Here’s a real-life truth that no one understands until they find their lives standing squarely in the middle of that very truth. Being the wisest person in the room isn’t about being the smartest person in that space. It’s about being the person who has been in that room the longest. The one with the most experience. The owner of the largest scrapbook of memories and moments, and the lessons learned from both. Smart enough to appreciate it all.
“I think that’s a natural life progression, right?” said Kevin Harvick, who at 47 and now in his 23rd and final season in the NASCAR Cup Series finds that he is now, more often than not, that person in most every room of racers he’s standing in. He is the procurer of quite the collection of experiences and the wisdom that comes with them. “You know, life progression is hopefully maturing as you go through time. To be able to do things in a better way and learn from what you did before. So, every moment matters.”
This weekend will mark not simply one of those moments, but a genuine milestone in a career packed with them. Sunday’s GEICO 500 at Talladega Superspeedway will be his 800th start at stock car racing’s highest level. In 75 years of NASCAR, only 10 drivers have hit that mark, and only four of them reached it at a younger age than Harvick. If he finishes out the season having started every race, he will retire with 826 Cup starts, eighth all-time. His 1,272 starts across all three NASCAR national series already ranks first. His 60 Cup Series wins rank 10th. His 62 second-place finishes rank sixth. His 258 top-five finishes rank … OK, you get the idea.
The complete list of Harvick’s all-time top-10 rankings would take up more space than this story has been given. Besides, you can read them all on his NASCAR Hall of Fame plaque when he is no doubt voted in on his first year of eligibility, now less than three years away.
Right now, he’s too busy trying to win a second Cup Series title to spend much time looking in the rearview mirror. More than a third of the way into the 26-race “regular season,” he sits third in the championship standings, only 15 points behind leader Christopher Bell. So yes, Harvick’s final career numbers have yet to be determined, but when every weekend presents another milestone or another rung climbed on all of those all-time lists, avoiding the topic of career summation is impossible — especially since the preseason announcement of his intention to retire at season’s end.
“I think honestly when we got to 60 [career wins] that that kind of put it in perspective,” Harvick confesses, speaking of his Richmond victory Aug. 14, 2022. “Really, for me, when you start hearing your competitors talking about it. I’ll never forget Cliff Daniels [crew chief at rival Hendrick Motorsports] walking up to me when I had my 750th consecutive start [this Feb. 26 at Auto Club Speedway], the things that he said that day really helped put it into perspective for me. Because when you gain the respect of your competitors on the racetrack, but also the people in the garage, that to me is really the rewarding part of the body of work.”
The earliest days of Harvick’s career — heck, the first decade of his career — weren’t filled with such praise from peers. Nor was he one to send cheer and good tidings in the direction of others in the paddock, whether they be the competition or even those with whom he worked. Just look at that consecutive starts streak. It currently sits at 757, third all-time, and should he finish out the season uninterrupted, it will end at 784, a scant 13 races short of Jeff Gordon‘s all-time iron man streak. The only reason he won’t own that record outright is because he missed the eighth race of 2002, his second season, parked by NASCAR at Martinsville Speedway for a tantrum thrown in a Truck Series race the day before.
That’s how Harvick rolled back then. Angry. He feuded with veterans such as Bobby Hamilton. He famously leaped off the roof of a Busch Series car onto the head of Greg Biffle during postrace interviews at Bristol Motor Speedway.
Thrust into a Cup ride earlier than planned, an into-the-deep-end experience that will never be replicated, pushed into NASCAR’s most famous ride because of the death of Dale Earnhardt in the 2001 Daytona 500, Harvick impossibly won in only his third Cup start in The Intimidator’s Chevy, edging Gordon by .006 seconds at Atlanta Motor Speedway. Oh, and he also got married in the middle of those three races.
From there, the 20-something Californian raced with guard up and his fists clenched. In 13 seasons driving for Richard Childress Racing, he won 24 times, including the Daytona 500 and Brickyard 400, but also endured three winless years and failed to win a championship. His increasingly heated in-race radio exchanges with Childress became must-hear entertainment for race fans seeking drama on a Sunday afternoon.
That’s how one earns the decidedly and deliberately ironic nickname “Happy.”
“We are both people who have no problem speaking our minds, even when we should keep those thoughts to ourselves, especially on the radio when everyone in the grandstands can hear us,” Childress recently said of those days, chuckling. “But that fire is also what you want in a race car driver. Sometimes that fire is going to burn some stuff down. And we did.”
