From NASCAR Driver to Snowbird Director | Hank Parker Jr.

Part 1

In today’s episode, Brody sits down with Hank Parker Jr., who now leads the marketing, sales, and programming teams at Snowbird Wilderness Outfitters. Hank was formerly a NASCAR driver and then founded Fireband Media, a production company that produced short films and outdoor television programming. 

Hank walks through his life’s story and how he started racing, moved to television, and eventually arrived at Snowbird. The Lord’s hand has been evident in his life.

Click here to listen to Hank Parker Jr.’s testimony at the Be Strong men’s conference.

View part 1 Transcript

It’s another Monday and it is time for another episode of no sanity required. Sorry, we’re getting these out a little bit late. Did that last week too. Just trying to get this season rolling.

And.

Life is crazy. Life is crazy. I don’t podcast for a living, so I don’t get paid to podcast and podcasting doesn’t pay the bills, but We are committed to it and it is a priority and the feedback that y’all give us reminds me every week how worth it it is. So it’s not always the priority to get things done in a timely manner on Monday mornings but I do want to start getting this thing out earlier so it’s not lunchtime on Monday when you get it. But here it is, we got you. No sanity required. And before we get into the the episode, I just wanted to kind of let you know that today and today and next week in at least these two episodes, we’ll be sitting down with Hank Parker Jr. Hank Parker Jr. Is one of my executive partners at Snowbird, but he has only been in that position for a little over a year. Well, COVID made everything so weird. I guess technically it’d be going on two years, but he’s been with us two years, but he’s lived here right out of year. Because of the craziness of COVID he was unable to make the move when we had planned on him making that move, which was the early part of 2020, gosh, 20, 20 or 21, I don’t remember anyway.

But he’s been on the board of directors for quite some time. We are as, as, Maybe some of you understand or know, I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about this at length, but we have a Snowbird is a 501c3 nonprofit corporation. That just means we have to have a governing board of directors in place. It’s funny, the other day I was, who was I with? It was a kid, local kid, who said, Maybe it’s one of my kids, one of my young kids talking about at school, somebody saying that, that they know that me and little are rich because we own Snowbird. Oh, yeah. This is like years ago. I remember this kid telling me he was dating the guy who at the time, this is, this is 20, probably 20, over 20 years ago. It was more than it was late nineties. And in this, this little guy, He had developed a crush on the then mayor of Andrews daughter. And now mayor of Andrews is not a full time job. I think it pays maybe a couple hundred bucks a week, you know, less than thousand dollars a month, I would imagine.

I don’t know, but I just know it’s a small town, small market. So it’s a true public servant, community service type job. Like the mayor we have now is awesome. You know, puts in a lot of time on his own, on his own dime. And that’s what it takes to be a mayor of a small town. But I remember this. I remember this kid saying, I’m dating. I’m gonna date the mayor’s daughter. Man, she’s rich. Her daddy’s a mayor. And I’m thinking, what a funny perception. So I do not own Snowbird Wilderness Outfitters, but we are governed by board of directors, and I am. On that board of directors and so is Hank Parker Jr. And has been for for quite a while. So currently three of the board of directors members are full-time employees and sit on the executive team at Snowbird. It’s myself, it’s me, yours truly, Matt Jones, AKA Mugs, and Hank Parker Jr. And Hank has a phenomenal story and testimony and I’m excited to bring it to you. He’ll be speaking in a future event at Snowbird Men’s Conference in the next, I forget which one it is. There’s not the one coming up this weekend, but it’s coming in the next year or so.

But anyway, excited for you to hear from Hank’s stories. Unbelievable. Hank’s a former professional race car driver, drove in the Busch Series, in the NASCAR Cup Series, and in the truck series. It used to be the Busch Series, the Winston Cup Series, and the Craftsman Truck Series. All that changed. Now what they call it all, but high level competitor comes from a, from a family of competitors. But, man, Hank loves the Lord. Man, he loves the Lord. He loves the Lord so much. And he, and he loves Snowbird. And he’s faithful, this ministry. And Hank is, Hank is a gift to Snowbird. I, I want to, I want to, as you listen over these next couple of weeks, be encouraged to know that God is sending people like Hank Parker Jr. To be a part of what’s going on here. Uprooted his family, five kids. He and his wife, Wendy, moved here with their oldest daughter, Alex, only having one year of high school left. I mean, it’s a big move of faith. And his kids are an amazing, he’s got an amazing family, an amazing group of young people. His second daughter, his second born and second daughter, Madison, is, Maddie is real good friends with My, my middle daughter, Laylee, they play ball together.

And our families are close. He built a house right across the road from me. Always give him a hard time. He took away my shooting range. I used to shoot on the property he bought. So that was where I’d sit in my hunting rifles. Can’t do that now. So, but it was worth it. Good trade, good friend, thankful for this brother, one of my, my close, close friends in the world and, Man, the team that God has assembled here is pretty unique and pretty special and Hank’s a big part of that. So hope you enjoy these next couple of episodes. Thank you for tuning in and listening to no Sanity Required.

Welcome to no Sanity Required from the.

Ministry of Snowbird Wilderness Outfitters, a podcast about the Bible, culture and stories from around the globe. So being on the no sanity required podcast, how do you feel like it’s going to compare to being on Dale Earnhardt Jr. ‘s podcast?

Two crazy hosts. Who knows? Or something. You know, you’re always opening yourself up when you come into an opportunity to be asked questions.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah. But you, both of you guys know a lot about me, so who knows where to go? Yeah.

Man, that’s crazy watching that watching, you know, we’re sitting around one night sitting around a fire me and some of the guys from here and I just pulled up some clips from that that’s a crazy ministry opportunity cuz that’s I’m sure he’s got a massive you have me idea of like the following I mean it’s got to be huge.

It’s so big. I don’t and you know, it’s always growing and changing. I can’t believe how many people have come to me and talked about you figuring me on that. I mean, it’s like there’s a resurgence of, oh yeah, I forgot you raised. And then they heard that podcast and it’s really cool. He’s got a huge, massive following and it’s unbelievable. A lot of guys step out of sight out of mind, you step out of the spotlight and kind of just drift off. But, man, he’s, I mean, obviously he’s still in the spotlight being on TV and all the things that he does. But I mean his popularity is continuing.

To grow that’s great when he was Like when he was at the height of his cup career I mean, wasn’t he like he was getting that like the whatever it is like the people’s driver award whatever that’s called fast popular driver you get every year wouldn’t he?

Oh, yeah every year every year and it was funny it was For years and years and years Bill Elliott got it And then Dale Jr. He took over that spot. I mean, I think he got it every year. And rightfully so, you know, a lot of people didn’t know how to take him, especially at first. But you got to think about, there’s two different kinds of people in the world. You know, you’ve got the guys like Mike Tyson who grew up in the slums and had to work and became successful. And that’s a very unique, special person. But then you got a guy like Dale Jr. who grew up, who had opportunity, who had financial support, but that’s a different kind of pressure. Yeah, he stood underneath that. A lot of people would have had a hard time or most people would have, I think, would have had a hard time in his position. And some people want to be like, oh, he should be successful. Look at what his dad’s done. But man, on the flip side of that, look how easy it would have been to not meet expectations to have been a failure.

Just crush people.

Yeah.

I mean, just. That’s the kind of thing that would crush somebody. I mean, it’s hard enough here about. We were talking about this before we went live, but, like, a kid, like, a kid goes through high school, is really good in the classroom or excels on the athletic field, and then they have a brother, sister, a sibling that comes through that doesn’t, that can’t live up to that hype and that kid struggle. I don’t know how many times we’ve dealt with families and, like, Ministry situations where they got a wayward younger kid and you drill into it and you realize, well, there’s these expectations because of what the older sibling or siblings did or because of what mom or dad did. And, man, I don’t crush you.

Yeah.

People expect you to. And then, like with, with Dale Earnhardt Jr. When his dad got killed, I think it probably intensified that pressure because now you had this rabid fan base of Dale Sr. that already loved Dale Jr. I was one of those people. Like when he started winning in Busch, I was so excited, you know? And he drove a blue car. Was it AC Delco?

It was, yeah.

I mean, I haven’t been a NASCAR fan since back then, but I was so excited because I was an Earnhardt fan. And then when his dad died, I think everybody thought, okay, the Legacy Junior’s gonna. And I. It ratcheted up, man.

Yeah. Yeah. Just to handle that pressure, I. You know, that was obviously a crazy, just week following Dellenbach’s death. And just the way Dale Jr. Handled that, he handled it with such maturity. And, you know, he’s my buddy, and I love him, and I can’t. I can’t say enough good things about him, but the. The truth is. He was kind of an immature guy in some ways. You know, he wore his hat backwards all the time. He was a little bit the rebel and just kind of crazy. Just acted like a kid in a lot of ways. But talking about stepping up to the plate, I mean, I couldn’t. That might be hard. I mean, he went back the next time at that racetrack and won the race.

I know.

This is amazing, man.

That’s a sports moment in history that I think Only NASCAR fans know, but that’s as big of a sports moment as anything you’ve ever read. I mean, to go back to that race and win it. Yeah. Go back to that track and win it.

Yeah.

Man, that’s crazy.

Yeah. It kind of gives me chills to think about it. But yeah, he stepped up, he grew a lot, and he’s a different dude as a result of All the things he’s been through and he’s a, I mean, he’s a good guy, man. He’s had to fight some battles and he stepped up and I mean, nobody’s perfect, but he is a good dude. Yeah.

For those of you that listen and don’t know racing, we’re talking about Dale Earnhardt and Dale Earnhardt Jr. So Hank’s dad, we’ll get into this, but Hank’s dad and Dale Earnhardt were good friends and so Hank and Dale Jr. grew up as pretty good buddies. Race together. We’ll tell some of those stories. Get into that. But so speaking of growing up, talk a little bit about your dad’s accomplishments, because one thing that I’ve appreciated in our 12 years of friendship now, which is hard. It’s hard to believe. Me and you’ve been. Yeah. Good friends for 12 years, but I don’t know. I would like to have one dollar for every time somebody has said something to you about your dad.

Me too.

And you have had to have heard it a thousand times more than me. I mean, your dad last night was sitting around the fire and a good friend who loves and appreciates you for who you are. But he’s like, we were hanging out with Duncan and Duncan’s like, oh yeah, man, me and my dad, my dad was crazy about Hank Parker’s fishing show and start talking about it. And like those conversations are enjoyable. But then the people that you don’t know and have that rapport with that’ll just go, oh, your dad. I used to watch the show all the time. I’ve had, I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people come up and say that to you. So talk a little bit about who a lot of people aren’t bass fishing fans, but that’s a big cult following world.

Yes, it is massive. It’s it and it seems to be growing right now. I mean, one thing that’s different, my son who’s a sophomore in high school, they’ve got a bass fishing class and they’re looking to start a bass fishing team, which is really becoming a big thing nationwide. So a bit of a history. My dad is from a small town in North Carolina, made in North Carolina, and he had a dream to be a professional bass fisherman. And so in the late 70s, he started chasing his dream and he became pretty successful. He was a guy that didn’t have a whole lot in his family, one of those guys who had to fight from really nothing to, to, to be somebody. And he had a, just a, I mean, he’s a, he’s a bulldog, and he doesn’t quit. He’s, he’s not a quitter.

And he’s crazy.

He’s crazy. And it, that’s, that’s a positive and a negative.

And he thinks I’m crazy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He thinks you’re crazy, but he, he fought. And, and just through determination, he’s a, he’s one of those guys. He’s a pretty determined guy. And, and, and he, he became. He won the Bassmasters Classic in 1979.

Okay, let me explain for our listeners. That is literally like winning Wimbledon in tennis, the Masters in golf, the Super Bowl in football, the Daytona 500 in racing. I mean, to win the Bassmasters is you are considered the most successful best bass fisherman in the world. And for people that think of fishing as, oh, this is what my daddy does on Saturdays, like This is a huge tournament industry.

That’s right.

We were talking millions of dollars of industry just within the tournament scene. And it’s a multi-billion dollar industry in terms of, I mean, it’s a winning the Bassmaster Classic is the pinnacle of that sport.

Even to qualify. So you could, not anybody could just sign up and be in the Bassmaster Classic. So you had to fish the tournament trail and you had to place, I think was, I don’t remember, It might have been the top 50, might have been the top 75 to even be eligible to fish in that. So even just making the classic is a really big deal. And then to win it several times, he went on to win just a whole lot of tournaments. I mean, in his career, he was the first guy to win all the major tournaments in one year. And to be that successful.

And again, I think I think golf or tennis are the two professional sports that you compare it to because of there you’re the only dude out there on the course or the or the court when you’re bass fishing, you’re the guy.

That’s it.

You get in your boat and you got to figure it out. And so when when he’s doing like when you so explain a little more from I mean, even I’m curious of this because I grew up watching this stuff, but I didn’t I never understood how the tournaments work. So like to qualify There may be on a given weekend, there may be multiple tournaments all over the southeast that you could go and if you place high enough that gets you like qualifying points.

