SELF MADE: The late Bobby Isaac to be inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame
WRITTEN BY GERRIT VAN GENDEREN FOR THE HICKORY DAILY RECORD ON JAN. 22, 2016
CHARLOTTE – Bobby Isaac’s success was hard-earned, not given.
After all, he was a self-made man.
He grew up poor in Catawba, losing both of his parents by the time he was a teenager.
He quit his formal education at age 13 and focused on work in a sawmill.
The odds usually stack up against young men in western North Carolina with as tough of a start to life as he had.
But Isaac had a gift others didn’t and used it to find a way out of poverty – he could drive stock cars.
Isaac’s natural talent and legendary stock car racing career will be cemented in history Friday night, as he’ll be posthumously inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame.
He’ll be the third Grand National champion driver from Catawba County – joining father and son Ned and Dale Jarrett of Conover – to be enshrined in the 35-member body and one of five inductees in the class of 2016.
With Isaac’s enshrinement, Catawba County will have more drivers in the NASCAR Hall than any other county in the country.
Isaac’s spot in the Hall of Fame is a milestone coming 39 years after his death and appropriately highlights a fast career – literally and figuratively – of 309 starts, 37 wins, 134 top-5 finishes, 49 career polls and the 1970 NASCAR Grand National Series Championship.
Racing was Isaac’s passion – that was never questioned by those around him – even on the day he died of a heart attack after racing at Hickory Motor Speedway in August of 1977.
But it’s the man he was, on and off the track that shaped a Hall of Fame racing career.
A true friend
Despite growing up in the Catfish area near Bunker Hill High, Isaac always wanted it to be known he was from Catawba. Even after moving to the Maiden area with his second wife, Patsy Isaac, he kept a post office box in Catawba.
“When they were going to introduce him at the races, Bobby wanted it to be known he was from Catawba,” said Patsy Isaac of Conover, who will speak on his behalf at Friday’s induction ceremony in Charlotte. “One of his proudest moments was when Catawba erected signs at either end of the town saying, ‘Home of Bobby Isaac, the 1970 NASCAR Champion.’”
Bobby met Patsy when he was 28-years-old, just before his racing career jump-started in 1961. She was reluctant to date him because of his prior marriage and older age – Patsy was 18-years-old at the time – but ended up dating him because of his “persistency.”
“He told me when he drove around my circle (driveway), he told himself, ‘I’m going to marry her,’” Patsy said. “And that’s what he did.”
The couple married in 1963 and had twin daughters, Rhonda and Robbie, who now live in Viewmont and Davidson, respectively.
The Isaacs divorced in the mid-1970s, but maintained what Patsy called a “friendly relationship” until Bobby Isaac’s death.
Patsy said Isaac was a “proud father” who missed the birth of his daughters while racing in Daytona, Fla. He drove to Catawba County immediately after the race and arrived at roughly 4 a.m. on a Monday, demanding to see his daughters despite the doctors’ insistence for him to wait.
“He told those doctors, ‘You will let me in,’ and he got his way,” Patsy said with a laugh. “That’s the kind of man he was – having the children were important to him and getting back home to see them was important too.”
Patsy referred to the weekend of their daughters’ births as the “story of our lives,” – Isaac had racing obligations and then he’d be home for a long as he could.
His passion for racing led to him being an obvious inclusion of the best drivers around; his friends knew it and his peers knew it, but Isaac never bought into the social aspects of his rising celebrity.
“He was so quiet and hard to get to know, really,” said Ned Jarrett, who raced against Isaac for most of his 13-year career. “He didn’t put himself in the position he thought others who were driving against him were in – he thought we were above him.”
“I did everything I could as we got to know each other better to convince him he was just as good as anyone else, because he really was.”
Patsy said there was never a lack of confidence in his ability to drive, but more so just apathy toward the social aspects of the job.
“Many thought he was a loner – he certainly wasn’t, but he was slow to make friends,” Patsy said. “If he was a friend of yours, he was a true friend.”
Isaac also carried a sense of humor often buried beneath the seriousness and competitiveness of his racing demeanor. Patsy said when he was able to be at home and relax – a rare opportunity for him – he was quick to jokingly pick on her.
When playing golf with Jarrett in Maiden one day, Isaac was playing poorly and hit several consecutive shots into the water on a par-3 hole. Jarrett said he recalls Isaac calmly throwing each of his golf clubs into the water individually, followed by a heave of his bag.
“He walked off toward the clubhouse, clearly calling it a day, but before long we saw him coming back,” Jarrett said, laughing. “Turns out he left his keys in the golf bag, so he stripped down, retrieved his keys, but left the bag and clubs out there for good.”
