Casting Call: The Iceman cometh

NASCAR driver Terry Labonte's car

September 3, 2003 • Jennifer Stevenson • Archives

Terry Labonte, NASCAR’s so-called Iceman, melts for the outdoors
Plus: ‘NASCAR great Terry Labonte to be at Wal-Mart FLW Tour Championship Sept. 11’

Growing up in the steamy confines of south Texas, NASCAR driver Terry Labonte nurtured a dream. Toiling around his native Corpus Christi, the soft-spoken young man spent week after week strapped into his quarter midget racing machine, paying his dues and slowly but steadily gaining the experience it takes to pilot a stock car.

Labonte graduated from quarter midgets to stock cars on the local racing scene, and in 1976, a lucky break from a deep-pocketed Texas oilman kept Labonte in a ride after financial woes nearly deep-sixed the family-owned operation. Two years later, Labonte made his auspicious debut on the Winston Cup circuit, finishing fourth in one of the series’ most storied events – the Southern 500 in Darlington, S.C.

Twenty-four years, 26 poles, 21 wins and two championships later, Labonte still lives and breathes the pastimes of his youth. When he’s not busy with his No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Kellogg’s racing machine, Labonte is often found enjoying his other favorite childhood pursuits – fishing and hunting.

Lake Corpus Christi, formerly known as Lake Mathis, provided the young Labonte with his formative fishing forays. His parents had a place on the shores of Lake Mathis, a 45-minute drive from the Labonte home.

“Probably my first experience with fishing was there,” Labonte said. “The biggest thing I can remember is that we’d always fish for catfish, and we caught some catfish that I thought were as big as I was. It was pretty neat.”

Years later, Labonte cashed in some of his race winnings on a lake home nestled on the shores of North Carolina’s Badin Lake. Labonte and his family lived there for 15 years, enjoying the ripe fishing scene found on its waters.

“We spent a lot of time down there, my son and I, when he was growing up,” Labonte said. “We did quite a bit of fishing together, mostly for bass, stripers and occasionally catfish.”

Labonte’s native Texas, with its close proximity to the Gulf of Mexico as well as its proliferation of waterways, afforded him opportunities to catch different kinds of fish in unconventional ways. “We’ve gone fishing for all kinds of stuff,” he said. “Growing up in Corpus Christi, we did a lot of surf fishing around there when I was a teenager. We did a lot of saltwater fishing. That was fun; I enjoyed that. We’d drive way down on the beach and go fishing on Padre Island.”

Lazy days on the beach, especially those spent fishing, can turn any relaxed mind to mush, and the teenage Labonte was no exception. “I can remember buying some frozen shrimp on one trip,” he said. “We got down there, and we got busy fishing and setting up our camp and everything, and I had left a box of it in the floorboard of my dad’s pickup truck that I’d borrowed. When we left it wasn’t frozen any longer.”

The oversight would have lasting effects. “All the juice was in the carpet,” he said. “My dad wasn’t really happy with me for quite some time. The truck smelled like shrimp the day he sold it.”

He also fondly recalled the drives to the beach just to cast a line. “We probably did some stupid stuff,” he said with a laugh. “We used to go down there to the beach to go fishing, and you had to have a four-wheel drive because the sand would get so bad. That was fun.”

Indeed, so-called Texas Terry much prefers fishing in the Lone Star State to the options he currently has near his Thomasville, N.C., home. “I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “I think it’s pretty good here, but down in Texas, there are so many lakes to go bass fishing on, and you have the coast right there and bays and things. I think the fishing is better down there, just because you have a lot more options.”

Geography is not the only thing that limits Labonte’s fishing time these days. Although the demanding Winston Cup schedule currently prevents Labonte from enjoying local fishing opportunities around race tracks, in the past there were less hectic times when he and some friends could wet a line in a private lake near the world’s fastest speedway.

“The only track that we used to fish at was Talladega,” he said. “The team I drove for had three or four guys who really liked to fish, and we’d go every afternoon except Saturday. We couldn’t go Saturday afternoon because the race was on Sunday, but we’d be there Thursday night and Friday night, every trip down there. We did that for quite a while.”

Though he has run the gamut of fish species when it comes to angling experience, Labonte takes a diplomatic approach to the topic of his favorite fish – he likes whatever’s biting. “I’m one of those fishermen who gets bored easily if I’m not doing any good,” he said. “But I enjoy fishing if the fish are biting.”

Without hesitation, though, Labonte’s favorite fishing companion is his 21-year-old son, Justin. Following in the footsteps of his father as well as his uncle Bobby Labonte, Justin is readying himself for his own racing career. He is currently cutting his teeth in local late-model stock-car races and hopes to run select Busch Series events.

“He is just an avid outdoorsman,” Labonte said. “He loves to fish and hunt, and we would go fishing quite a bit. We lived in our lake house for a while, and we had to fish every afternoon. He would be waiting for me to get home to go fishing. We finally got brave enough to let him take the boat out, and he probably wasn’t 14 years old.”