Right. And so it was, it’s changed over the years, but there was, there was a, there was a couple of ways to get in. So you could be a small time guy fishing in, and I think they would bring in maybe one small time guy who was fishing local tournaments. There was a, I can’t remember exactly how they had to do it, but there was a lot you had to be, you had to be the guy. And it was, when I say small time, it’s not, I’m not talking like your Monday night fishing tournament at your local lake. I’m talking like regional BASS affiliated tournaments. So that’s still kind of not completely small time. So you had to do that. And then you had to finish at a certain, you had to rank almost like in NASCAR, the point system inside the Bassmaster Majors. You had to be inside that top 50 to be able to be eligible to fish in the classic.

And then the classic is a single tournament.

It’s a single tournament, three days.

And they pick a lake.

And they pick a lake.

It’s not always on the same lake. No. Okay. It could be in Texas. It could be in Georgia, Florida. Probably typically in the southeast or maybe Missouri.

Texas, I mean, they’ve been all over the place. So my dad in 1989 won the classic at the James River in Virginia.

It was on the river, which the James River, by the way, is there’s places where it’s, yeah, it’s like lake fishing. Right in a lot of ways, but a lot more strategic Because of the tide because of the way that’s right because of the way the current the water the tide the terrain under the water and so and it’s a three-day tournament. Yeah How long did he go there and practice? So he go in there you said you’re telling me he goes and practice fishes for days leading up to it.

That’s right and so in the classic You know, rules change. We’re talking, you know, late 80s when I was a kid hanging out with my dad going, you were only allowed to to pre fish for the classic, I think it was 10 days or 14 days, whatever it was. And it was within a certain window. You could only fish those days. And so he would fish them every single day. Daylight.

Get up at four in the morning.

Yes, sir.

Go get on that lake or that body of water and fish till dark.

Every day he was allowed and he’s trying to learn.

Every nook and cranny of that lake.

That’s right. And he just has, you know, I mean, he’s, God gifted him with a natural ability, but he’s also one of those guys who’s worked really hard at it. But I can remember being a little kid and, you know, old school paper maps. I mean, the depth finders were paper that had a needle with ink on it that would show you, save those rolls of paper and study them. He would look at a map. Be at a lake he’s never been to look at the map and say, I think we need to be here, here and here and here’s why. And we go there.

Catch fish.

Catch fish.

A fish finder is, modern fish finders are crazy. Think of looking at your iPhone or your smartphone and having a screen that shows you an underwater radar, a sonar that fish are pinging and you can see, okay, at 20 feet down.

That’s right.

There’s fish right now and they’re feeding and so you fish that. So you’re saying early days, It was like paper scrolling a needle like when you read it like an EKG or something.

Exactly. And that’s about what it looked like in EKG. And you just kind of look what you were more looking for was the structure of the bottom and the shape of the bottom. And then obviously you could see if there were fish. But what would fish relate to? What would they be connected to? And then you build your strategy based on that. That is crazy.

That’s crazy.

Crazy.

And he would look. So when he would look at a map and then go and go be successful, it was a map of the lake. Or it was that fish read that readout.

He would, he would first look at the map of the lake and then have a topographical map and say, okay, I think the current’s going to be here. I think this is going to have a shelf. And then we go out and look on the depth finder and just say, okay, here’s where I think we need to be.

And, and catch fish. And you would. Did he have, like, And it would be, you go in there and be like, okay, based on this shelf and this depth, we’re going to use plastic worms, this color, we’re going to work off the bottom. Now we’re going to use a crankbait. We’re going to just try different things. And he would, but he would be that uncanny ability that God gave him. He would almost supernaturally know what baits more than average guy is going to know. He just know he would know what baits to use.

Yeah, I think a good example would be, I’ve tried to fish one tournament when When not like a big tournament, but a kind of a medium sized tournament, not not your Monday night tournament, like I said earlier, but not a top level. I was just a kid and we were fishing a team tournament and I was fishing with a friend of his. We were in Gunnersville, Alabama. I was just there because my dad was there and he’s like, you need to fish this tournament. Be fun. And so I did it with a with a friend of his, Bruce Cunningham, and we we were fishing on this lake. And my dad took me the day before and he showed me, okay, We’re in 20 feet of water, right here is 17 feet of water. This is where the boat needs to be lined up. There’s an underwater grass bed. This is how you fish it. And so we caught a couple of fish and he’s like, I don’t want to wear it out. This is how you need to set up. So the next day we came and fished the tournament. We caught like two fish.

We couldn’t catch them. And I told my dad the fish moved and they just weren’t there anymore. And I argued with him because I was like 13 years old. I got it figured out, right? So he had heard enough. I argued enough that he’s like, okay, we’re gonna go back tomorrow. We’re gonna start at the same time of the fishing tournament. We’re gonna stop. We’re gonna weigh our fish, and we’re gonna see where you would finish if you had done it right. Okay. But I’m telling you, dad, there’s no fish there. So we went back and we fished and we smoked them. We would have won the tournament by, like, three pounds. Oh, and it wasn’t so much the bait. And this is what he was always really big on. It wasn’t so much the bait. It was the having the boat properly lined up on the hole so that you’re presenting whatever bait you have in the right way so that the fish would respond to it.

Oh my goodness.

And I was like, all right, I haven’t argued with my dad about fishing since.

I mean, it makes sense. Like it makes sense that, I remember one time watching this video where a guy was, he was a, he was a field goal kicker on an NFL team. I remember the guy’s name. He’s like one of the best field goal kickers in the NFL. Well, You know, field goal kickers, when people think of NFL athletes, they don’t think of kickers. If anything, probably make jokes about them. You remember them for either hitting a game winner or missing the game winner. They’re heroes or zeros, but you don’t remember the mundane day to day. I remember watching this video of this guy kicking and he’s like doing crazy stuff by himself. He’s out on his field and they’re filming him. He would take the ball, spin it like a top, and then kick it off the outside of his foot and make it do like a banana thing and go through the uprights. And then he’d kick it from this side of the field. He’s just doing all this crazy stuff. He’s kicking it from like the goal line and making it do like a banana curl and go through the post.

That’s cool.

And then they’re interviewing him and I just realized this guy, at this level, you don’t realize how elite a person like that is. He just blends into that crowd he’s around. What you’re, what you’re describing your dad is as elite in that field as anybody’s ever been. I mean, I mean, how many people that listen to the podcast like to fish, but don’t think about boat. I don’t think about boat position. I’ve never thought about that at time. I think, okay, I need to be, I want to be so far off the bank and cast towards the bank this way. That’s about as complex as it got.

Yeah.

But that’s next level. Yeah.

And we were fishing out in the middle of the lake, so. There was like, you’re just out in.

The very middle, in the middle of the lake.

He found this hump with a, with grass on it, and he does that kind of stuff and, and goes out.

There and catch a bunch of fish.

Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, like you say, there, there are things that, that you do that people don’t realize that he would spend hours. People would make fun of him. He said when he was a kid, because he would stand in his front yard and practice casting, like, you’re not going to catch a fish in the. Yard, you know, your grass. But he’s a very determined guy who was determined to build the fundamentals and the basics to be the best at that. Everything. He always told me, he’s like, 99 is never good if a hundred’s achievable. And so he’s going to give a hundred percent every single time, no matter what. Even if everybody else is giving up hope and packed up and go home for the weekend, he’s, he’s not going to give up.

You’re wired that way. And I think I think your boys are gonna be wired that way.

I hope so. I you know, I’ve got to he modeled that well for me.

I’ve got a pond. Hank lives across the road for me and I’ve got a pond. Can you call that pond?

That’s the lake house man. Yeah.

Got a little lake down there. Awesome. Little house down there. I call it the lake house. It’s a pond about half the size about a quarter of the size of a basketball court. Maybe a quarter not even it’s tiny. And I’ve got a few trout swimming around in there. Thanks, boys. And y’all fish all the time. Y’all take the bass boat, drop it in Anna Haley Lake, drop it in Fontana, Hiwassee, Notley, go catch fish. And them boys, they get off school bus or get home from school and they go out there and fish in that pond for hours on. And I’ve told them I can’t keep. There’s only, there’s 10 fish left in it. I had stocked it just for them. I stocked it for the boys.

Yeah.

And let them catch all they wanted. They caught fish all summer, didn’t they? I mean, they’re just and killing them because half time they wouldn’t get eight. I don’t know where they’d end up. They couldn’t throw them back because they trout. Howard Brown says trout wake up in the morning figuring out how to die.

Yeah.

And so there’s a, I think I counted 10 fish in there the other day when we were feeding them. And I said, all right, boys, you can’t keep no more fish. I’ll catch them as long as you don’t kill them. So don’t fish. You can only fish big artificial bait. Yeah. Because they can’t swallow the hook.

That’s right.

You throw a you throw a small hook out there and they swallow it and they’re dead. Well, they’ve been down there wearing it out.

Just yeah.

And I went down the other day and they’re not casting in the pond. I remember Boone or Cade. One of them’s throwing the bait out down the yard. Just practicing throwing the bait, you know, it’s some new lure he’d gotten. But yeah, I think it’s I think it’s in the blood.

My dad. He didn’t it’s funny he didn’t really tell me this story. Someone else told me this story and I asked him to clarify about or I wanted to hear his side of it when I was a kid. They were fishing somewhere up north in the Great Lakes and you know that’s basically like being in the ocean.

Yeah.

And you had to use a compass. This is what before GPS you had to use a compass. It’s pretty treacherous. You had to be careful and you’re gonna back then you know a good bass boat now is 22 foot long back then. And they had 150 mercury on a 17, 18 foot bass boat. And beat you to death. Beat you to death. And they were fishing there and my dad was about, I think my dad said he was somewhere in the latter part of the 30th place and it only paid to like 35th. So he’s like 39th or something like that. And they only paid 35 spots. And on the last day of the tournament.

And there’s probably 50 people.

There’s probably 150.

Okay. 150 guys.

The last day, a big storm came up and they were going around telling people, don’t, don’t try to make it back to the way in. Just don’t, don’t weigh in. But the way in was still open. And those guys were, everybody was just saying, I’m gonna wait the storm out, stay here, I’ll miss the way in.

And but some guys had already gone and weighed in.

Well, yeah, some of that fished really close by, but my dad was halfway across the huge lake, and they’ve got eight foot Seas and it’s thundering and lightning and raining. And so my dad sits down on the boat and gets a rag out and puts it in his mouth. And he, back then you had a partner. And the guy that was his partner said, what are you doing with that rag? He said, I don’t want to lose my teeth when I go across the lake. And I was like, okay. So my dad drove back across the lake wide open, wide open, tore the trolling motor, lost most of his fishing rods. The depth finders broke off from the waves. And he made.

He said, to make way in.

Yeah, he said, I made. I came in 30 second and I got paid.

That is awesome.

I appreciate that.

So he told you he verified the story?

Yeah. And that’s just how he lives his life. And then. And that. That was a good life lesson for me.

Yeah, buddy. Hey, if that doesn’t, like, resonate with, like, every dude, you know, that’s right.

That’s cool, man. Whatever it takes.

So you can remember the 89 Bassmaster classic.

Yeah, in 1989 when he did the pre fishing the practice it was like a month before the tournament I spent every day with him. I remember I had strep throat and I’d get up and we’d go fish and and he didn’t have a whole lot going on. I mean he he had a strategy going into it, but it wasn’t a wasn’t like he Like I got this in the bag matter of fact, I think he he came from the furthest back of anyone in a Bassmasters classic and on the last day and one. So he had to work at it and it was pretty cool. It was a moment that I got to have a part in it because I spent all that time practicing with him and helping him build his baits and getting everything ready. It was really cool. And so for him, what’s cool, that was 1989. He had already started his fishing show in 1984. And I think it was 84, but in 89 he retired right after he won the Classy.

Went out on top.

Went out on top.

More guys should do that. And it’s different sports and things.

He had a family at home. He had five kids and he could see where it was going. He was always on the road and he wanted to spend more time with his family.

And when he retired then he put more just into doing the show.

That’s right.

I mean, I’m like everybody else. I watched him. You know, I can remember in middle school and high school watching him. So if he started a show in ’84, I probably started watching it in ’85 as a middle schooler. Yeah. That’s pretty cool to think about. I would go emulate him on, I lived, I could walk to Biltmore Lake when I was in middle school and high school. I’d crappie fish it once that was on, you know, you know how crappy they are. You catch you catch way more than you’re supposed to on a naked hook if you want to. I thought I was Hank Parker, man, and nobody told me that crap would become the dumbest fish on the planet for about four days, you know?

So then.

