From: imbibe@mindspring.com   
      
   Cale Yarborough, Hall of Fame NASCAR Driver, Dies at 84   
   By Richard Goldstein, Dec. 31, 2023, NY Times   
   Cale Yarborough, who won 3 consecutive championships and whose 83 victories   
   tied him for 6th place on the winners’ list, died on Sunday. He was 84.   
      
   He had been battling a rare genetic disorder, his family told The Associated   
   Press.   
      
   At the peak of his success, Yarborough won 9 races in 1976, 9 in 1977 and 10   
   in 1978, capturing the points championship each time. His feat wasn’t   
   equaled until 2008, when Jimmie Johnson matched it. Yarborough was also the   
   series championship runner-up    
   in 1973 and 1974, and again in 1980.   
      
   He won the Daytona 500 4 times (1968, 1977, 1983 and 1984), second only to   
   Richard Petty’s 7 victories.   
      
   But for all his achievements, Yarborough was remembered especially for a race   
   he didn’t win, the Daytona 500 in Feb 1979, the first NASCAR event to be   
   televised in its entirety to a national audience.   
      
   Yarborough and Donnie Allison, the brother of Bobby Allison, another of   
   NASCAR’s greatest names, thumped each other several times on the backstretch   
   while vying for the lead. Both Yarborough and Donnie Allison lost control of   
   their cars near the finish,   
    went spinning off the track and wound up unhurt in a grassy area while   
   Richard Petty zoomed to victory.   
      
   Moments later, Yarborough and Bobby Allison, who had been out of contention,   
   engaged in a fistfight. The eastern U.S. had been hit by a Sunday snowstorm,   
   leaving thousands without much to do but watch TV. Most of these viewers had   
   presumably never seen a    
   major stock-car race and tuned in to the CBS network out of curiosity.   
      
   The fight between two good old boys from down South — Yarborough, a native   
   of South Carolina, and Bobby Allison, from Alabama — provided an   
   entertaining few minutes for viewers who had only modest interest in the race   
   itself.   
      
   That fight transformed NASCAR from a niche sport in the South to a national   
   attraction.   
      
   “It put NASCAR on the nationwide map,” Petty told The Tampa Bay Times in   
   2019. “People thought racing was a Southern sport deal, and they saw the   
   rednecks come out there at the end. It was the perfect storm, the snowstorm,   
   everybody watching, how    
   the race ended.”   
      
   Remembering his duel for the lead with Donnie Allison some 30 years later,   
   Yarborough said: “I had the fastest car and had it set up to where I could   
   slingshot him on the last lap. That may have been a mistake on my part. I   
   should maybe have gone on    
   and passed him, gone on and won the race handily. I was trying to make a show   
   out of it. Unfortunately, it really came out to be a show. It was one of the   
   best things ever happened in NASCAR.”   
      
   Yarborough said that he reconciled with the Allisons the next day.   
      
   William Caleb Yarborough was born on March 27, 1939, in Sardis, S.C., near   
   Timmonsville, the oldest of 3 sons of Julian Yarborough, a tobacco farmer, and   
   his wife, Annie. His father was killed in a private airplane crash when Cale   
   was 10 years old or so.    
   A year or two later, Cale got his first taste of auto racing when he attended   
   the Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway in South Carolina. While a teenager, he   
   lied about his age so he could race there.   
      
   Yarborough was a football star at Timmonsville H.S. and received an athletic   
   scholarship to Clemson, whose team was coached by Frank Howard, who would   
   spend 30 years with the Tigers. But Yarborough told Howard that he had to   
   delay his arrival on campus    
   to race in a NASCAR event.   
      
   “He said: ‘If you go back, pack your clothes, don’t come back. You   
   either go and race or play football,’” Yarborough quoted Howard as saying   
   in a 2008 interview with The New York Times. “So I packed my clothes and   
   left. Of course, he kept    
   calling. I said: ‘You told me to pack my clothes, and that’s what I did.   
   I’m going to make racing my career.’”   
      
   “He says, ‘Son, you’ll starve to death,’” Yarborough recalled. But   
   Yarborough never returned to Clemson.   
      
   He made his NASCAR debut in 1957, driving in the Southern 500 and finishing   
   42nd. His first victory came in 1965 at a 200-lap race in Valdosta, Ga. His   
   last victory came at the Atlanta Journal 500 in 1988, his final season.   
      
   Yarborough had career winnings of slightly more than $5 million. While   
   continuing to live in Sardis, where he had a farm, he owned a Honda dealership   
   in Florence, S.C.   
      
   He was inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2012 and the Motorsports Hall   
   of Fame in 1994.   
      
   “He would not quit,” Junior Johnson, Yarborough’s car owner during his   
   championship seasons, once told the publication Autoweek. “I think if he was   
   in a situation where he had to get out of a racecar because of his stamina, it   
   would be the most    
   embarrassing thing that ever happened to him.”   
      
   Survivors include his wife, Betty Jo, and his daughters, Julie, Kelley and B.J.   
      
   Howard, the coach at Clemson, became a fan of Yarborough, who certainly did   
   not “starve.”   
      
   “I’ll never forget that he was at Talladega when I won a race there,”   
   Yarborough once said. “He was in the winner’s circle. He walked up to me   
   and put his hands on my shoulder. He said, ‘Boy, I ain’t never been wrong   
   many times in my life,    
   but I want you to know I was wrong this time.’”   
      
   https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/31/obituaries/cale-yarborough-dead.html   
      
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