After 200 victories and seven championships, Richard Petty ran his last NASCAR race on November 15, 1992.
More than two decades later, the life of NASCAR’s King is no longer being run at 200 miles per hour. But it’s still very much running along.
Whether it’s meeting his fans at the Petty Museum in North Carolina or helping tend to the Sprint Cup team that bears his name, there’s always something to do.
He’s 77 years old and long removed from the cockpit, but he still can’t stop. And he doesn’t plan to.
As Petty summed up recently for NBCSports.com columnist Joe Posnanski: “Guess I’ll keep moving ’til I drop.”
Petty has seen incredible highs and lows, both byproducts of the racing life. Those moments are chronicled in Posnanski’s latest piece, “Life And Times of the King,” which is now up on NBC Sportsworld, the new home of NBC Sports’ long-form stories and documentaries.
As Petty winds his way through the museum that pays tribute to he and his family’s accomplishments in American motorsports, he tells Posnanski of tales like how he and brother Maurice attempted to pave the garage floor for father Lee when they were pre-teens (“It’s sorta straight if you look at it right,” Petty says); his late wife, Lynda, handling the pressures of the real world so he could focus on his racing; and him dealing with the numerous tragedies that befell him in his career (“You don’t put a question mark where God put a period,” he says while, as Posnanski writes, staring into nothingness).
For every fan of the King and NASCAR history, it’s a must-read.