We start off talking about Dellenhardt Jr. And growing up in the shadow of Dale Sr. So, man, you’re coming up. What do you, what’s it, I mean, what do you, as a teenager, what do you do when you’ve got a daddy that’s that accomplished, that celebrity in his world? Because again, I can’t, I can’t state this enough for people that don’t follow bass fishing. It’s like having Dale Earnhardt or Michael Jordan or Tom Brady as a dad. In that world, he was the Tom Brady. He was the Michael Jordan. And so is it, at what point, and you may have never thought this question the way that I’m going to word it, and we didn’t, by the way, we didn’t plan this conversation. We just sat down, hit record and started talking for those of you that are listening. But at what point does it go from, this is my dad, he’s my hero, he’s awesome to, okay, what am I going to do as a man now? What tracks am I going to make in the world? ’cause every kid has got to figure that out. What do you do when your dad’s that driven?

Was it? Yeah. Did you want to be a bass fisherman at one point?

I’m sure you did. I did. I love to fish. I’ve always, I still love to fish, but I’ve always liked hunting a little bit more. And my dad and I, the way we hung out with the way we spent most of our time together was hunting. We did fish a lot. But we spent more time duck hunting, deer hunting, turkey hunting. That we loved it. And so like you say, I grew up with my dad, my hero. Obviously, if we went to hunting camp, everybody wanted to talk to my dad. And my dad’s wired a lot like you. He’s going to be the last person at the campfire every single night talking to every single person. And that’s the way he’s wired. And so everybody wanted to hang out and talk about fishing and hunting and, you know, just wanted to hang out with my dad. And so, you know, as I got to be a teenager, you see that in most of all of my other buddies, their dad went, got up in the morning and put on a coat and tie and drove at eight o’clock in the morning to a building and went to work.

My dad didn’t do that. And so I was probably, and, you know, you, you, you adjust to the environment that you’re raised in. You like my world was fishing and hunting. I didn’t really it was, you know, there was a moment when I realized, like in school when they had career career day and they were asking what your parents did, teachers didn’t know what to do. And I said, my dad fishes. And they’re like, okay, okay, wait a minute.

We we don’t live on the ocean.

Yeah. And for me, it was confused just as confusing when other people say, my dad does this or does that. I was like, what does that mean?

My dad is in sales.

Yeah, what does that mean? So I remember trying to figure that out and then starting to think. And I think more for me than trying to figure out what I was going to do in my life. And just kind of based on, I’m sure everybody’s experience is different. I like the idea of the fact that my dad made a name for himself and that people liked him and people respected him. And so I wanted to be that and I love to hunt and fish. I certainly wanted to do that. Hunting fish, whether that was a hobby or professional or whatever, I just wanted to whatever. I wanted to do it. But more important to me, I think, was I want to be that guy that everybody wants to talk to and they respect him. Like people respect my dad and I wanted that kind of respect. And I’m sure most young guys Or most men now can can remember back to that point in their life where hey, I want to be respected for what I do and so for me, I wanted, you know, I didn’t have I couldn’t have that story like I I didn’t grow up in a tough family environment that didn’t have my mom was pretty wealthy or independently had her own money and then my dad was super successful and My parents loved me.

They cared for me. They came to my events or whatever it is. So they were there. I grew up in a great family with means. So I don’t have that rags to riches or from nothing to successful story. I couldn’t do that. So I was trying to figure out what do I do to have respect from another dude? Like when they hear my name or I meet them, they have that kind of respect that they do for my dad. So that that’s more where I landed. Then how, what, how, what I’m going to do to get there.

Yeah. And so that turned into racing. Yeah.

And so I was on a hunting trip with my dad, and my dad has a farm in South Carolina where he now lives in Union, South Carolina. And Dellarin Hart came down and was hunting with us, and he brought Dale.

Jr. And what age are you at this point?

15. Okay. Somewhere in that range. And we started, he was just, he was kind of funny, he was kind of crazy, a little bit like my younger brother Ben.

And.

We just kind of hit it off and we got to be friends. And you know at this point in my life I’m thinking, hey I’m gonna follow my dad’s footsteps, I’ll be a fisherman, I’ll do something in that world. You know just a side note, I don’t think people really, obviously I’m 47 now and I can look back But when you have a dream to go do something, so many people will have a dream to be like play football or be a fisherman or be a race car driver. You can kind of get sucked into the side options of what that looks like and where your whole life becomes about whatever that thing is, whether it’s that sport or whatever, and you’re doing something that you really didn’t want to do, but you’re still connected to that sport. And for some people, that’s where they, they, they, they are happy with where they end up. In other words, people compromise.

So, like somebody that wants to be a, a basketball player, but they don’t end up being good enough, but they could be the manager, right? The equipment manager. So they’re close. You know, Tuck was telling me that at Virginia Tech, the two guys, I was asking about the two guys on the sideline that hold up the cards that play call. I was like, those guys look young. They look students. And he said, yeah, they’re guys that were real good high school football players, but not good enough to play at the next level, but they want to be involved in sport. So this afford them that opportunity. That’s what you’re saying. Yeah, that’s exactly what it takes to stay in that.

Whatever it takes to stay in that. And you better have a passion for what you’re doing. And you know, obviously there’s a lot of people that are called to that. And I can come back to that as the conversation develops. But my point right now is that I could see I wanted to be a professional fisherman. But I didn’t want to sell debt finders for a living. Does that make sense?

Yes.

Like I like fishing enough, I’ll go get me a job selling shoes and fish on the weekend, or what have you. So I liked to fish and I just assumed maybe that’s what I do because of what my dad did. Well then I hang out with Dale Jr. And racing, we grew up in the capital of NASCAR, the Mooresville, North Carolina area. I’m from Denver, which is just down the road.

Denver, North Carolina, the true Denver, the real Denver. Yeah.

Yeah, I always tell people, Denver NC, not Colorado, is what the NC stands for, not North Carolina. But we, so, I mean, I knew about racing. We watched it on TV, but I’d never really been to a race. And so I got really interested in it. And so I went to a couple of races with him. Funny enough, a kid moved into town, moved into you know, our, our area neighborhood. His dad was a professional race car driver who had just gotten out of prison. And I actually went to my first late model race with him and his dad and just got out of prison. He just got out of prison. His name’s Gary Balou. Phenomenal short track racer. And he won the race. And I got to seeing all this stuff racing. I could make these connections to fishing. Hard work, dedication, innovation, don’t give up, work all night long, put more work in and outwork everybody else and you can be successful. And I started seeing that stuff and I was like, wow, this is pretty neat. And what kid at 15-16 years old doesn’t like hot rod cars, you know? So I started hanging out with Dale Jr.

Mostly with his legends racing and he had a street stock car. We’re in his shop one day and his dad comes in. I mean, he was just an intimidating guy, you know, and I look back.

And I was the nickname fit.

Yeah, it fit.

And I’m the intimidator.

I look back and I’m thinking, ah, you know, he’s just normal. I mean, he wasn’t in my mind then. I mean, this dude’s six foot five and he’s ripped and, you know, all these things, but he really just a normal dude who.

You said he’s like 5’10, 170 pounds.

Yeah, he might have been six foot tall. But he’s just a normal dude who was a winner and that was intimidating. And he came to me and Dale Jr. Standing there and you never knew if you were in trouble or not, just the way he had his presence, some of that dad presence. And he came over and he’s like, Hey, Dale Jr. Tells me you want to race, why don’t you buy his race car? And I’m like, that’s an awesome idea, but I don’t have any money.

You’re a teenager.

Yeah, what do I do with that? Man, my dad got excited about it and he got behind it 100%. So he bought me this old 1974 Malibu.

That ain’t late model.

No, this is like Thunder and Lightning street stock. This is one step above demolition derby.

Okay, one step above demolition derby, dirt track racing.

So I went out there and raced that weekend. My dad went and bought him a car. The next week.

So you went out? Yeah. So you went and how old were you?

16.

And went and ran a race that weekend.

Yeah. No practice, no nothing. It’s like a different world. And how’d you do?

Did you even finish?

I mean, I did really good. That was crazy. So I finished like in the top five. Whoa. You know, one of those things where I was just dumb enough not to know better. Yeah. So my dad’s like that. It’s awesome.

He went and bought himself.

We bought him one. He loves to go fast in a bass boat. Why don’t it work here? So what was the race?

What racetrack?

Concord Speedway.

All right.

That’s where Dale Jr. And Kerry, Dale Jr’s brother and Kelly, his sister, all three of them raced there.

Okay.

And they had two matching cars and I bought one of those cars. And so they were kind of moving on trying to do some other stuff like late model racing.

Which would be the next progression.

Yeah, it’s kind of like two steps up really.

Okay.

And so my dad came up there and I realized real quick, you know, people think that race car drivers don’t have any fear, but that’s not true. If you don’t have some type of limit, you’re gonna die quick. Yeah, yeah, you know, you’ll crash out. My dad don’t have that fear button, so he didn’t know. So my dad’s like wiping out. He’s kind of, he’s pretty good. But he’s crazy. And so I was like, oh my goodness. So my dad really got into it, you know, and my dad ended up buying a bush team and Neil Bonnet’s son, David Bonnet, drove for him. And, you know, Jake Elder was the crew chief and he’s the guy that was the crew chief that they built the storyline off of in Days of Thunder.

Really? Just a crazy– Robert Duvall’s character.

Yes. So Jake couldn’t read or write, but he was just an extremely intelligent man, just in his own way. And it was just different. And the sport was evolving and changing and growing. But it was really, really cool to see how my dad really got into this racing. My dad wanted to try it some himself, but he started this team and he started racing, which only paved the way for the opportunity for me. So first race I go out there I finished like fourth or fifth as.

A 16 year old kid.

Yeah lights start going off in my head. You want to be respected? Go fast Do something dangerous and be good at it. People are gonna like it, but I think that that was in the back of my head But what was really on the fourth front of my thoughts was hey, this is awesome. I can do this. I can win at this you know, maybe some false expectations really but or premature, but I just liked it. And I liked the work and I liked the drive. I liked the things that it took to be successful. So I ended up starting racing that car. I flipped it and destroyed it in a race, like my fifth or sixth race. And we bought an old Camaro out of an old lady’s front yard, put a roll cage in it, put that engine out of that Malibu into that car. And the next weekend took that thing. Still had this stock paint job on. I just put a number on the door. It’s a big old sticker with my number. That’s it. And I won the race. That was it for me. I’m done.

You’re hooked.

I’m doing this. Let’s go.

Well, what was your number then?

Oh.

You had Dale’s kind of a progression of Dale’s number. That’s awesome.

Because that was Dale Jr’s number. And I bought the car. I wasn’t gonna buy new stickers.

Oh, okay.

Yeah. So I just stuck with that number.

Yeah.

And, and my dad was double zero. So from there we started, we started advancing, just moving up the ranks. So I, I won several of those races and the street stock races.

Okay. And that was what, that was street stock.

Yeah. Tell me 93, 94.

93, 94. You’re on the street stock. And what is the progression? You got like street stock, then what would be the next progression up most.

You know, every track on And it’s changed over the years, but it would be different at different tracks. But most of the time you had like your four cylinder class, then you had street stocks. I started in street stocks. I never raced any of the four cylinders. Then you would have like a modified version of a street stock and they would have different names for them. But you could do more stuff to the car. You could put different springs and be able to adjust the car more. And then from there, there might be another step between there. But then you had late model stock. And then after late model stock, you had super late model. And most tracks didn’t have super late model. Most tracks, their premier division was the late model stock. You had a two barrel carburetor, you know, a pretty standard body and chassis. That way, everybody was on a pretty level playing field. Now, in the super late models, I raced at Concord Speedway, super late models where you could run any carburetor you want. With aluminum heads and you weighed you had, you pretty much could do about whatever you wanted with the chassis.

And so you could get a mechanical Advantage, right? You combine that with a good driver and you, you, you’re going to win races.

They didn’t have a whole lot of rules. There were some rules, but it was more like what you see on dirt, like super late models on dirt, pretty much like Outlaw cars. You know, they, they had. You couldn’t have wings on them, but you could do all this crazy stuff. But so I went straight from street stock to late model stock. Dale Jr. And, and, and a lot of my buddies stayed in the true late model stock cars. And that’s what they raced. You could race those at Myrtle Beach and Hickory. You could take that same car and race multiple tracks. And so I raced at Concord for a year in that late model stock, and then I just moved right up to super late models. And the reason for that was there was a lot of guys in there who had had a career and were wanting to be racers but kind of past that age to really make it. But these guys were very successful and these guys were very competitive. And so you weren’t just showing up racing against 10, 18-year-old kids and maybe one 30-year-old. Racing against guys and veteran drivers.

They travel and race a lot up north. So you had these super late models more up north than we really did. It was in our region. You had them in Florida, kind of a small band in our region, and then up north. So you had guys like Matt Kenseth and all that stuff, racing them up at Slinger Speedway up in Wisconsin. And then you had guys like Pete Orr and, and, and guys like that down in Florida racing them. And then a small band in North Carolina where we would have big races. And these races were typically, you know, your late model stock race every Saturday night would be 30 laps and that was it.

A shootout.

