The Dale Jr. Story You've Never Heard

The Gordon / Earnhardt thread got me to thinking. I have some detailed info on Dale Jr. that very few people know.

This info comes from direct posts at mixedmartialarts.com, now MMA.tv, by those involved.

About 4 or 5 years ago Dale Earnhardt Jr. who is a huge fan of grappling based martial arts such as Jiu-Jitsu decided he wanted to sponsor a tournament. He enlisted the help of Budweiser and off they went to attempt to challenge the Arnold-Gracie Classic (yeah that Arnold and those Gracies) as this nations premier grappling event.

My understanding is that Dale insisted on being deeply involved in the handling of the event. Well...things went badly, very, very, badly. It was unorganized and poorly run to say the least. The biggest problem I saw addressed was that no trophies had ever been obtained as promised.

I saw this being addressed in detail and at some length by a good number of well known fighters and trainers focused primarily on the fact that the kids in their respective classes had never received the trophies that had been directly promised them by Dale Jr. himself at the tournament.

I saw statements from some of the baddest men on the planet saying to the effect of "I don't care about anything for myself but if my kids don't get their da&* trophies pretty soon I'm looking that skinny S*B up and twisting his head off!"

I'm not exaggerating this. In fact for about a month or a month and a half there would be 4 or 5 new posts each day from various known and respected trainers and fighters threatening VERY serious bodily injury to young Mr. Earnhardt.

Repeated attempts to contact Jr. were made and a number said that they did make contact but to no avail. Finally a Brazilian grappling coach who had served as an advisor at the event took it upon himself to purchase the trophies and send them out.

Budweiser took away any control that Jr. had over the event, removed his name from it and has turned it into the Number 2 event of it's sort in the country. Dale isn't even mentioned there now. In fact I've heard that several were hoping he would show so they could "have a word with him".He has yet to do so.

I can believe that. At that time frame, I would imagine that Jr. was more concerned about partying and having a good time. There was several such stories floating around about that. My guess, him, drunk buddies watching some, him interested in it, mentioned it, Bud said lets do something, he thought lets do something, it progressed, and then his interest went down or he didn't expect to have to do any work, just get his name in it (like 2/3 of the celebrity endorsed events in the world end up being like), and it went from there. One of the biggest issues I was remembering that he was pushing for more control of his own name and such with the deals he was doing with Dale Earnhardt Racing, that is one reason it was even thought he would leave it a year or so ago because he was almost a non-factor in his own name.

I agree that this event was probably due mostly to his immaturity at the time, but......

had this been Jeff Gordon who had done this we would have about 40 replies by now, most calling for Gordon's immediate execution [img]/LDPforum/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

or a challenge match between him and Matt Hughes.....

That's cause Gordon was gay and just wanting to grope guys [img]/LDPforum/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

LOL

[img]/LDPforum/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/ooo.gif[/img] Story is that a guy challenged Joe Rogan for just that reason [img]/LDPforum/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/shocked.gif[/img] Turned out he was a well known drag-queen and a big admirer of Rogan's.

[ QUOTE ]
That's cause Gordon was gay and just wanting to grope guys [img]/LDPforum/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

LOL

[/ QUOTE ]
[img]/LDPforum/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]