Joe Gibbs enters NASCAR Hall with pride and a heavy heart, one year after son’s death
Joe Gibbs has had a lot of great things happen in a remarkable life, the latest of which takes place Friday night in Charlotte.
Most people are lucky if they reach the pinnacle of a single sport. Gibbs, one of the most successful owners in NASCAR history, has now done it in two.
Already a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the 79-year-old Gibbs will be inducted into NASCAR’s Hall of Fame Friday — part of a class that also includes two of his former championship drivers (Tony Stewart and Bobby Labonte), as well as Waddell Wilson and Buddy Baker.
This ceremony will be special to the man everyone still calls “Coach,” in part because Gibbs’ eight grandchildren are expected to be in attendance. When Gibbs was welcomed into the NFL’s hall in 1996 — he directed three Super Bowl wins with three different quarterbacks as the head coach in Washington — none of his grandchildren were even born yet.
It will be a happy evening for the man the Carolina Panthers originally wanted to hire as their first coach in 1995. (Gibbs met with then-owner Jerry Richardson twice and seriously considered the idea before deciding the timing wasn’t right.)
But Friday will also be a day leavened with a degree of sadness for the Gibbs family.
J.D. Gibbs, Joe’s son and the biggest driving force behind the success of Joe Gibbs Racing, died one year ago, at age 49. He passed away from complications caused by a rare degenerative neurological disease that had impacted his brain function for several years. He left behind his wife, Melissa, and their four sons.
Joe, however, is convinced that J.D.’s spirit swirled through the extraordinary 2019 season that JGR had. The team’s four Cup drivers won 19 of a possible 36 points races, and Kyle Busch secured JGR its fifth Cup championship in the season finale at Homestead.
All of that, though, didn’t make as much impact on Joe Gibbs as Denny Hamlin’s win for Joe Gibbs Racing at the 2019 Daytona 500, one month after J.D.’s death.
J.D. Gibbs had discovered Hamlin and brought him to JGR, and the numerical significance of that entire day in February still resonates with Joe Gibbs.
Joe and J.D. and ‘11’
J.D. Gibbs died on Jan. 11, 2019.
“J.D.’s number playing football in high school and college was 11,” Joe Gibbs said Thursday. “Denny Hamlin’s car number was 11. J.D.’s number when he raced himself was 11. So Denny put J.D.’s name on the roof, next to his, and won the Daytona 500. That was the greatest victory I’ve ever been a part of. ... I think people who saw it know that God was a part of that, and J.D. was part of that.”
Gibbs got into racing in large part due to his sons, J.D. and Coy. They had long loved “anything with a motor,” their father said, and had wondered if the family could go into the racing business some day. The family began Joe Gibbs Racing in 1992 after their father had retired (for the first time) from being a football coach. They fielded a single car in a modest rented shop on Harris Boulevard. They had 17 employees.
“That first year we were just trying to survive,” Gibbs said. “It was, ‘Hey do we belong in this thing? It’s awful big.’ We didn’t win a race.”
The breakthrough came in 1993 when Dale Jarrett won the Daytona 500 for JGR by edging Dale Earnhardt. Five Cup championships have since followed, and the business has grown exponentially.
Said Gibbs with a laugh: “We never had a dream really of more than one car or 17 people. (It was) ‘Maybe we can control this.’ Now we’re racing seven cars, we have 500 people, and it’s totally out of control.”
Gibbs helped Rivera
Gibbs still follows the NFL closely. Over the past two months, he said he met “a couple of times” in person with former Carolina head coach Ron Rivera when he was deciding whether to become the head coach in Washington after Panthers owner David Tepper fired him.
Gibbs said he gave Rivera a glowing review of controversial Washington owner Dan Snyder.
“I tried to give him an accurate picture,” Gibbs said of his meetings with Rivera. “Dan never meddled in anything with me. But he was there for free agency on the first day at 12:01 a.m., trying to help me get guys we had picked out. He really does have a burning desire to win. And when I lost football games there (Gibbs returned as Washington’s head coach from 2004-07 before again retiring), it was my fault, not his.”
Gibbs’ roles with Washington during his years as coach and as the titular head of JGR are dissimilar in many ways, he said. In football, he was drawing up plays and deeply involved in micromanaging his team.
“I was the technical guy because I grew up in it,” Gibbs said. “And there’s a thrill to that, making something happen on a football game day.”
At JGR — a place that one day will likely be run by Gibbs’ son Coy and some of Joe and Pat Gibbs’ eight grandchildren — Joe Gibbs is more of a CEO and a delegator.
“When I came over here (to NASCAR),” Gibbs said, “it was totally different. I was not the technical person. So over here it’s trying to pick the people and keep the sponsors happy … Trying to pay the bills. So it’s a different world. But it’s still people … And you realize that when you get shoved up front and you get something like this that happens in your life, you’re thrilled that everybody gets to go with you.”
That includes J.D., who the Gibbs family has established a charitable website for: JDGibbslegacy.com.
“Everybody loves J.D.,” Gibbs said, “and everyone misses J.D. But he’s also still a big part of everything we do.”
