Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, August 31, 1993 TAG: 9308310050
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BRISTOL, TENN. LENGTH: Long
It is three o'clock on a warm Saturday afternoon and Joe Gibbs walks to his team's pit at Bristol International Raceway, intent on helping prepare for the evening race.
He sees a team member pick up a push broom.
"I'll do that," he says. Taking the broom, he sweeps the small rectangle of asphalt where his Winston Cup team will spend the race.
He looks slim and fit in his 38x32 black Levi's jeans, having lost about 25 pounds in the six months since he retired as coach of the Washington Redskins.
But on the eve of the 1993 NFL season, it seems strange, indeed, to see a three-time Super Bowl champion NFL football legend pushing a broom at a Tennessee race track.
Actually, this job is one of the few race-day tasks that the Winston Cup stock car owner is qualified to do.
And it's a world apart from the pressure of NFL football, which he abandoned March 5 in a tearful farewell.
If Gibbs still were the coach, his nerves would be running at full rattle. He would be worried about the loss of offensive lineman Jim Lachey and the impact of the departure of linebacker Wilber Marshall and receiver Gary Clark - all Redskins standouts. But he would try to hide the tension behind his calm coutenance.
He already would have logged more than a month of those wee-hours coaches meetings. But he would be rising ever earlier to gain those precious extra hours of preparation for Monday night's season opener against the Dallas Cowboys in Washington.
"I'd be nervous right now is what I'd be," he says. "Heck, Monday night against Dallas?"
But these days, the pang of what he gave up only hits him occasionally.
"I've missed some things," he says. "I've missed some of the fellowship with the coaches and players."
Does he miss the late-night meetings?
"I miss some of the joking around from 11 to 12," he says, "but I don't miss the midnight to 3 stuff."
And he was more than happy to let new coach Ritchie Petitbon handle last week's roster cut from 80 players to 60. It was never easy for Gibbs to tell a player he was gone.
"I'm tired of all that stuff," he says. "Every now and then, I see some hitting. And you get a little twinge for the competitive part of it. But I tell you I've had so many other things I've been able to enjoy and do, it's kind of like a new life, really."
The new life brings its own concerns, of course, and Gibbs is concerned on this Saturday afternoon in Tennessee that his driver, Dale Jarrett, and his team are having a miserable weekend.
In February, Jarrett won NASCAR's biggest race, the Daytona 500. But hours earlier on Saturday, he failed to qualify for the Bristol race. The team had to use a provisional starting spot.
But Gibbs can't control the fortunes of his stock car racing team as he could with the Redskins.
As Redskins coach, his fanatical work regimen finally sent his health into a tailspin. That, and a growing desire to spend more time with his wife, Pat, and two sons, J.D. and Coy, led him to retire from the NFL at age 52.
He promptly settled into a whirlwind schedule that included job hunting, speaking engagements, public appearances, sponsor commitments, every NASCAR race thus far, roller coasters and race car driving.
If anything, he appears busier in retirement.
"It's different though," he said. "Any time I want to, on my calendar I can say, `Okay, these three days . . . I've had about three small vacations and I leave Thursday to see Coy play [with the Stanford University football team] out on the West Coast. Pat and I went to the lake last week for two days. We've got a little place down in southern Virginia [Fawn Lake] we like to go to.
"And so I've had a lot of little things that I'm enjoying that I wasn't able to enjoy.
"To give you an idea, Pat, J.D., myself, [business manager] Don Meredith and his kids took a trip to Michigan and got in there early on Saturday [Aug. 14]. We drove over to where those world's two biggest roller coasters are in Ohio and rode those.
"We came back with the whole family and went to the race in Michigan, then the next day they rode with me to Indy [for the NASCAR test] and then they went over on Monday night and rode the next biggest roller coasters over in Cincinnati. And then they flew home and I flew home."
Says J.D., "Other than that, Mom's trying to keep him at home as much as she can."
This summer, Gibbs and his sons attended a two-day stock car racing school at Texas World Speedway.
"They let you roll pretty good - 165 or 170," J.D. Gibbs said.
All three of them loved it. Now the boys want to race. J.D. already has started.
While he continues to work on Jarrett's pit crew, J.D. recently bought a Legends race car (a five-eighths scale replica of an old NASCAR modified with a 1200cc motorcycle engine) and has begun racing it.
"I think he's going to kinda work his way around driving different things and see if he really likes it," Gibbs said.
NBC has hired Gibbs as a color analyst and his first game is Sunday at San Diego.
"I get to go to San Diego and then go up [to Stanford] and see Coy play and go back down to San Diego. NBC was real good about that. So I'm going to see Coy play all the time and I enjoy that."
But can mild-mannered Gibbs succeed as a commentator?
"I don't know," he said with a little laugh. "People either like you or they don't. I'm not going to worry about that one."
Since leaving the Redskins, Gibbs has purposedly kept his distance, lest a three-time champion and Washington hero cast an unwelcome shadow over the efforts of his successor.
"I haven't been back around," Gibbs said. "I really have no contact. I'm going to go fishing with [assistant coach] Don Breaux. I'm lining up some things like that.
"But I think I've talked to Ritchie for 10 minutes since I stepped down. I think it's good for me to be as far away from there as possible."
He still has a radio show in Washington, "but I talk about the Redskins' opponents. I don't want to be talking about the Redskins."
He does not own Redskins season tickets. He will not be going to Monday night's game. "I don't think I need to be there," he says.
But he will be watching at home Monday on television, after flying back from the West Coast.
"I'll definitely have feelings, now," he says. "I want those Redskins to win."
Keywords:
AUTO RACING
by CNB