“It was always just, you know, ‘He’s mad. He’s angry,'” Harvick recalled this week when looking back on his tumultuous tenure at RCR. “When I was driving the 29 car and you look back, I told Richard this, I said, ‘Man, I wish I could have done it this way. The way I do things now, with maturity, experience. You know, things might have been a little bit different.’ I would handle things a lot differently, how we did all of that. But, you know, everything just leads to the next step.”
The next step was the second half of that career and the next phase in his life as a man. He moved to Stewart-Haas Racing in 2014 to join friend and fellow anger-management student Tony Stewart and immediately won that long-elusive Cup Series championship. Harvick has added another 37 wins. He has gotten out of NASCAR team ownership, opting to expand his sports management business, and has shifted his focus toward being a father of two, with 10-year-old son Keelan now behind the wheel.
“It’s really been two different parts of my career,” Harvick replied when asked the impossible question of identifying the single most memorable moment among his first 799 Cup Series starts. “The announcement that you’re going to drive your first Cup race was bigger than any moment that you’ll ever have in your career. Then your first win was bigger than any win that you’re ever going to have. So, all of these things that you had to go through and face, the rest of it, that felt like a cakewalk to be honest, because you never had something that was that big again.”
This is year 10 at SHR, always behind the wheel of the same car and, against all known NASCAR natural laws, always with the same crew chief, Rodney Childers.
“It all shifted in 2014 because everybody said, ‘OK, now is he going to be able to succeed at a new team and can he get along with people?’ And here we are 10 years later, with the same crew chief, same organization and a championship. You look at that Homestead win that won that championship, and that was a huge moment. The biggest moment in the second part of my career. It’s of comparable importance, but not really a comparable experience, to that very first win.”
That ability to compare experiences, moments and even eras, that is the gift of wisdom. The well-earned byproduct of an unparalleled multidecade career. In our youth, we all fall into the same trap that ensnared Harvick so many years ago: believing that we know more than we actually do. Only via the hindsight of experience does anyone truly understand the value of genuine perspective.
Say, the latest Next Gen race car.
The tide of praise for NASCAR’s 2022 one-size-fits-all machines officially began to turn last summer, when Harvick began speaking up with concerns about safety. After his playoffs started with a 33rd-place finish due to a fire in his Ford, he said on live television, “What a disaster for no reason. We didn’t touch the wall. We didn’t touch a car and here we are in the pits with a burned-up car and we can’t finish the race during the playoffs because of crappy-ass parts.”
Just this week, he responded to a tweet reporting that NASCAR teams believed parts for 2024 needed to be ordered now to head off supply chain issues, posting “1000 HP spec. Order it …”
“Honestly, the communication between the teams and NASCAR is as good as it’s ever been. The problem is that the process of making changes is just as slow as it’s ever been,” Harvick said when asked about his call for more horsepower. He also suggested quicker tire wear before adding, again, the kind of nuanced take that can only be informed via experience.
He recalled 2007, when the sanctioning body rolled out the so-called Car of Tomorrow. Like today’s Next Gen machines, the CoT was largely a spec car. Those who were around back then have mentioned the CoT a lot in the past year. It’s just that there are fewer and fewer around now who were also around then. Harvick, then at the height of his Happy days, is one of them.
“It’s the same process. It’s no different. We already went through this. With the CoT and whenever NASCAR has started changing rules,” he said. “In the very beginning nobody knows anything about the car, and once everybody figures out the car, things change. The style of racing changes. It always does. It always will. So, yeah, I think communication is there, but I think the process is as slow as it’s ever been, unfortunately, to be able to make changes because of how much red tape there is to jump through because the teams aren’t in charge of the cars.”
Call him Happy, call him The Closer, call him old man, whatever you want, Harvick’s opinions are no less pointed than they’ve ever been. His intensity is the same now as it was 799 Cup starts ago. These days he simply yells less. He keeps his volume knob somewhere in the middle instead of breaking it off to be stuck at 11. But now the kid whom every veteran of the Cup Series garage used to either bash or avoid altogether has become the veteran whom today’s kids seek out for advice and a point of view that could only come from a racer who started his career in a world sponsored by cigarettes, racing against men who have already been enshrined in the NASCAR Hall of Fame.
You know, wisdom.
“I think at that particular time, starting out, you really don’t even know what that means, right?” Harvick said. “But I’ve been here for so long, through so many generations of cars with so many people, I think putting that body of work together, that is for me very rewarding. Through the years, the ups and downs, we’ve always figured out how to get things going again and be able to be competitive and run upfront.
“I was just a kid going to the racetrack having a good time, driving whatever I could race just to get on the racetrack. Now, 800 Cup starts later, all these years later … that’s something you can be proud of.”
