Rowdy Reflections
Opinion by Jeffrey Kanode, RealWV
I wasn’t a Kyle Busch fan. I won’t pretend like I am one now, just hours before his shocking and untimely death. In fact, during the absolute peak years of his driving career, I actively rooted against Kyle Busch.
For those of you who don’t know my NASCAR fan heritage, I grew up a Dale Earnhardt fan. When Dale got killed at Daytona in 2001, I transitioned into Tony Stewart fandom. When Bubba Wallace entered the Cup Series in 2017 driving for Richard Petty, first as a relief driver, later as the fulltime pilot of the fabled 43, I became a Bubba Wallace fan. Of course, now Bubba drives for Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin in 23XI’s number 23. I have also always had deep affinity for Chase Elliott as a legacy driver, someone who, like Dale Earnhardt Jr., has NASCAR history coursing through his very blood, breathing in his DNA, as the son of beloved Bill Elliott. At no point in his career then, did I actively root for Kyle Busch.
But there comes an era in every Cup Series driver’s career. The wins slacken off. The hair gets a bit gray at the temples. There are younger drivers, much younger drivers who start making the headlines for their daring and prowess. I saw it happen to Richard Petty. I witnessed it with Dale. I’ll never forget Jeff Gordon’s final win. As dusk settled in on the Martinsville Speedway, and as the darkness blanketed the then silent track, the fans blanketed Jeff with cheers because he had won, as an “old” man, in his final season. Folks who had hated Gordon for years were rooting for him to win again.
We were “there” with Kyle Busch. Oh, he was still winning. History will record that Kyle actually won a NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race at Dover just six days before his death. The Cup wins weren’t coming anymore, though. I fully believe Kyle would have experienced something of the racing renaissance Earnhardt experienced, way back in 2000 when Dale rallied back to win a few races and finished second in points, in the last full season before he died. Kyle and Richard Childress were going to figure out the Next Gen car, and I believe he would have won another half dozen to ten races over the next few years. That would have been awesome. It still would have been post his “prime time,” however. That’s okay. NASCAR fans would have loved seeing it, myself included. Now we never will.
Folks my age have a generational connection to the Busch boys. Kyle’s older brother, Kurt, the 2004 Cup Champion and a NASCAR Hall of Famer, is exactly my age. We were adolescents, teens, when the Tom Cruise NASCAR movie “Days of Thunder” came out. The nemesis who ultimately became the protagonist’s friend in that movie, Rowdy Burns, was a Dale Earnhardt-like, crusty old cuss who drove a black car. Kyle loved the character, and he nicknamed himself “Rowdy Busch.”
Rowdy won 234 races across the Truck Series, O’Reilly (formerly the X-Finity, and Busch) and Cup series. A few years ago, when he hit the 200 wins mark, a sharp debate broke out among “NASCAR Nation,” an argument that shall surely erupt again in the wake of Kyle’s death: Does Kyle’s winning number compare or even eclipse Richard Petty’s 200 career Cup wins? While many say “No,” because the King’s wins all occurred in the premier Cup Series, whereas Kyle’s extended across the three top NASCAR series, others will argue that Kyle’s Truck Series and X-Finity wins are equal to Petty’s, because many of Richard’s wins occurred in smaller racetracks (including West Virginia’s Ona Speedway) in races where many other top NASCAR drivers did not compete and the races were 200-300 miles/laps or less—very comparable to this era’s Truck and X-Finity series races. I personally believe in the coming days and years, Kyle Bush may very well come to be regarded as NASCAR’s winningest driver.
Kyle Busch won two hallowed Cup championships, in 2015 and 2019. He always took a bow after each race and championship win, like a Broadway star or a musician. He would receive the checkered flag from the flagman, and clutching that flag as something holy, he would bow, three times. It always reminded me of the legendary unified bow of the Beatles. I loved those Busch bows—Some fans I know found it cocky. I found it classy. No other driver ever did it, ever. Kyle made it up just like Alan Kulwicki created the “Polish victory laps,” the backward laps of honor around the speedway now called “Kulwicki Victory Laps.”
In these last few years, Kyle’s love and passion for racing steered heavily toward guiding his son, Brexton. Busch even stated that after he retired from Cup, he would share a NASCAR Truck Series ride with his son. Kyle planned on driving half the races, then spend the balance of the season on the pit box coaching his Brexton.
Sometime tonight, into tomorrow, I plan to fall down a You Tube black hole. I want to re-watch some classic Kyle Busch verbal combat with the media. These aren’t verbatim quotes, but they are very close. Who can forget his, “I’m great! Everything’s fine…” sarcasm, or the mic drop “I’m not surprised about anything” press conference, or the moment a few years ago when he turned helplessly to his P.R. person mid-interview and said, “Can I go? These are really stupid questions.”
What I will spend the most time watching, though, will be those classic Kyle Busch bows in victory lane. I wish, as I know all NASCAR fans wish, we could have seen just a few more.