When asked which Labonte is the better fisherman, Terry quickly replied, “Oh, he is, definitely,” recounting a story of how Justin outfished an employee (and fellow outdoorsman) during a recent day of fishing in the backyard pond.

“He is a good fisherman,” Labonte said. “He caught an 8-pound bass when he was about 7 years old in a neighbor’s pond. When I got home, he had it strapped to the back of his four-wheeler, and he said, `When are we going to get this mounted?’ We had to ice it down and take it to the taxidermist!”

When the Labonte family moved to their current home in Thomasville, Justin, then a teenager, commandeered the extensive project of stocking the pond that sits on their property.

“He did it all,” Labonte said. “He took charge of that. He went and talked to a biologist and did it right. It’s got some pretty nice bass in it right now. He’s got catfish, bass, bream, bluegill and minnows. He’s got about four grass-eating carp in it. He put them all in like the guy told him to – so many of these, so many of those. It was a big project.”

A genuine outdoorsman, Labonte enjoys hunting as well as he likes fishing. In fact, his outdoor excursions once included the companionship of the late Dale Earnhardt. “We went elk hunting a few times together,” he said. “I’ve been fishing with him before. We were going to go out to my place in Texas to go deer hunting but never had the opportunity. We went to New Mexico to a place Dale had been to several times. It was a fun trip. We didn’t get the elk we were looking for; the other guys did!”

Labonte frequently visits a place of his in Texas that’s flush with deer. “I enjoy whitetail hunting, especially down in south Texas,” he said. “I think I like it down there mostly because it doesn’t get really cold, like some parts of the country.” He said he has an elk-hunting trip in store later this year.

Labonte’s trips, elk-hunting and otherwise, are, of course, planned around the Winston Cup schedule. Labonte has driven the Kellogg’s car since 1993, and the association between him and Kellogg’s is so strong that to many race fans, he is Kellogg’s.

“Of all the years I’ve been racing, of all the different sponsors I’ve been associated with, they’ve been, without a doubt, the best sponsor to work with,” he said. “I like the image of the company. I like everything about it. They do a good job promoting the race team, and they’re a great group to work with.”

Indeed, the Kellogg’s Racing Web site proudly boasts of Labonte’s vast career accomplishments, most notably his Iron Man record of consecutive career starts, recently broken by fellow driver Ricky Rudd. With typical humility, the affable Labonte shrugs off the achievement, but he still speaks reverently about the man whose record he broke.

“When I got the record, I broke Richard Petty’s record,” Labonte said. Petty’s record stood at 513 consecutive starts, and before a concussion forced him to miss two races in 2000, Labonte had started 655 consecutive races. “I thought, `Of all the people to share a record with.’ It’s pretty cool it was Richard Petty.”

Even though his streak ended nearly three years ago, Labonte still regrets losing his grip on the record. “I was really disappointed,” he said. “If I wouldn’t have gotten hurt and missed those races, that probably would have been something hard for somebody to beat down the road. It didn’t really change anything; it was just disappointing.”

After 24 years on the tour, Labonte bears the mark of a seasoned veteran. Younger, newer drivers are quickly making their mark on the Winston Cup scene, making the competition tougher for the old guard. Some of them are even Labonte’s teammates, including four-time Winston Cup champion Jeff Gordon and 2002 rookie-of-the-year candidate Jimmie Johnson, who defied many expectations by winning three races his first season.

While Labonte’s on-the-track performance may seem weaker than it did in his championship-winning days, no doubt the higher level of competition that exists in modern-day Winston Cup racing has taken its toll. That said, Labonte expects positive results in the 2003 season, thanks in large part to the newly redesigned Chevy Monte Carlo that he and his Hendrick Motorsports teammates have fielded in 2003.

In the months preceding the season, Labonte said he felt the new body style would be better than the one they had, and he thought that change, working in tandem with other improvements, would lead to good things for the No. 5 team.

“Our team made some changes a year ago – we’ve got a new crew chief (Jim Long), and he’s been trying to fine-tune that thing to get it where it needs to be,” he said. “A lot of times these race teams – they get to be like football teams. You hire a new head coach that comes in, and he inherits everything, and it takes him a little while to get things sorted out. Our crew chief has done a good job in doing that, I think, and has continued to get us going in the right direction. We’re excited about this new car because we think that’s going to be a big help for us.”

No matter the end result, Labonte can reflect back on his career and know he is a rarity – the kind of racer that comes along only once in a while, making a mark that’s surpassed by few but heralded by many. Labonte himself, though, has a simple answer for his grand accomplishments.

“I’m just kind of the guy who showed up every day for work and did his best.”

Star Chart

Home:
Thomasville, N.C.

Years fishing:
“Probably about 40 years.”

Favorite lure:
“Whatever works. Whatever the fish like.”

Favorite fishing hole:
“The pond out behind my house, because I don’t have far to go to get to it!”

Fishing buddies:
21-year-old son Justin.

Largest fish ever caught:
A 350-pound bluefin tuna. “I thought it was a small submarine when I had it hooked.”