The Mariners are within a win of their first AL Championship Series since 2001. Their first chance to advance is on Wednesday afternoon in Game 4 at Comerica Park and if necessary, another opportunity awaits on Friday back in Seattle for a decisive Game 5.
“The Seattle Mariners deserve where we’re at right now,” Suarez said.
Detroit manager A.J. Hinch said not to count his team out after it showed resolve following a historic collapse in the regular season and bounced back by eliminating Cleveland in an AL Wild Card series, then won Game 1 against Seattle.
“We’ve had to play more and more back-against-the-wall-type games,” Hinch said. “I know our guys are going to be ready.”
Seattle’s Logan Gilbert gave up one run on four hits while striking out seven and walking none over six innings.
“Can’t say enough about what Logan did,” Mariners manager Dan Wilson said. “Just an incredible outing. He had everything going.”
Raleigh, who had a major league-high 60 homers during the regular season, hit a 391-foot, two-run homer to left-center in the ninth to make it 8-1.
The offensively challenged Tigers were limited to four hits and one run through eight innings before suddenly generating some offense in the ninth against Caleb Ferguson, who allowed three runs on three hits and a walk without getting an out.
All-Star closer Andres Munoz entered with one on and no outs and ended Detroit’s comeback hopes with a flyout and game-ending double play.
Detroit’s Jack Flaherty lasted just 3 1/3 innings, allowing four runs (three earned) on four hits and three walks.
Seattle scored two runs in the third after starting the inning with three hits and a walk.
Victor Robles led off with a double and scored on an error, which was credited to left fielder Riley Greene for an errant throw that could have been fielded on a bounce by catcher Dillon Dingler.
“A little bit of a breakdown all the way around,” Hinch said.
Randy Arozarena‘s RBI single put the Mariners ahead 2-0 in the third.
Suarez sent a 422-foot shot to left in the fourth to make it 3-0. Raleigh’s two-out RBI single in the inning gave Seattle a four-run cushion.
The Tigers were hoping their first home game in two-plus weeks might make them more comfortable at the plate, but it didn’t help and they lost an eighth straight at Comerica Park.
Detroit finally scored in the fifth on Kerry Carpenter‘s fielder’s choice on what was potentially an inning-ending double play. Crawford’s throw from second base pulled first baseman Josh Naylor off the bag and he didn’t secure the ball in his glove, allowing Dingler to score.
Crawford’s homer in the sixth restored Seattle’s four-run lead.
The Tigers allowed the Mariners to score a second unearned run in the eighth inning after Carpenter dropped Victor Robles‘ fly in right field, allowing Luke Raley to advance to third and to score on Crawford’s sacrifice fly.
Detroit RHP Casey Mize and Seattle RHP Bryce Miller are expected to start Game 4 on Wednesday.
LOS ANGELES — The loud booing by angry Philadelphia Phillies fans at their home ballpark likely drowned out similar noise Bryce Harper was making.
The Phillies slugger has a single and three strikeouts in the NL Division Series, which Philadelphia trails 2-0 against the defending World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers.
“I love our fans. I boo myself when I get out,” Harper said Tuesday.
Game 3 is Wednesday at Dodger Stadium, with the Phillies facing elimination in the best-of-five series.
“I will probably get booed tomorrow night, too,” Harper said.
He didn’t agree that a change of venue — away from their frustrated fan base — is a good thing for the slumping Phillies.
“We’ve got some of the best fans in baseball and they make me play better, so I enjoy it,” Harper said. “They show up for us every day. They spend their hard-earned dollar to come watch us play; they expect greatness out of us and I expect greatness out of myself and my teammates as well.”
Third baseman Nick Castellanos came up big in a wild ninth inning that nearly saw the Phillies steal a win Monday. The fan reaction whipsawed between huge cheers and deafening boos in the 4-3 loss.
“I think that the stadium is alive on both sides, right?” Castellanos said. “When the game is going good, it’s wind at our back, but when the game is not going good, it’s wind in our face. The environment can be with us, and the environment can be against us.”
Harper was glad to be in sunny Los Angeles, not far from his hometown of Las Vegas where he was a Dodgers fan.
He became a father for the fourth time last week, when his wife, Kayla, gave birth to a son.
“I’ve got an incredible wife, man. She pushed that thing out in three pushes and 30 seconds,” Harper said. “She’s an absolute monster doing it. Women. Man, what a breed. I’m serious, it’s an incredible thing. Being able to hold your son for the first time is something. It’s one of the greatest moments of my life.”
The couple now has two boys, Krew and Hayes, and two girls, Brooklyn and Kamryn, all of whom are age 6 and under.
Harper said he loves baseball but his family means the most.