Just a shootout. But with these super late models, every month we’d have a 200 lapper. Oh. Or a 400 lapper.

So you’re getting into long races.

Long races, big time competition. And my dad felt like, And I felt like at the time and it was right, I think was to let’s just jump right into the big dogs and mix it up because you’re a learning curve. I mean, if you’re shooting basketball on the JV team, it’s a big difference when you go from there and you play with guys in college. Yeah. Right? You up your game. So that’s what we did. We moved right into Super Late Models and for me, all that horsepower in that type of car really fit my driving style. I really liked it. I was not the kind of guy who was going to go out there and hold it wide open just to do that. I was going to be the kind of guy who could manage my tires and win races.

Okay. And so I’m– you-‘re a thinking driver. Yeah. You’re not just hit the throttle and turn left. Right. You’re thinking three steps ahead.

That’s right.

Five steps ahead. And doing it in the moment, what’s going to matter five steps ahead?

That’s right. So my very first race in a super late model, the guy I went to my first late model race with, I mentioned Gary Bilt got out of prison. I’m racing against that guy who had raced in the Cup Series, who had raced in all these different things, one of the most successful short track racers of all time. And I won my second race doing that. And so it was like, All right, so you think about it when I was in the street stock, senior in high school, I went pretty quick and light bulbs go off and I’m like, I can do this. A couple of years later, I’m in an elite late model series, win my second race. So I felt like this is proof that I can do this. So I spent some time Racing that, not a lot, about a year and a half. And then I moved from there to a traveling series called the NASCAR All Pro Series. It was a full-fledged NASCAR touring series. Every race was at a different racetrack every week. And it was those super late model type cars with a few more rules.

And you were– and are those guys or drivers then full-time with that?

Most of them were. So you had guys like Jason Keller, Jeff Purvis, Jack Sprague, you had a lot of different guys who raced in that series who went on to be very successful.

That’s a big name.

Yeah. And so I took off racing in the, it was called the Slim Jim All Pro Series. And that was, you know, people ask me if I miss racing. I probably miss that more than the rest of it.

That was your favorite segment or level? Yeah. That’s what I was going to ask you, of all these different levels, because we’ll get into, we’ll keep going here to help. I mean, you went all the way to the top, but that was your favorite.

That was my favorite. And so I think the point I’m trying to make in all of this is that my dad was very hands on in all of this. He was at every single race. He was my spotter. But he was also a guy, it wasn’t like we set out like, I’m going to be your mentor and tell you how to do this. Because he didn’t know how to race. I mean, that’s not what he did.

It’s probably better.

Yeah, but there was, like he would say, a lot of guys in the late model series would have crew chiefs. I don’t want you to have a crew chief. You and your brother figure it out. Instead of hiring and bringing in a crew chief, I had a mentor, a guy named Freddie Query. And he was a retired school teacher who had become a race car driver. And he’s, I mean, just legendary where we live. One of the greatest late model racers of all time. And he’s an extremely intense dude. I mean, very intense. And we hit it off, and he, he would teach me how to drive, fix cars, build cars. My brother, catfish, he’s two years younger than I am. He had a love and a drive for racing. He ended up becoming a driver. He drove in the bush series for Rusty Wallace, but. He was better at building cars and being a fabricator than I was. I just did what I needed to do to go out there and win races. There were certain elements I liked better than others, but he was better. He was more gifted at that than I was.

And. But freddie query came up, became my mentor to teach me not only how to just drive, but how to think and then how to. How to. To. To make my cars better. So how to set cars up, how to build cars. How to, how to do all the things that needed to be done to win races. So I wasn’t like just some kid who had a rich daddy and said, there’s the car. You show up on Saturday with your helmet, your shoes and go.

That’s right.

I was, I was, I didn’t have some, I was setting my own cars up. I was, my brother and I were hanging the bodies and doing this thing. Obviously there was people that helped and did a lot of stuff along the way, but the, the It wasn’t just handed over to me. So when I started racing in the All Pro Series, it was a big jump for me because you’re traveling, new tracks, new situations, different people, more competition. And my rookie year, I won it. I won it at Louisville, Kentucky. And that was pretty cool. I led one lap.

The last lap.

Yeah. Last. I made a pass on the back straightaway in the last lap, and it really kind of sets the stage for me in a lot of ways because.

To win that early, it turned people’s heads that are higher up. Yeah.

It gave me opportunity that that, you know, you can say, hey, yeah, I won at this local track last saturday night. And most people like, yeah, that’s, that’s nice.

That’s great.

But when you say, hey, I won in the all pro series. Oh, okay. So there might be some potential then, you know, and so I only raced two years in the All Pro Series and We they had Miami Homestead, Florida was a brand new race track and NASCAR scene. I was, I dominated that race and ended up losing because they threw a caution at the, at the end with a lap to go. I had a transmission problem. But there, a bush team saw me and asked me if I drive their car. So I kind of got my big break.

Okay.

To, to drive a, a bush car. It wasn’t a very good one, but.

You’Re, but it was an opportunity jumping in the bush. Now, that’s legitimately Pro.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mark Martin was in the race. Jeff Gordon was in the race, you know? So it’s like, okay, so it’s a different deal for our listeners.

If, again, if you don’t know. Racing at all, even if you know racing in a modern context, it’s no longer called the Busch series. What’s it called? Infinity?

Xfinity. Xfinity.

Xfinity.

So.

Think of these levels that Hank’s been describing. You’re going up level. I guess the close thing in sports might be, again, comparing it to a more maybe well-known sport would be in baseball. You’ve got the minor leagues. You got single A ball, then double A, then triple A, then the majors. Yep. And the bush series would be right up under the, the cup series. So those guys, a lot of those guys would race both, which you did, too. So, so when you’re saying, yeah, man, I’m racing against Mark Martin, Jeff Gordon. Those guys are racing the cup series, right?

They’re, they’re doing both that same weekend.

The same week.

So, like, Dale Earnhardt would be running. The cup race on Sunday, but he also ran the Bush race on Saturday.

Saturday. And typically it would be the Bush race on Saturday, the cup race on Sunday.

That’s right.

Back then it’s called the Winston Cup race. And then it became next.

L. Yeah, it’s the cup series now.

Now it’s just a cup series because he used to base it off the sponsor. So the, the cup series, then right under that was the feeder series. So those guys are all pro drivers, top high level. They’re the best of the best.

That’s right. That’s right.

And you’re that quick, you’ve climbed into that series. A good show and at homestead gets you a ride in the Busch series.

There was 75 cars that entered for that race, but they only took 36. And I ended up qualifying 30th, so I got in. And I think I finished, I finished like 12, somewhere between 12th and 15th in that race. And so they hired me for the next year.

In that bush race. The first bush race.

That’s right. So they asked me to come be their driver for a limited amount of races. It’s like 10 races. They gave me a 10 race deal for the next year.

And at that point, you’re obviously full time. How’s that work at that level? They give you a salary or is it like commission based on where you rank and how much money you win and you get a cut? And, and, but they’re, they’re the owners, so they’re kind of controlling that. But you can make a living at it at this point.

That’s right. Yeah. Most of the time, the way it would work is you would have a base salary and then a percentage of what the car made, and that could fluctuate. Like, for me, most of my contracts had to do. If I finish, if I finish first, I would get, like, 50 of the pot. If I finish worse than 10th, it would go down. So that percentage would would greatly go down. So it would incentivize me to win. And then you would get a base salary as well. And so starting out, like when you just get your foot in the door, you don’t really have that much leverage. So for me it was just a percentage of what the car made.

And you’re just happy to be there.

Yeah, and we made it to the party. And I was helping pay for tires. So that was a huge expense.

You were helping pay for tires.

Right, right. So it was just, It was just an opportunity. So I took off the next year. We’re going to run about 10 races. We went to Daytona. We didn’t make the race at Daytona. And that’s all. I mean, that’s 99% car, 1% driver for qualifying in Daytona.

Because at that level, every driver is good enough. Yeah.

You’re just putting a brick on the gas pedal and going around the track to qualify. But I learned a lot. And, you know, I have my I’d already dabbled some in the Busch Series trying to make races in my dad’s car and was unsuccessful. It’s just it’s hard to explain the level of competition when you have that many guys, 70 plus people to show up to make a race and they’re only going to take 36. I mean, there was one time at Charlotte, there’s people. I think they had 100 cars there trying to make the race. It’s crazy.

And they’re gonna take 36. Yeah.

It was just ultra competitive.

Yeah.

So that, it was Mark 3, the number 78 Mark 3 car I was driving for. And then I got injured in Texas pretty early. So that’s like the fourth or fifth race of the season.

Just the big wreck.

Yeah. I had a big wreck in Texas where I don’t remember a whole lot of it. I just, it was in practice.

That’s when it freaked your dad out so bad.

Yeah. Yeah, because I think they, I had a head injury and I had some swelling. My brain was swelling and they airlifted me to the hospital. He had to drive himself. And I can’t imagine now, you know, with five kids myself, what that would be like, you know? So back then I didn’t think it was that big of a deal, but I kind of can see his side of it a lot more clearly now. I was so, I was airlifted, had a head injury. They did some stuff and it ended up being alright. It wasn’t that big of a deal. And NASCAR suggested, or my doctor, I should say, through NASCAR, suggested I take some time off and I didn’t. And I went back to the race. We’re gonna race Hickory. My throttle sticks and I hit the wall again. And it was, that’s a really, so I went from a, a mile and a half racetrack where you’re running 200 miles an hour to a quarter mile racetrack at Hickory Motor Speedway, where you’re running 90. I hit the wall and it knocked me out. And I was. I had another concussion, so that was two back to back.

And it was like, all right, doctors. He’s like, all right, for real. Yeah, you’re 23 years old. Let’s talk, you know? And so I took a little break. To get healed up. I was having a hard time remembering things, like being focused, being clear, having some problems with my vision, all that sort of stuff. All the fun things that go along with that. So I took some time off and then I started racing my late model a little bit and picked up once won a couple races and started driving for my dad the next year.

And that’s in the Busch Series.

And that was good. I didn’t win any races that year, but we were pretty competitive. And I spent a couple of years with my dad’s team. We were just underfunded. It just takes so much money. Just takes so much money. And then GNC got into sport and they wanted me to drive for them. So I went to drive for another team and my dad said, Thank you Lord. No more buying tires, no more wrecked race cars and all that sort of stuff.

Finally shut this door because there’s somebody mowing outside. It’s so pretty here. We got the doors open in the luxurious NSR studio upstairs of the barn. I think nobody would be surprised to know that we do this upstairs of a barn in the old hay loft of a barn.

Fitting. Very fitting, man.

So you go to, you go to drive the GNC cars, Bush Series car, too.

Right. Right. And I went to race my first year there, and I’ll never forget, just really cool when I. It was, it’s a big deal to move from a family-owned operation where everybody’s scraping to make it, you know, like, I didn’t get paid as much or, you know, if you wreck the car this week, we’re not going to race next week. That type of thing to going to race for a legit race team that, that, you know, it’s a, you know, it’s different for your daddy to fire you than someone else says, you’re, hey, you’re not performing. We’re gonna put somebody else in there. Like that, that’s a reality. Mm-. What, you know, so I went to drive for the team, CC Welliver, and Tim Feitl was one of my teammates, and he was a seasoned guy. He had won several races in the Busch Series. Just good, dude. He pulled me to the side and he pointed at all my new race team, all these guys. I’m getting this is like you’re gonna spend, you know, 10 months with these guys and hotels at the racetrack. You’re gonna fight and when you fight a battle together and you have success and you have good days and bad days with a group of guys, you build a bond that’s just hard to replace.

And so I’m looking at all these new guys. I’m getting ready to go into this new race team and the new race season. And he said, look at, look at all that. I want you to look at all, look at your eight race cars. I had eight race cars lined up with my name on them and all that stuff. You know, it’s just crazy. And he said, these are the good old days, so go do it and enjoy every second of it. I was like, what good advice? What good advice?

Yeah.

And so I won a race that first year with those guys and, you know, Things were good. I Dodge came into the sport, got involved with Dodge. I started doing a lot of testing. So every Tuesday I would go to Kentucky Speedway with Ray Evernham’s team and I would do a 500 mile test in a cup car.

Every Tuesday.

Every Tuesday. It was crazy.

You fly up there?

Yeah, I would fly with the team up there.

Private jet.

Yeah, well, it was a charter plane. Yeah. And we would go up there and we would test and we would test new stuff, crazy crazy stuff, crazy motors. It was a really good learning experience. I learned a lot. And we would have telemetry and I could see my data compared to Jimmy Johnson’s or my data compared to Bill Elliott’s and whoever’s. I could look at all this different stuff and I really learned a lot. Well, we went to Dodge. We switched from Chevy to Dodge in our Busch team and I won a race at Pikes Peak. And so that was pretty cool because it was the first guy to win a Busch Series race in a Dodge.

Yeah. That’s cool.

