They say Cale Yarborough wrestled alligators. They say he jumped from planes. They say he won a Golden Gloves boxing tournament in South Carolina. They say he was on the fourth floor of a hotel in Vietnam during the war when Viet Cong soldiers attacked and made it up to the second floor before being repelled.</p><p>They say that once during the week of the Indianapolis 500, when Cale was trying a little open-wheel racing, he had a little too much liquid courage and decided it would be fun to do a long series of hot laps around the Speedway Motel, conveniently located at turn two. So, of course, that&#8217;s exactly what Cale Yarborough did. And no matter how many people tried to wave him down, he would not stop.</p><p>He did not stop, in fact, until the security guard shot the Firestone tires out from under him and Yarborough got dragged off to jail. He was bailed out, of course, by an official from Firestone.</p><p>They say a lot of things about Cale Yarborough, which is a big reason why NASCAR is the monster sport that it is today. If you think about it, there doesn&#8217;t seem to be any compelling reason why fast cars, smothered in advertising, racing around in circles, would fascinate the masses. But, see, it isn&#8217;t the fast cars. It&#8217;s the people driving those cars. There is something dangerous about them.</p><p>Or anyway, we like to believe that. Today, Jimmie Johnson &#8212; should he avoid a crash at Homestead-Miami Speedway &#8212; will become the first driver since Cale Yarborough to win three consecutive NASCAR Cup championships.</p><p>Nowadays it&#8217;s called the NASCAR Sprint Cup championship, because no other sport manages to so thoroughly integrate sponsors into the sport. Imagine it being called the &#8220;Super Glue Bowl&#8221; or the &#8220;U.S. Air Open.&#8221; And Jimmie Johnson didn&#8217;t get here wrestling alligators. He made it to the top of his sport by being a brilliant driver, sure, but also by being the savviest businessman &#8212; a guy who networked and worked up win-win business plans and persuaded the right money people that he was worth the investment.</p><p>In other words, yeah, it has changed some. But people still remember. They remember Dale Earnhardt, the man in black, who was going to get to the finish line first one way or another. They remember Richard Petty, the everyman, who wore his cowboy hat and sunglasses and signed every autograph. They remember Junior Johnson, the last American hero, who took on all the big racing teams with a homemade Chevy and the same guts he had used to elude the law when he was running moonshine.</p><p>And even if people don&#8217;t exactly <em>remember </em>those drivers, they still believe in that spirit, believe in watching drivers push the limits, cheat death, laugh in the face of danger and all those clich&#233;s that were not quite clich&#233;s when Cale Yarborough was doing them.</p><p>Yarborough grew up on a tobacco farm in Timmonsville, S.C., one town over from the racetrack at Darlington. He raced for the first time at Darlington when he was 18 years old. He finished 44th, won 100 bucks and didn&#8217;t race in NASCAR again for a year, until the next time the show came to Darlington. Won 150 bucks the second time.</p><p>There was nothing subtle about Yarborough&#8217;s racing style once he got established and was able to get pretty good cars: He liked to get up front and stay up front. Twice in his remarkable career, he led every single lap of a race. More than twice, his engine blew up and his pit crew &#8212; led by the moonshiner Junior Johnson himself &#8212; would put a whole new engine in the car while he waited patiently in the driver&#8217;s seat. Well, he would do anything to get to the finish line. Yarborough would finish every single race in 1977 &#8212; all 30 of them &#8212; and that was the second of his three consecutive championships. He won 83 races. He won four Daytona 500s. He was the first guy to break 200 mph at Daytona.