After Dick shot himself, Chad called Kenny. Darlene wants you at the funeral, he said. “You know,” he said next, “we’re all big Kenny Wallace fans.” That sounded like a Dick Trickle call. There weren’t many short phone conversations between Kenny and Dick. If the phone would ring and Dick’s name was on the caller ID, Kenny would think twice about answering if he didn’t have an hour to talk. But they still talked all the time. Dick was still giving him advice. Back in 2011, Kenny called to talk about his new Nationwide Series race team. He told Dick he’d lost some weight. He was ready. You’ve got a new car now, Dick told him. Do not change your driving. Let the car do the work for you. Kenny had 11 top 10s and finished seventh in points, his best showing in years.
The calls started to slow down. Kenny wasn’t sure why. Dick really didn’t talk about it. In 2011, Kenny’s father, Russ, an old-school racer who won a lot around St. Louis, died at age 77. Your dad lived a great life, Dick said. He was in pain, but he’s fine now. Dick could justify anything, but Kenny thought it was odd how quickly he’d made sense of his father’s death.
After Dick’s funeral, Kenny had an idea. “Darlene, maybe we should make some T-shirts,” Kenny said. New ones. With Dick Trickle’s name on the front. Just something so his fans could remember.
“Nope,” she said. “We’re done.”
Darlene hadn’t talked publicly about what happened to Dick. She still hasn’t. And so Dick Trickle’s closest friends were left with memories from a lifetime of friendship and a couple of clues and hindsight to make sense of his death. Darlene knew that the people who loved her husband needed to know what happened. So before Kenny and the rest of Dick’s friends left the house after his funeral, she gathered up some manila envelopes and handed them out, one by one.
Here, she said. The answers to your questions are inside.
Most of the stories people tell about Dick Trickle aren’t quite right. They aren’t wrong, but they just aren’t what they appear to be. He was bowlegged, and walked with a slight limp. That must be from a lifetime of crashes, right? Wrong. There was that commercial from 1997 where Dick Trickle talked about a contest for guessing the winner of the Napa 500. “A little tip,” he smirked, “it’s gonna be me.” Instantly, text flashed on the screen: Dick is 0 for 243 in Cup races. “And remember, November 16 could be a real big day.” That’s 0 for 243, the screen said. If you saw that, and didn’t know much about racing, you’d get the impression that Dick Trickle never won anything.
Same thing if you watched SportsCenter in the early ’90s. You’d hear Dick Trickle’s name alongside a litany of middle- to back-of-the-pack finishes. Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann thought the name sounded like a joke, so they said it as often as they could after NASCAR highlights. “I thought, Well, this guy’s not any good,” Patrick told Spin magazine in 1996, which pointed out Trickle’s last-place finish in the Daytona 500 that year. “But he’s a good old boy and he really represents what NASCAR used to be. He just loves to drive.” Patrick and Olbermann weren’t the only people who kept referring to Dick Trickle by his full name. Announcers did it. Fans did it. At the track, only his wife called him Richard. To everyone else, Dick Trickle had that three-syllable cadence that made you want to say the whole thing, like Kasey Kahne or Ricky Rudd. At first, it’s funny, then familiar, and finally it just feels easy, not formal. When you say Dick Trickle, you know a story is coming.
When Dick Trickle finally got to NASCAR, to the biggest stage he’d ever been on, he was fading. By that time, people had attached a lot of labels to him, some true, some half true, and some not true at all. Hard drinking. Hard partying. Hard living. Veteran. Journeyman. Chain-smoker. Respected by racers and loving fans who could appreciate who he was and what he’d done, he had become a caricature to many, misunderstood by a new group of people who only saw him as a coffee-drinking, cigarette-smoking, old-school racer. If you were one of them, you might think that Dick Trickle wasn’t good enough to hack it in NASCAR. That he never got the chance to run in the Cup series as a young man. And that too, like so many of the labels, is not quite right either.
“He was definitely one of the most talented race drivers that we’ve ever had in America,” says Humpy Wheeler, the former promoter and president of Charlotte Motor Speedway. “He’s up there with A. J. Foyt, [Richard] Petty, [Mario] Andretti, Cale Yarborough, Dale Earnhardt, Jeff Gordon.” Wheeler once stuck his face in a tiger’s mouth. He knows hyperbole. But he’s being serious.