That was a cool experience. And so Ray Abraham gave me an opportunity to race in the Cup Series for him in the number 91 Dodge at Rockingham Speedway. And so that’s it, man. That’s the pinnacle.

That’s where you made it.

Where you, yeah, yeah. And you’re looking at that and I’m sitting there, I mean, how cool is it? You’re for a lot of people, you may have something else you like, like it might be Bill Belichick and football or, or, or a famous coach that you couldn’t imagine working under. I mean, it was a surreal moment to be sitting in a race car and Ray Evernham’s talking to me, you know, like, holy smokes.

Just a few years ago, you’re running around the track at Hickory or at Concord.

Yeah.

Concord.

Hickory. And all these different places like that. And it’s so it was really cool. And he is Ray Evernham is a very unique individual. He’s one of those people that has the ability to connect extremely well and to convince you that you can do something that you might not think you’re able to do.

And name some of the drivers that have driven for him so people can.

Yeah, he was the crew chief for Jeff Gordon all the years that Jeff Gordon won his championships. He was the head of the Rainbow Warriors pit crew team. That’s what he’s best known for. And he started his own team and Jeremy Mayfield, Bill Elliott, Casey Atwood, several different drivers drove for him then. He was just, you know, he’s an icon when it comes to crew chiefs. A genius, an absolute genius, neat guy. So, man, I feel like I’m on my way and GNC is really excited about everything that’s going on. We’re gonna make a few changes with the way that we did our team, but their ultimate goal was to take me to the Cup Series with GNC. And Chip Ganassi asked me about mid-year if I would come drive for him in the Cup Series. It was one of those mobile cell phone service cars. I can’t remember back then, but he asked me to come drive for him and I turned it down because I felt like where I was at with GNC was going to be very successful. And so here I am. I’m on my way. Things look good. I’m meeting all of those things like the inside of me.

I want people to respect me. Well, now I’ve got that. I’ve got it in a way. I mean, and the funny thing is, once you kind of achieve that, it’s never really enough. I mean, I still, well, I need to be in the Cup Series full time. Well, I’ll need to be there and I’ll need to win a certain amount of races before I get there. Well, I need to have people like, you know, so it just, the goalposts kept moving for me in my mind. But man, I am, I’m at that place and, we’re at the last race of the season back at Miami Homestead Speedway where I got my start was a phenomenal track for me. I’ve won several races there and I just love that racetrack, before they reconfigured it and, I finished second in the race and GNC The corporate guys were all there at the race, which they came to most of them. They were great, awesome guys, fun to hang out with. They were really cool, but they were at the race and they told me at the end of the race, hey, we’re going to drop our sponsorship.

We’re moving on. In racing, that’s it. If you don’t have a deal at the end of the year, like by October, this is November, if you don’t have something wrapped up early October, you’re in trouble.

For the next year.

Yeah. And I had turned down that ride with Chip Ganassi and I had turned down other opportunities to be loyal and stay with those guys. And what had happened is the big part of their sales was ephedra and the government put a band on ephedra, shut their business down. I don’t think that GNC’s ever fully recovered from that, which whether that was the right call or not, that’s not my point. My point was I was out of a ride. So I’m scrambling trying to figure out what I can do. And so I started talking to some different people. I got a sponsorship package put together to go drive for Roush Racing. And so I was going to drive for Roush and we were down at Daytona testing and that sponsor backed out and went with another team. And so here I am. You know, I’m at that point.

So was that a team Roush was going to add to their already?

No, I was taking an existing ride they had. Todd Parrott was going to be my crew chief. I mean, oh, it was going to be awesome. I mean, it was going to be awesome. I was going to have killer equipment. And so back to where my dad talks about never giving up or he modeled that without even really having to say it. I mean, I’m at the point. I just want to give up. I’m real. I mean, you know, it’s defeating, devastating and. And a challenge to. To not let this get to you. But you just can’t stop. So when that’s at Daytona, Daytona was in like a month, three weeks to a month when I lost that deal because the sponsor decided to go somewhere else. So I had to scramble to find something. So Dale Jr. Calls me and asked me if I’d run like three or four races for him in the chance to car. So absolutely, yeah, we’ll do that. And I put together, interestingly enough, two other races with that same sponsor who bailed on me. Talk about being humbled and having to swallow some pride. But I did it and I raced like five races that year and my worst finish was fifth.

Oh man.

And so I thought this is going to be a good opportunity for me. I drove the Bass Pro Shops car. Johnny Morris was super excited. What a great opportunity this would be for him to have Hank Parker on the Bass Pro Shops racing team with me driving it. My dad connected it. It just made a lot of sense. But Bill Jr. And those guys had made a commitment to Martin Truex. And, you know, my point in telling all this is, like, I could walk through the kind of the way all of this shook out. But the truth is, with every turn that I made, it seems like something really fell apart. And so what I did was I didn’t quit. I kept trying to put together good deals, but I was not going to go get in a car that went out there and ran three laps and then came in and parked and just get last place money. They call those starting parks. And you know, it pays, every position pays in NASCAR. So what you could do is only buy one set of tires.

Go qualify.

Yeah, you had to practice one lap. Just roll around at 30 miles an hour in practice, qualify, go fast qualifying so you can make it.

Yeah.

But then just come in after three laps of the race or four laps or whatever you wanted to do and collect last place money. You can make it, you back then you could make a pretty decent living doing that, but I’m not going to do that. I’m not wired that way and I’m not criticizing anybody who’s done that, but I just couldn’t do it. And so I put together a pretty good ride in the truck deal. But it wasn’t, you know, I had some, their schedule wasn’t as robust. So I started doing TV. I started hosting TV shows. They came to me, the TV thing, they just kind of came to me. And, you know, at this time I’m married with two kids and you’re fighting, fighting for my career, fighting to make a living and trying to figure it out. And so I did the truck deal. And started doing TV and the TV opened up all these opportunities. I could have never dreamed. It’s not something I really wanted to do, but I enjoy being an idiot and cutting up and being hyperactive and talking and that’s what people like for TV. So I started doing the TV and then which led me down to the end of my racing career where my truck deal fell apart.

The team shut down. They ran out of money and I just started doing TV full time. And then at about that time we started a hunting show with my dad. He wanted to do a hunting show because he had got involved with a product that they sell in Walmart and other big box stores.

Khmer Deer, shameless plug.

Khmer Deer and we wanted to be able to highlight that product on the television show. So that’s what started in about that time, about my second year and that’s when I ran into you. We went on a hunt together and you asked me about getting involved with Snowbird, being on the board from a marketing standpoint. And it’s been kind of crazy how the Lord has progressed to get me here. So I went from doing the TV show to really growing the TV show to starting a production company.

I really want to drill into that, which we’re going to do in the next episode, but I really want to drill into that because I want, I feel like it’s going to be so, I want people to understand, I want people to look behind the curtain here at Swoop. I think so many people, they listen to the podcast or they come to an event or multiple events, but there’s got to be a curiosity. I talk to people, how do y’all do this? How do you run this? What, how’s the board work? How did it, what? And I, and I want I’m excited.

To.

Drill into what you do here and what a game changer it’s been for us. Because you went from being on the board to being here full time in a few years. But I want to walk through that story. Where I want to pick up is, and we’re going to stop here. Where I want to pick up in the next episode is let’s go back briefly, overlap into your race career, When you met Wendy and Because that’s when the Lord started to really work in your heart.

That’s right.

Because she she had come out of a kind of a wild and crazy life and you’ve been living the NASCAR life and the Lord is so cool when he does this he started to work to bring y’all together and work in your lives and then the gospel story starts to really get woven. Yeah so anyway, we’re gonna stop right there. Thank y’all for listening in And that was a good stopping point for Hank and I. So we actually continued that conversation over the next couple of days and I’m excited to bring the rest of that to you. But for today, we’re gonna stop there. And if you get a chance to come up to Snowbird Outfitters in the next year, look forward to having you meet Hank Parker Jr. And get to meet him in person. This is a man who loves the Lord, loves Jesus, loves Snowbird, and is excited about what we’re doing here. I’m thankful to call him friend and so grateful that he’s my brother in Christ and also partner in ministry. Thank you for your support again as always, thanks for listening in. I’m gonna share in the next episode, I’m gonna share in the intro to the next episode before we get into the rest of our conversation with Hank.

I’m gonna share some emails and comments from listeners and hopefully you’ll be encouraged by that. Hope you guys have an awesome week. Thanks again so much so much. I can’t I can’t reiterate iterate reiterate iterate and reiterate and reinforce what it means to us that you listen means a lot. Thank you so much and oh one other thing before we go Last week’s episode where we looked at the life and legacy of my father-in-law Steve Coleman the big Kahuna Lots of awesome comments. Thank you all for that and then I want to let you know that on the 24th of which is less than two weeks away, we’re gonna be having a memorial service, a celebration of life at Snowbird Wilderness Outfitters. So if you’re able to come, it’s open invitation, open door. Anybody knew him, loved him, we’re gonna celebrate his life and legacy and look forward to celebrating that and his home going to go be with Jesus. And thank you so much, all of you, again, for your support. It means a lot. And we’ll see you next week. Thanks for listening to no Sanity Required. Take a moment to subscribe and leave a rating, it really helps.

Visit us at SWOutfitters.com to see all of our programming and resources, and we’ll.

See you next week on no Sanity Required.

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Part 2

In part 2, Brody sits down with Hank Parker Jr., who now leads the marketing, sales, and programming teams at Snowbird Wilderness Outfitters. Hank was formerly a NASCAR driver and then founded Fireband Media, a production company that produced short films and outdoor television programming. 

Hank walks through his life’s story and how he started racing, moved to television, and eventually arrived at Snowbird. The Lord’s hand has been evident in his life.

Click here to listen to Hank Parker Jr.’s testimony at the Be Strong men’s conference.

View part 2 transcript

All right, well we’re back with Hank Parker today. I guess Hank Parker Jr. is what I need to call him, but anyway, he’s back on the show. We’re gonna do part two, follow up last week’s conversation. Before we get into that, I wanted to make a major announcement for those of you that listen and can be here this coming Saturday, September the 24th, September 24th at 3:00 PM. That’s Snowbird Wilderness Outfitters. As of right now, it’s set for the North Campus in the Super Coop. If that changed, it would just be to bring it back to main campus in the Coop. But we’re gonna be doing a memorial service for the Big Kahuna, Steve the Big Kahuna Coleman. And we’d love for you to join us. Anybody that’s ever been impacted by this ministry that’s willing to come up, you can stay. We’re gonna make available, we have no event going on at Snowbird that weekend. That’s why we’ve waited. A month to do this. There’s nothing going on. So we’ve got the camp facility is wide open. If you need a place to stay, if you want to come in Friday night the 23rd, you’re welcome to crash here and just have a day of celebration and reflection.

Walk the property. We want to invite you to come in and do that. If you want to stay Saturday night after the celebration, it’d be at three o’clock, be about an hour, hour and a half. Hour and a half memorial service and bring your grill and stay and cook out or you can eat, grab some food locally. We’re not going to be serving food or anything like that, but man, we’d love to have people who have been impacted by this ministry come and celebrate the homegoing of the big kahuna and celebrate his life and legacy here. So please come and join us and we’d love to see you. Also, On behalf of my wife, on behalf of little and her brother Stephen and his wife Tammy, the entire family, the grandkids, thank you all for those of you that have sent condolences and said, you know, kind words. And we’ve had some folks give money to the scholarship fund that will get students that’ll get kids to camp. This past year we spent over $50,000 in scholarshiping students. It was actually up around $70,000. To be honest, the total that I got a couple days ago for kids to come here and go to camp and to not have to pay for that.

And that’s a big deal. And so some folks have given to that scholarship fund in lieu of flowers for scholarships in memory of Steve Coleman. So thank y’all. What else? That’s about it for now because I want to dive right in We’re coming off of our Be Strong weekend, just had the Be Strong conference. Awesome as always. Coming out of that and praying that the Lord will use that and continue to challenge and encourage men. Those of you that listen to this podcast who were here this past weekend, pray that it was a blessing. Would love to hear feedback from you. And also just pray that you’ll go and you’ll be on fire for Jesus, man. Go be better daddies and husbands and Faithful friends and workers and employees and employers and make a difference for the kingdom. So just gonna jump right in. Me and Hank, we’re gonna chop it up. We talked a little bit about, we start off talking about hunting and just, oh man, just jawing, you know, but we’re gonna pretty quick get into what, you know, why God led him here, why, you know, the way that the Lord led him here and why he’s so passionate about what he does in this ministry.

