, back when he first ascended the throne as NASCAR's second czar in 1972, almost nobody - including Billy himself _ thought he was up to the task even briefly, let alone for a reign.

Nobody could replace the old man, "The Tall Man," they called Big Bill then, as a visionary and a ruthless typhoon and an artful salesman.

Even as Billy struggled for his sea legs in the mid `70s, "He'd rather be driving a rig (an 18-wheeler) up and down I-95 than running NASCAR," one of his old troubleshooters, the late Joe Whitlock, used to confide to some of us.

He was a reluctant czar, up from an apprenticeship of peasantry. He had run bulldozers and earth movers in the desperate days of construction of Daytona International Speedway, one who in the upstart days of NASCAR had sold tickets and waved flags and run off freeloaders who wouldn't pay their 50 cents.

But once he saw the necessity of power, he wielded it with a pragmatic despotism that was never regal.

Bill France Jr. has been billed all over the media the past 18 hours as a visionary, but his great secret was that he was not.

Billy France was a common man who saw through the eyes of the common man, thought with the uncluttered mind of the common man, empathized entirely with what excited the common man. It was all about the show. To hell with engineering. That is, and was, and always will be, the difference between NASCAR and Formula One, the antipodal empire of motor racing on this planet.

You could see Billy France, common man, hoisting himself by necessity into the role of Bill France Jr., czar, on the afternoon of Feb. 8, 1976, when A.J. Foyt had him around the neck and appeared about to punch him.

Billy had thrown America's best-known driver of the time off the Daytona 500 pole for cheating. Neck in the crook of Foyt's massive left arm, eyes staring at that picnic ham of a right fist, Billy never even blinked. Not once.

That was the day he became, officially, Bill France Jr. So far as I know, he never blinked again, either.

To anybody. Or anything.

He took his knowledge of the common man's yearnings and longings to the media capitals _ he always seemed something of a rumpled figure in Manhattan, and never was good trying to read a Teleprompter.

But he said what he thought, and meant what he said, and could he ever stare down the polished titans.

More important than L.A. and New York, he could stare `em down in Detroit and Charlotte, and especially on his home court, Daytona Beach.

He was portrayed by the actor Fred Thompson (the current presidential candidate) in the Tom Cruise film "Days of Thunder." In the screenplay he was called Big John. He summoned the two combatant drivers to dinner, a dinner now titanic in NASCAR lore, not just in the film. You think that scene was good? You think Dale Earnhardt was tough? You think Geoff Bodine might have been the only man alive who never took a grain of bull from Earnhardt? Listen.

Rick Hendrick was there when the real scene came down, in 1987. Present were Earnhardt and his car owner, Richard Childress; Bodine and his car owner, Hendrick . . . and France.

"That day I saw him explain life, to two drivers and two owners, to where we understood exactly," Hendrick, now NASCAR's most successful team owner, recalled Monday.

"The point was, he wasn't going to tolerate anybody messing up the game. He said, `We can sit here and watch videos and try to figure out whose fault it was, or we can just realize this ain't gonna happen anymore. If I see y'all even get close to each other, I'm gonna have to park you and come down there and check the cars. And it might be the end of the race before I can get down there.

"He said, `Dale, you make a pretty good living doing this. Bodine, I guess you can go back to New York and race modifieds. Richard, I don't know what you can do.' And he told me, `I guess you can sell cars. But this (expletive) is over. Now let's go eat.'

"Earnhardt said, `I got plans.' Bill said, `There's a phone over there. Change your plans.'

"And we all went to dinner."

Billy France died Monday. The genius of the titan Bill France Jr. was that there was no genius, just the unwavering pragmatism of a common man given an uncommon task, who did enormously well.