The humor he brought to those around him, like his golf round with Jarrett, often clashed with a stout competitive nature to be a winner in everything he did.
A competitive edge
Patsy said she’d never seen anyone as focused and determined to make a career out of racing as Isaac was.
It was an uphill battle for Isaac, who saw his first stock car race at Hickory Motor Speedway when he was 17 and bought a 1937 Ford shortly after.
He started racing full-time in the NASCAR Late Model Sportsman circuit in 1958, living off of the bare minimum with one goal: win as much as possible.
And he did.
Isaac won 28 feature events, competing against the likes of eventual career-long peers and friends, Jarrett and David Pearson, and eventually vaulted himself into the Grand National division (currently known as the Sprint Cup Series) in 1961.
His talent was raw and his desire was admirable. But there were some flaws, one of which still causes Patsy to laugh.
When Isaac raced the Sportsman Modified cars in the early stages of his career, Patsy said if he was in second place and knew he wouldn’t be able to win, he’d pull into the pits and quit.
“He learned very quickly that he couldn’t do that if he wanted to make it to the big leagues,” Patsy said.
Isaac put it all together in 1970 when he won the Grand National Series Championship, driving the No. 71 K&K Insurance Dodge Charger Daytona under crew chief Harry Hyde. He won 11 races and finished with 32 top-5 finishes in 47 starts that year.
He’d go on to set 28 world-class records on the Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah in the same car the following year, including a 217.368 mph mark. Some of the speed records still stand to this day.
An eerie day at Talladega Superspeedway in 1973 forever subdued his competitive edge, though, as Isaac famously heard a strange voice tell him to retire from the race.
That came sometime after Larry Smith, a driver from Lenoir, died from head injuries sustained earlier in that race.
“He told me everything became dead silent – no motor noise, nothing – and he heard this voice say, ‘Get out of the car,’” Patsy recalled. “I don’t question that; I really believe that’s what happened.”
“I don’t know if he actually heard that voice or it was a thought in his head, but it made enough of an impact on him to get out of the car.”
Superstitions claim it was the voice of Native Americans who used to live on the land Talladega is built upon. Whatever it was, Isaac believed it and stopped racing after that.
Jarrett said he and Isaac never had a conversation about what happened that day, noting it wasn’t a conversation he felt was appropriate to bring up. It was something Isaac never even addressed with Patsy either, other than their conversation the day of the 1973 race.
Despite the warning Isaac received that day, his hunger for driving and doing what he knew best eventually drew him back to racing later on, ending in tragedy.
The heart attack that ended Isaac’s life on Aug. 13, 1977 came hours after he collapsed in pit road at Hickory Motor Speedway during a Late Model Sportsman race with 25 laps remaining.
Patsy said it’s sad Isaac didn’t obey the warning he received four years before at Talladega about leaving racing in the rearview.
“He knew he needed to quit,” Patsy said. “He couldn’t stand to be away from racing and I think deep down in his heart, he knew he didn’t belong out there anymore.”
Jarrett thinks Isaac wouldn’t have resurrected his racing career at that point, yet he continued to have the urge to be in a race car.
“He realized he couldn’t really be competitive in those final races,” Jarrett said. “He told me he didn’t know what he was going to do, because racing was his life.”
“If he would’ve had something else he was familiar with, he might’ve tried his hand at it.”
“But as far as the world had changed, I don’t think he would’ve done anything other than be involved with racing.”
Paving the way
Despite his tragic death, Isaac will be remembered as one of the drivers who helped usher in the mainstream era of racing. Jarrett said he mastered the ability to aggressively drive without overdoing it – a middle point between Jarrett’s own driving style and Wilkesboro native Junior Johnson’s pedal-to-the-metal style.
Of the many changes to racing over the 40 years since Isaac last raced, Jarrett and Patsy Isaac said the biggest may be how much is required of the driver to be successful.
Today’s sport is truly a team effort; the driver, the pit crew, the crew chief, a spotter and many other individuals are relied upon to win a race.
While winning races in Isaac’s era was never 100 percent the driver’s credit, they were required to do much more than today’s drivers.
“At least 50 percent of winning was the driver back then,” Jarrett said. “My guess is about one-third of the responsibility of winning comes from the driver in today’s racing.”
It’s difficult for Patsy to compare the generations of racing because of how rapidly the sport has evolved, but she’s confident in knowing Isaac’s talent was something unparalleled.
“He was a pure driver, that’s really what he was,” Patsy said. “It’s what he knew best.”