And then I’ll come back at the end, close it out, and I’m gonna give you then a little bit of an overview of what Hank’s job is specifically, and just so you can kind of wrap your brain around it. Thanks for joining us. Hope you enjoyed this conversation with Hank Parker Jr. Welcome to no Sanity Required from the ministry of Snowbird Wilderness Outfitters, a podcast about the Bible, culture, and stories from around the globe. All right, so let’s just let’s pick up where we left off last week. We were we were talking when we went off the air after that last episode. Hank had asked me man, is that did we go too long? Is that too much? Man, no, I was that was I mean, I feel like I’ve known you as long as I’ve known you. I feel like I know a lot of the stories And I’ve heard you do presentation. We’ve used you at Be Strong, you’ve shared here, I’ve heard you at other events. But where you’ve got it bottled into a 30 to 40 minute presentation, it’s high level, it’s fast moving, it gets more into what we’re getting ready to get into in this episode, because that’s the big stuff.

Your walk with Jesus, how you came to faith, the formation of your theology, Christian formation. Because that that’s what matters. That’s right. In the big picture.

That’s right.

And it’s what and it’s the reason you’re sitting here. You ain’t sitting here. NASCAR ain’t got nothing to do while you’re sitting here in the big picture. You know, that’s not why you’re at Snowbird. If you had never gone down that path and we had crossed paths, I think you’d still be sitting here. But the thing is, I don’t think we’d have crossed paths. Yeah. The Lord, everything in God’s sovereign plan ties and stitched together.

That’s right.

And I think when I met you, I did not know you from NASCAR. Because I mentioned in the last episode, I was a race fan. I was a race fan as a kid because my granddaddy was a diehard race fan. We’d go to the New Asheville Speedway pretty much every weekend. Did you ever run there?

I never ran there.

It was smaller.

It was like a quarter mile.

Yeah. I mean, did it go to late model?

Yeah, they most know they raced late model stock. So you had the Presleys, Robert Presley and all those guys race there.

I went to school with Robert’s boys.

That’s cool.

Or with his one boys, my brother’s age.

But.

When I got and then I followed racing in the nineties, but just as a I followed Dale Earnhardt.

Right.

I kind of kept, you know, I wasn’t a diehard fan. And so I knew your name. From watching racing. I was not a very hardcore fan, but I followed it. So I knew your name, but then, you know, I just didn’t think about any of that stuff. And then I saw you. I was at my mom’s house, and I found y’all’s show, and you’re sitting on a muzzle loader hunt in Kentucky. You didn’t kill, you left, and you came back later and tagged one. Yeah.

You remember that episode? Yeah. Hell yeah.

And so I’m watching that and I’m like, I think Parker Jr. Man, this like he raced cars and his daddy was, you know, was the guy that I used to watch when I was a kid. He’s in connecting all the dots because Austin Rammel had told me that you started attending Venture.

That’s right.

You started experimenting with, you know, kind of visiting, because that was like a 45 minute drive. You went on, became an elder at that church, served faithfully there for a while as a lay elder. But I started to connect these dots and I’m watching an episode, I’m like, I need to get Hank. We used to do a Wild Game Sportsman’s Dinner slash Wild Game thing. You’ve done a bunch of that and your dad does a bunch of that. I’m like, yeah, I can reach out to Austin and get this guy’s number and get him up here. And that’s how our relationship started. So when I met you, you were walking with the Lord. And you said in the last episode, I think you said you were about two years into you’re about two years into film production.

Right, that’s right.

At that point. That’s right. So let’s go back, because I meet you as a believer and then start to stitch together your story, which I’ve heard your testimony, how the Lord moved you out of racing, and I’d love folks to hear that, because that’s what it’s all about. So walk us through that, like meeting Wendy, because the reality is, It’s crazy and it’s really good for me to hear everything you just talked about in that last episode about as far as like and I would encourage you if you didn’t hear the if you’re listening to this and you didn’t hear last week’s episode, you need to go back and check that out. But and I always hate it when people say that. Yeah, but you really do.

Yeah, it’s a background.

It’s a big part of story. But here in all those, how much has to line up perfectly? That’s right. I mean, for you to get in the rides you got in, like, it’s not, it’s, it’s, you got to be good enough, but there’s probably a lot of guys that are good enough, but don’t have the right opportunity at the right time and then capitalize on it. Maybe they have the right opportunity at the right time and they have an off day. Maybe they have the best day ever, but other circumstances.

That’s right.

Cause everything to kiss like everything has to line up just right.

Oh, yeah.

And we know in your story, it’s a sovereign move and work and plan of God.

That’s right.

But how do you go from, how do you get there?

All right, well, how about.

All right.

How about I start how I came to faith? Yeah, we’ll work from there. I think that’d make the most sense. So, you know, growing up as a kid, my dad was kind of my hero. My dad, came to faith when I was just like a year old. My grandfather had gotten killed helping build a church, a church plant in Kansas. And on the way home, he got killed in an automobile accident, riding with the church in the church van. He was the only person to get killed. And he had a note in his Bible just talking about how he prayed for his sons, my dad and my uncle, and that to. To preach the gospel at his funeral. Well, my dad and my uncle come to faith in Jesus at my grandfather’s funeral. So from a very early age, a year old, I don’t even remember any of that. My dad comes to faith in the same church.

At his own father’s funeral.

At his own father’s funeral. And my grandfather had been sharing the gospel with my dad over and over. And my dad, I was really focused on his career, really focused on just trying to be a good person and whatever that meant to him. But really what it boiled down to more for my dad was to be successful. And so my dad comes to faith. And so I grew up in church. Good people. I mean, just an awesome church, a church that really exploded at a particular time in the late 70s. It had a lot to do with my grandfather. A guy knocks, randomly stops by my grandfather’s house and door-to-door evangelism and my grandfather couldn’t get away from the question that he asked him. I said, my grandfather, raging alcoholic, lot of struggles, World War II vet, just had a laundry list of struggles and his life radically changed in this little town and people catch wind of it and see his life. And just God did a really cool work in his life. And so he lived out the rest of his years just very focused on the gospel with his family and with the community.

And so that church, my grandfather was kind of like a centerpiece because in the birthing of that church, my grandfather comes to faith. And so we go to church, they are good people. And you know the truth is it might have been you know a part of what my own brokenness and my own sinfulness what I heard and what I didn’t hear and what I the way I understood things I grew up in church every you know Sunday, Wednesdays all the time youe know and I made a profession of faith pretty early pretty young. I was probably about 10 years old. I can’t remember the exact time but Just to be honest with you, I really felt like, hey, I don’t want to go to hell, so I’m going to raise my hand and sign the card. That way I know I’m in. And so that was kind of my mode. But I was a good kid. I didn’t break the rules. I loved my dad. My dad was my hero. My dad told me not to do something, I wasn’t going to do it. It was more of a morality. It was more of a moral conformity.

I wanted to make my dad be happy and be pleased with my actions and that sort of thing. So growing up in this church, Southern Bible Belt type church, as soon as I started racing in my mind I felt like, hey, I can’t be a guy who’s going to drive 200 miles an hour and that lifestyle, that world of racing, you can’t mix those two. So I wanted to be successful. That’s what drove me. I wanted people to respect me outside. I’m not just Hank’s kid. I’m fast race car driver who wins races. And so when I got out of high school and started racing in the All Pro Series, I kind of just, I just kind of walked away from it. You know, just a lot of guys, just kind of a party scene, like you travel every week, you’re in hotels, you’re in different places, and you know, you gotta be super careful about how you tell stories about your past, especially before you come to faith in Jesus, before God saves you, that you don’t glorify those things. I mean, I wasn’t an alcoholic, I wasn’t a drug addict, I wasn’t a lot of things, but I was an idiot who wanted people to like me and I wanted people to laugh and I wanted to be successful.

So you mix all those things, those concoctions together without Christ driving your life, you make poor decisions and that’s where I was. And so early in the Bush series, I could see a lot of guys would go to the chapel and it was just hypocrisy. Like I would see them at places on Friday night, but Saturday morning chapel, they were there. And I hated that. So I just, I’m like, I’m not.

Gonna, dude, you didn’t go.

Yeah, I didn’t like that. But I was as much of a hypocrite in my own life because there is that, that, that culture of a good old American boy, race car driver, God and country, and, and the whole deal of how, you know, whatever was warped in my own mind. So I’m not pointing fingers to anybody else. I’m just saying the way I perceive stuff. And so in the Bush series, there’s a guy named Eddie Robinson. He became an IMB missionary, spent time over in India and Pakistan. He’s an awesome dude. He’s from Louisiana, country is cornbread. And he just started hanging out and talking to me about Jesus and talking to me about the gospel. I know all the Bible stories. I grew up in church. I get all that stuff. But what was different about this guy, he’d ask me questions that were really made me think, like, all right, so how does that apply? What does that look like in your own life? And so it wasn’t like, hey, do you know how to go to heaven? It was more like, what’s that look like in your life and how’s that shaped the way you think?

And so he spent a lot of time with me, and I think I was oblivious to it. I just thought he was a good dude.

And.

He asks me a question and I can’t remember the depths of it, but basically it probed a lot of thought and for whatever reason, and we both know the reason, God opened my eyes to see Romans 5:8 in a whole new light. That God demonstrated His own love for me. Christ died for me while I was a sinner, right? While I was at my ugliest, while I was hostile, while I was at my worst, He sends Christ to die for me. And for whatever reason, I had felt like God had the standard of holiness and perfection and I can’t live up to that so I can’t do that in race. I’ll be done with God. I’m gonna be successful. And when you stop and you really look at the gospel, you’re like, whoa, wait a minute. He saw me at my worst and yet he purchased me, he ransomed me based on the the work of Jesus. I mean, it shook my world. And I was toward the end of my time at my dad’s race team. I was driving for the United States Marine Corps. And so God saved me. And it wasn’t like I wasn’t real sure if I had really come to faith and God just did a big work in my life.

It was undeniable. I could not talk about it. I could not. It affected me. Now, there was still some struggle, massive struggle with sin. It wasn’t like all of a sudden, there was still some things I’d had to work through, but my conversation was going to be about Jesus. I was working that out, and so I had just started dating Wendy. I didn’t know how that was going to work. Wendy and I went to high school together. So my brothers are kind of crazy and they got kicked out of public school and I was the only one with a driver’s license so we ended up going to this Christian school in Charlotte where I met Wendy and she had a big old beautiful smile and she was very athletic and I said, I like that girl. I took her to the prom, she shook my hand and sent me on my way afterwards and we never talked again.

Smart girl.

Yeah, smart girl. Sent me on my way. So I hadn’t seen Wendy since high school and I ran into her while I was racing at a wedding party and we started going out. We’d only been dating a short time. I can’t remember exactly how long, but we’d, and so I’m like, I gotta tell her I’m gonna be one of those weird people that loves Jesus. Now we went to a Christian school and I knew her background, I knew her story. And I knew where she was and we had had conversations about church and Jesus and those sorts of things but she was in a place where she was really running from the Lord because her father passed away when she very unexpectedly when she was a senior in high school and she just was really wrestling and dealing with that and her way of dealing with that was just pushing away and so that lifestyle we were both kind of just, you know, when we first started dating, that’s where we both were. And so I said, hey, something’s happened. I don’t know. I didn’t even know how to articulate. I was like, I’ve rededicated my life, or God has saved me.

I don’t. But I see this in a whole new way. And there’s a guy who started this Bible study, and I want to figure it out. She’s like, okay, so we started going this Bible study, and it was. Every Tuesday night at seven o’clock, but we called it 701, ’cause the guy teaching it was always late. So we started going to that Bible study together, and man, God just grew us. She got on fire for Jesus. She was already a believer, but was just really trying to work through how to deal with her father’s death and where she stood, her own identity in Christ and what that looked like. But God got a hold of our hearts together. And man, really that really formed a bond in that relationship. I had a lot of respect for her anyway. But it just my heart for Wendy grew as we grew together in Jesus. And so, man, in racing that had a big effect on me because I had built this group of buddies that I was, I didn’t build, I had hung out with them, a group of buddies that just all kind of naturally are, you know, what drove us was, you know, driving fast and partying and that sort of thing.

Nothing too crazy, but just stupid. And I had to take a step back from that. And so most of my buddies felt like, oh, he’s stepping back because he’s found a girl.

Got a girl.

Yeah. But it was we had already been dating for for a few months before. This has really happened. So I had to take a step back and just really evaluate because I wasn’t strong enough to not do what everybody else was doing. And I knew that about myself. And so I wanted to be different in regards to I’m not trying to do this because God’s going to be disappointed in me. I was just overwhelmed with the fact that God saved me. And again, not perfect, really working through that. But I put dudes around me that really, really helped me. Kenny Crosswhite spent, we spent every Tuesday for about a year and a half studying through the book of Philippians. Guys who just taught me how to, hey, this is how you read the Bible. Let’s work through that. Let’s spend time doing that. And so as my career, I came into this GNC deal, a brand new believer, pretty fired up about Jesus. They would take me to events, motor racing outreach would take me to events where I would speak. I didn’t even really know how to articulate the gospel very well.

You’re a Christian and you’re a professional race car driver. People listen.

They would ask me questions and I would just answer them. I knew, I just didn’t know how to present well. I knew that, man, God, I can’t explain it, but God saved me.

That’s powerful.

