Dale Earnhardt Jr. is a lucky man. He got out of NASCAR alive, and not drooling on his chin, incapacitated for life.
Those were real-life concerns he reveals in a new book, "Racing to The Finish: My Story," co-authored with Ryan McGee.
Earnhardt recently invited Graham Bensinger to his home in North Carolina, to chat about the book, elaborating on those concerns and his fear of brain trauma, or worse, dying.
Dealing with the severity of his concussion symptoms _ to the point of the inability to tie his shoes _ Earnhardt secretly documented those symptoms on his iPhone in case he died.
"I felt compromised in my head," he told Bensinger. "I felt delicate. And if I was to have another random, rare, high-impact crash that could injure me severely _ so severely that I wouldn't be able to communicate properly... I wanted there to be some sort of documentation of what had been happening to me and what I'd been going through."
Although Earnhardt was only said to have dealt with a handful of concussions, he estimates that he had somewhere between 20 and 25 during his stock-car racing career.
As with most athletes, peer-pressure and staying relevant in a sport trumped everything, including one's health.
Bensinger: How many of those (concussions) do you think NASCAR was aware of?
Earnhardt: The majority of those I wouldn't have told anybody about.
Bensinger: And how concerned were you at various times in your career that if you did tell somebody about a concussion you thought you had, that it could negatively impact your career?
Earnhardt: Every time... If you go to somebody and go, 'Man, you know I rung my bell and I'm real messed up and I'm gonna take a break and I'm gonna come back 100 percent" you know that person's always gonna have that in the back of their mind and when you don't run a good race, are they gonna go, 'Hmm, I wonder if he's just not the same anymore.' You know? I've heard that talk about other drivers. Even guys that don't have any history of concussions, I've heard people say, 'You know he did have a lot of hard wrecks.
Earnhardt, who retired at the end of the 2017 NASCAR Monster Energy Cup season, has said he would donate his brain for research _ more specifically, the Concussion Legacy Foundation _ in the fight to connect the dots between a contact sport like racing and the perils of CTE.
He has built a nice life for himself outside the track, and is now a married man. Earnhardt and his wife Amy welcomed a daughter, Isla, into this world in May.
"Every time I look at Isla, I want to cry," he said days after her birth. "Every time I look at Amy and her together _ when Amy's holding her or feeding her _ I just can't believe this is in my life."
The book is set for release on Oct. 6. The full episode of Bensinger's interview with Earnhardt airs nationwide this weekend as the debut for In Depth with Graham Bensinger's ninth season.
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