My faith is in Jesus. And I have a hope that’s totally changed and what I thought was so important is now it might be important but it falls way short of the fact that God has saved me and I’m a new person in Christ. I’m forgiven in Christ and I have a hope in a future whether racing makes it not whatever. I have a hope in a future that’s in eternity. And so that changed my perspective. So I would I would go to these events and speak with those guys speak at events with MRO but in my career man things were going good things were building up things were awesome so it’s easy to it’s easier in some ways. There’s there’s always difficult but it was easier like hey, I just became a Christian. I’m now winning races. This is gonna be awesome, you know? Well, the very next year, at the end of the year is when I lost my ride. So I’m a brand new believer. I’m like, okay, what do I do with this?

And there’s three things. Last night, I preached, we’ve got a bunch of Christian school here, Christians schools here right now. And you were there, but I preached 2 Peter 1, that ladder and progression of God’s promises to us. And there’s a point where you add to your faith godliness. And I define to those students, godliness is three things. And in walking through those three things, the second one, the middle one is that you learn how to suffer. The first one is willingness to submit.

Check.

When you become a believer, check. Got it. And the last one is to serve the Lord by serving his church and people. But the middle one is Prepare to suffer and be willing to suffer. And when you become a believer, one of the biggest lies that Satan, I think, tells people is, oh, finally, life is going to get better. Life is going to get easy. A lot of times it gets way harder. But in the difficulty, whether it’s suffering or persecution or trial or tribulation, you’ve got this stabilizing effect that the Lord brings to you that his strength is made perfect in your difficulty.

That’s right. And so for me, I mean, I was struggling more with identity of being that guy. I mean, the money side of it. Yeah, it bothered me. But, I mean, I raced several years, you know, as a single dude, I put money. I mean, what am I going to buy? I don’t have anything to do. I mean, I love to hunt and fish. I’m hanging out with my dad when I’m not racing, so. I was really struggling with people respecting me and, and having that view of being that high profile guy. And, and so, like, when that, when that was ripped away, and then I’m out with my hat in my hand trying to find rides, making deals with sponsors who had done me wrong, that was a tough time. And in the middle of that, as that, as that progressed, the guy who, like, In God’s mercy and grace, he put guys around me. He would help me. Kenny Crosswhite, he was doing Bible studies at Ray shops. And so I started going with him to these Bible studies. I just hang out. And then as I lost my career, that was kind of humiliating because the driver is the quarterback.

Everybody’s going to make sure he has his stuff, take care of him. He’s the main guy. He’s the, you know, everybody’s catering to you as a driver. Now I’m walking into these race shops, hanging out with guys back at the shop talking about Jesus, which is always a little awkward and weird, right? In a world that that’s not, like, it’s optional. You can miss your lunch and come go to Bible study with six or seven guys and talk about things. I think as I look back, the Lord was really uprooting in me what I was clinging to as far as an identity of people, the way people viewed me. And he was at work and all that. Of course, I couldn’t really see that. Then I was just frustrated and mad. And then I felt like I didn’t want to give up, and I felt like a failure in a lot of ways, but I didn’t want to compromise. By just signing with a team that was gonna do starting parks like I mentioned in the last episode. And so I was really wrestling through a lot of those things. And in the middle of that, just like it happened so many times, the Lord really, really grew me through that time and really rooted me.

And it wasn’t like I had an emotional experience and it was gonna wear off. Or I had a view that Jesus was good while things in my life were easy. But now it was like, okay, I’ve weathered some storms that God has brought me through. And now I’m in the word. I’ve got people, you know, Kenny’s teaching and working in my life. And so now I’m moving to like teaching some of the Bible studies. Working hands on with different race teams. And so the Lord began to just open up these opportunities and then to grow my desire for that. I mean, man, I love hunting, fishing and NASCAR. I didn’t care anything about reading books or making good grades in school. I wasn’t thinking about that sort of stuff. And so I didn’t really know how to study the Bible. You know, I didn’t know. And now I’ve got, I’m learning and growing in that and God’s growing me and I’m learning how to, I’m taking some classes online and just that’s where that’s driving me. And so through that, I don’t have any idea what the future holds and I’m still clean and I’m wanting to put together a big time race deal.

And then once that last team that I drove for that truck team, when they folded and went under, I said, all right, it’s about time to start figuring something out. I had a meeting, I was doing a lot of work with Roush Racing Back to, you know, that’s one thing I’ve learned in my life. And you always be careful about how you treat people because you may be back working with them again or you may be in some type of work relationship. You know, I could have cussed everybody out at Roush Racing when they fired me for dropping that sponsor and I could have moved on, but I would have lost a lot of opportunity. And they were really nice to me to bring me back on. That crew chief liked me, Todd Parrott liked me so much. I’m sorry, Brad liked me so much that they brought me in to do a bunch of work with Carl Edwards’ team when he would be gone or they needed testing and they needed, I needed a paycheck. And so they brought me in and we had a meeting with Jack Roush and Carl Edwards told Jack Roush, said, you need to give this guy an opportunity.

He’s got a lot of potential people haven’t seen. He’s not been able to showcase his talent and you need to give him an opportunity. Jack Roush looked at me, looked me up and down and said, he’s too old.

How old were you at this point? 33.

He’s too old. So I took that was all right. I’m gonna start, I’m gonna go down some different paths. I’m gonna explore other paths. And for the first time I felt like I was okay with that. But it was hard to sleep at night. It was hard to, you know, you work so hard and you have a dream for something.

Since you’re 15.

Yeah. And it blows up in your face and, hey, I mean, well, it feels.

Like it blows up in your face. But we know now looking back, you had an amazing career. You know, what a crazy journey and story. But it was a few chapters in a bigger story. And I think that’s what people, people need to hear in your story is, Yeah, in that moment, if we can go into that moment in your story, literally your whole world has just disintegrated. That’s right. That’s right. But you had an amazing run for so many years. And now looking back, it’s God making, it’s not we’re changing the chapter, it’s the book that I’m reading my kids in the morning before school. Today we started part two. So every day we’ve done a chapter. But then there’s like this blank sheet, a new title page, it’s part two. This is not just, you’re going into a new chapter, this is, okay, we’re closing book one. We’re starting book two kind of thing. I mean, this is a major shift in your life.

Yeah, major shift. At this time, when in our marriage we have two kids, and so you’re trying to navigate that and trying to figure out what that looks like financially. What that looks like for long-term career stability. And so you’re just having to learn how to trust. All right. I’m gonna work. I’m gonna work my guts out. But I’m gonna trust.

And then so this is when you this when y’all started a hunting show.

That’s right.

Because your dad had done the fishing show forever.

Yes.

And it was still running.

Yeah, it’s still running today. He’s got one of the longest running television shows ever. And so it actually so as that really started happening I got really into TV on the TV side of racing I spent a year doing that. That’s when you’re okay and during that time we started the hunting show. Okay, so it’s kind of like a year lapse and that was cool my dad to do that he had the opportunity to do that and he’s looking at it from the opportunity He’s got a lot of leverage from a fan base from his fishing industry. Yeah, he can hang out with his two boys and do stuff he likes to do and we can sell Commuteer and other products and Swacker Broadheads. We can do all of that stuff, but we can do it together as a family.

Yeah.

And it was fun.

I remember when I discovered that show, I was kind of burnt out on that TV outdoor programming, ’cause it was either big name product people, like the Realtree guys, or celebrity stuff, Or it was these little upstart shows that you would see on those outdoor type channels. But you didn’t know who these guys were and they were trying really hard to have a personality that fit a niche in the industry. And I’m like, oh, Hank Parker, I used to watch him fish. I didn’t know he hunted too, but it makes sense. And I remember starting to watch the show. Yeah, it just makes sense. But for him, He’s getting to, I mean, what a dream. To get to do something you love, film it, do it with your boys.

Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was really, really cool.

What was the first episode? You remember? Yeah. Was it turkey hunt? It was probably whitetail hunt.

It was a whitetail hunt.

That’s the bread and butter of outdoor programming.

That’s right.

Whitetail hunt.

That’s right. It was a deer hunt in Texas. First one. And we kind of did a hodgepodge of kind of explaining who we were.

Were you so excited on that hunt?

Yeah. Yeah. So, but I’ve, I mean, I’ve always hunted with my dad. I’ve always gone to all these hunts, and he’s, he was always been really big into it. That’s how, you know, obviously broken time. NASCAR, you know, Diller had a lease together in Texas, and he would come down to our farm in South Carolina.

But, I mean, to that first time, you’re going, okay. I’ve hunted forever. Did the race thing. New chapter in life. We’re doing it. We’re stepping into this new world of we’re filming the hunt.

Yeah. I was so focused on trying not to talk like just to be myself, just relax, not try to fit a mold like you were saying. It’s so easy to try to find a niche or try to copy someone else, you gotta, and so I was really, really focused on that. And at that point, you know, it’s kind of like, all right, let’s make this happen. And you had your eyes on a lot of different things to, the things that make it happen, obviously, you know, sponsorships, air time, and, you know, our product sales and things like that. So you’re pretty, you’re so busy, but it was, it was, it was really cool just to hang out, you know, and you always have those moments where, on a hunt where you get to overcome some things, and it really kind of sets you up to, to, to drive for success. So, like, we shoot a deer, we can’t find it, and then you find it, and it’s like, oh, my goodness, that was such, that was so cool. You know, I I wanted it to be easy, but the fact that it was hard or it rained and we were sleeping in tents and everything we had got wet, just looking back, you’re like, oh, yeah, that was awesome.

And I wanted I want to share that experience and what drove the ideas that I wanted to see in our hunting show was the relationships that you have with people and how that works. And so it’s all about people. I mean, you share hunting camp. I’ve shot a deer 10 years ago. I barely remember it, but I remember hanging out in camp with all those five guys and all the funny stories and staying up late and laughing and just hunting together. So that’s what we really wanted to highlight. We want to really highlight what that looks like. And the dynamic of that.

So cool. And into that last episode, we were talking about your dad getting into some product. So I got to tell my first story about using a Parker.

Oh, no.

A Parker licensed product.

Okay.

So I was so, okay, the in the last episode we referenced, we went on a hunt together. You know, we’d gotten to know each other a little bit and then just a little bit and came up. We want we did turkey hunt. Well, y’all shoot swacker broadheads.

That’s right.

And a broadhead, for those of you that are not outdoorsmen, outdoors women, not hunters, the broadhead is think of like on an old bow and arrow, medieval or, or Native American, the The arrowhead, like an arrowhead, what’s that made out of? That’s the tip of the arrow that goes, you know, the cutting edge that goes into the animal. And in modern archery, that’s a big competitive market. Broadheads, a big competitive market. And they’re called broadheads. They’re not called arrowheads. And Swacker is a brand of broadhead that y’all, same deal, Come Here Deer and Swacker, y’all, your dad was kind of involved in both of those.

That’s right.

So I was on a hunt in Ohio and I shot a deer and the deer, no broadhead would have killed this deer because just as I released, I mean it was the worst possible timing. The deer spooked and spun around and the arrow literally, if he would have waited a half of a tenth of a split second, I wouldn’t have pulled the trigger, but I punched the air out as he’s spooking and turning. And he was spooking because a doe, I didn’t know he had a doe, he was following a doe. And she’s about to bring him right by me. I didn’t know there was another doe behind me. And she was watching me draw on him. He never saw me. And all of a sudden, she boogered and took off. She took off right as I squeezed the trigger. He wheels to go running off with this doe. This other dough. Well, my arrow goes in, like, behind his shoulder, but parallel to his body. So you want the arrow to go in perpendicular to the body so that it goes through both lungs. Mine went in exactly parallel, and it just tucked right up behind his shoulder.

Well, it never hit a lung. It didn’t hit any vitals. It’s a flesh wound. And so I called Jim, like, I remember calling you from the stand. I was like, all right, man, I don’t know what to do here. This deer wheeled. I’m pretty sure at the shot angle, the deer probably. Hitting dead. But anyway, we. So now you’re, you’re looking, this is a great opportunity to promote your Broadhead.

You know, so you’re like, it’s the Broadhead, Shameless Salesman.

So you gave me some, you gave me some swackers. Well, next year I’m up there in Ohio hunting, and, and you had told me, you said, the thing that I love about these swackers is if you make a bad shot, you don’t ever want to make a bad shot, but it happened.

Yeah.

And if you hit a deer back, which means if you hit it back, it means you hit it behind the lungs, which means the stomach or the liver, you’ve gotten into an area that is a slower death and it’s not a quick lethal kill. And you said, but it’s such a wide cut that if you if you hit it back, you’re still going to put that deer down right quicker than something else. So we’re I’m hunting, I’m in the stand and I shoot this deer and I hit it back. Just bad shot. I mean by three inches. I’m just off and it was some deer moving around the brush. Anyway, it was too far of a shot. It was a really long shot with a bow. Hit the deer back and the deer walks about 10 steps and lays down and it’s dead in about four minutes. Normally you want them dead in four seconds.

Yeah.

20 seconds.

You don’t want to be tracking all night long. Oh, not.

And I watched that deer die and I was like, dang, swaggers are pretty good. Since then, speaking of medieval.

Yeah, since then you’ve gone medieval with them.

Since then, I don’t know how many, how many picture, how many blood trails have I sent you videos of?

Lots. Lots. You know, it’s fun. I mean, I’ve, I’ve grown up hunting and I’ve loved to hunt and I can remember. Seeing releases for the first time. I remember when rangefinders came out. I mean, I shot the old Razorback fives. And the reason we shot Swacker broadheads is we’d been on several hunts. We’d lost some deer. And, you know, back in the day when I first started, you know, in the late 80s, early 90s, you get, you recover 50% of your deer and you’re doing pretty good.

50%. That’s exactly right.

Yeah, you’re a pretty good.

Hunters don’t realize that.

That’s right. And we went to Swacker Broadheads and they started, we started finding all of them. We’re like, whoa, wait a minute. And that’s, you know, we just believed in it. And we were wanting to make a big order to keep enough of them just in case something went south. And they were gonna, they were talking about going out of business. My dad got involved. My dad’s really good at marketing and sales. And, but he’s a bow hunter and he’s like, I don’t want to lose these broadheads. So guys like yourself get that. And that’s fun to share that experience with them.

Yeah, because, and that sounds terrible to say, we used to lose 50% of our deer, but I remember one time I’d been bow hunting about 15 years. I started bow hunting, my first year bow hunting was the fall of 1991. Okay. So I’m, now this is my 32nd fall bow hunting.

That’s awesome.

And I remember about probably 15 years in. Doing a tally and going, you know, I lose about 50% of my deer. I’d shot an eight point buck and I blood trailed him and it was a good shot. Like, I know it hit his front lung. He was walking, he was in stride, he was quartering to me and I shot and I hit the back of the front lung and then probably punched through the liver. Yeah, we blood trailed that deer and he got into a river across the river and I just, we just lost it.

I lost him.

And I walked that river the next day, couldn’t find him. And it was a fixed blade broadhead that didn’t have a real wide cut in diameter. And I just, there wasn’t enough blood to suit me. I was like that because again, for those of you that aren’t hunters, the way you recover game is you blood trail them. It’s not like in the movies where somebody shoots something and it falls over dead.

Yeah.

You shoot something even with a big magnum rifle, a lot of times it’s running off. That’s right. Now, if you shoot with the rifle, if you shoot, this is another conversation, if you shoot. A deer high shoulder and hit that spinal cluster like it is dead in the tracks it’s standing in.

That’s right.

Most people are taught to shoot at the shoulder or behind the shoulder. Well, that’s an archery thing. Archery, you want to shoot, slip it right in the crease behind the shoulder because you’ll punch both lungs.

That’s right.

A double lung shot deer is dead lethal within a few seconds. Maybe 50 yards. The farthest I’ve ever seen a double lung hit deer run would be 80 yards. Right. And they’re dead on their feet. This muscle memory.

Adrenaline.

They’re just running on a burst of adrenaline and then till whatever’s being pumped through their body.

That’s right.

Is gone, you know? And it’s like a couple heartbeats. And so then I remember going, when I lost that nice eight point buck, and I was spun out about it.

Yeah, it makes you sick.

It’s the first buck I’d ever shot with the bow. I’d killed at that point. Half a dozen does, maybe. And I shoot this buck. I’m like, my first bow kill. I’d killed some decent bucks with a rifle, but it’s so bummed.

It’s hard to swallow. It is.

And. And I was going, am I doing something wrong? No, I hit that deer behind the shoulder. Well, I. I don’t know. We were joking about a while ago. I’ve killed a lot of deer with a swacker broad. A lot.

People that know you can see, can visualize what your eyes look like right now. Touch of crazy in them.

There’s a little bit of crazy. I killed ten deer with the bow one year, about three years.

Oh, be careful. But different states, right?

Yeah. So I killed in North Carolina, you get six tags. I killed four with the bow.

That’s cool. Yeah.

And in Ohio, I killed a buck and a doe. Maybe two does, a buck and a doe. So I had one of each tag there, or six. And then I went to Alabama and down there it’s a real, the area I hunts were very liberal.

Yeah.

And I killed four or five down there. And we ended up being killed 10 with swackers in my bow that year.

Learned a lot.

That’s dirt napping them right there now. That’s like a body count.

That’s a lot of food for the freezer. Yeah.

And you learn a lot. I read one time, a guy said, The best way to get good at killing deer is killing deer.

That’s right.

You know, you can practice on that target and you can shoot. And I remember, you know, getting to where, you know, practicing at 100 yards is, is a consistent part of my routine.

Yeah.

Now, wouldn’t shoot a deer at 100 yards, but I’m, I’m shooting foam at that, but at 20 yards on a deer, it helps you. But there’s so many variables that have to go right. That thing like the one I shot. Yeah, I was talking about earlier that, It twisted at the last second and it went into the shoulder pocket. That deer was like 21 yards from me. That’s a close shot. So I’ve learned killing deer, I’ll kill deer sometimes. I go in, me and my brother-in-law, Mike Wilson, we call them kill days. Today’s a kill day. I’m gonna go kill something. In other days it’s like today’s a trophy day. If it ain’t a big trophy, I’m gonna let ’em go. And you watch ’em go by.

There’s probably more kill days for you.

A lot of kill days for me.

That’s all. I love it. That’s awesome.

We got kill these hogs. Yeah, we got we’ve got a gang of hogs rooting around on the new swoop property. We ain’t standing for that.

No, sir.

It’s bacon time.

We’re gonna have some fresh bacon at Be Strong. How’s that?

We got to this point on the hunt. We’re talking about hunting. Where you’re transitioning out of NASCAR, you transitioned more fully into the outdoor industry.

Right.

You’ve been married at that point and had a couple kids. When I met you, how old’s Cade?

Cade’s 11.

When I met you, he was a newborn.

He was a newborn baby. That’s right. Yeah. So.

At that point, you were a couple years into the TV industry. Let’s pick that up. We’re getting into outdoor programming. Yeah.

So, you know, walking outside of, walking away from my racing career, I think we walked through that pretty good kind of where, where my head was. So with TV, my dad is, you know, obviously in the outdoor world, very well known, has very much established himself. He loves to hunt. So we do, we’re doing this hunting show, man. It’s going really good. And the whole time through this, I’m trying, I’m working at growing. And my walk with the Lord and trying to read and study and grasp deeper concepts and be able to articulate better. And so as I was going through that, I came up here, the way we met, I came up here with a group of buddies to a Be Strong event. And it was, I had a good time. First time I’d ever been to anything like that, was really challenged, really convicted in some ways. To just lead my family well and to just to be faithful. And so as we’re doing this hunting show, things are, it doesn’t matter what you do. We were kind of joking earlier today about someone said, do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.

How that’s such a fallacy, you know, you’re going to work. I mean, it’s just, do you enjoy the work or, but even if you love what you do, you’ve got to put, you’re going to be some sweat and some tears and some blood and you got to get after it. And that’s how that hunting show was. And I love to hunt as much as anyone. And so as we’re doing this show, trying to raise my family, things are going good. I come up here, we meet, and then you talk to me about getting on board as a board of director to come in from a marketing aspect. I’ve spent most of my life NASCAR, doing television things. I’ve not been formally educated in a university when it comes to marketing, but OJT for about 47 years. So I came up here and started sitting on the board and things were good. I really enjoyed the work here. I enjoyed the vision. The very defined and clear mission to proclaim the gospel through the exposition of Scripture and then alongside of that with personal relationships It really clicked with me because I didn’t feel like I was coming up to some kind of place where we’re gonna play a game or be gimmicky with particular things.

It’s something that you could put forth the word of God and trust that it’s gonna bring the results that God says it’s gonna bring. And I can get behind that. And so, man, I feel like.

I.

Just really enjoyed my time here. And so as we’re doing the hunting show, My dad, I mentioned in 1989 he won the Bass Masters Classic and decided to step down so he could be with his family. And I was on a hunting trip. We had been, I think I’d been in Iowa or Oklahoma somewhere. And I drove over and met my dad and my brother in Texas. And we went hunting at this really phenomenal place in Texas. To make a long story short, I’d been gone about 11 or 12 days. And I came home, my wife, you know, ready to pull her hair out. She’s dealing with little kids. Rightfully so. She’s been holding down the fort. And one of my kids, I can’t remember which one it was, kind of backtalked her mama. And at that point, I was like, okay, we need to have a serious heart to heart discussion. But I didn’t feel qualified. I felt like I’ve been gone for 12 days. I’ve been in front of my kids now for 25 minutes. And this has happened. And I remember just a wave of conviction that came over me with that.

And I really sought the Lord through praying and just getting some godly counsel from brothers and just thinking through.

What.

Was the best way to respond to that. And so I just sat down with my wife and looked at the hunting show. Things are going good. We’re not lighting the world on fire, but it’s solid. I get to go on hunting trips. I get to do what I love to do. We make a living at it. But I kind of took a step back and said, okay, 10 years from now, I’d really like to still be married. I’d like for my kids to like me and appreciate me. These are foundational and formative years. If I don’t invest now, I’ll lose that weight with them. And then when that time comes and you get to enjoy that fruit of a good relationship and really mentor into your kids in their teenage years, I’m going to have lost that. And so I made a tough decision to take a step back from the Hunt Show. And I called my dad and my brother and just said, Hey guys, look, I’ll be a part of the show, but I’m not going to travel like this. I can do certain things. We’ll have to set up parameters. And so I took a pretty big step back.

When I did that, I had to find other ways to support what I was doing, support myself and my family on my income primarily when I say support. So I started a production company with a good friend of mine, John Tate. And we started producing our television show, other television shows, and we started producing short form content for corporations and businesses. And we started doing some things like that to be able to grow our business so that So just so I could have it, you know, provide for my family.

Make a living.

Make a living.

Short form content is like those Lowe’s safety videos.

Yeah, a lot of Lowe’s videos, Duke Power videos, we’d make videos for churches. We did like all kinds of just really different stuff that’s way outside the realm of hunting or fishing. So we grew that business. And as I was growing that business, kind of back to what I was saying, you know, every job you have, you’re going to have to work. And I wanted to make a sacrifice to be with my family, whatever that looked like. I wanted to be a good husband to my wife. I wanted to be a good daddy to my kids. Because at the end of the day, money comes, money goes. You can figure out different income levels, but you can’t alter that you get one shot at this deal. And I didn’t want to waste it. So my passion in the middle of all this was really ministry oriented. I wanted to be involved in some way in gospel work. And so kind of through that time frame, I had a burden for, I’ve got a shoe in and a connection with guys who love to hunt and fish. They know me personally or not they want to talk to me about it because of my dad so I’ve got this opportunity and I live in this community where we don’t live very far from a lake There’s a lot of people who love to fish everybody knows who my dad is and so my wife and I started a deal to do father son father daughter catfishing tournaments and so we started putting these these events on and it would be a free event for the community you come in We had different catfish lakes, lots of great people helped us, but we would, most of the

time they would donate a catfish lake to us for a day. You come in, you fish, we’d have a dinner, Bass Pro Shops got involved, the North Carolina Department of Natural Resources got involved, a lot of people got involved and they’d come to BB shoots, casting contests, we had all kinds of stuff. And at the end we would share the gospel. And so for like seven or eight years we were doing this and I really enjoyed that and at that time Growing, I think you mentioned in the last episode, I was a lay elder at my church at Venture. And so, you know, I had this tug and I think a lot of guys who get on fire about Jesus and love to read the Bible, they get really fired up about that and they think, okay, maybe I’m supposed to be a preacher or maybe I’m supposed to be a missionary or whatever it may be, you may feel a different tug in it and I felt that angst kind of through that but it wasn’t really sure what to do with it. And so as I kind of settled in and got really comfortable about what I was doing in my production business, I saw all kinds of opportunities.

There was opportunities to talk about Jesus with corporate people and there was opportunities to talk about Jesus in videos that we did and there was all these different opportunities that was put before me. And you know quite frankly, I was in a pretty good place. I was comfortable. I enjoyed what I did and I was able to, you know, there was days that was harder than others just like everybody’s life. But I’d found a groove that worked. And in the middle of that groove, you know, through some shakeups of different things in my business, you know, I was doing some work here as a consultant at Snowbird. I was coming in and helping with the marketing team trying to figure out how do we get more people to come to conferences and retreats. Summer here at Snowbird, summer is full 15 minutes after registration is open. But there were some events that you guys were having that were having a hard time getting the word out, getting bookings. And so you guys brought me to consult and kind of take a look at your marketing department and see what we could do to enhance and make that better.

And, you know, it, it was just instantly pretty successful. We, we were able to work together as a team, you know, in a way that we saw direct results. And it was, it was fun.

Yeah.

And so the more that I did that, the more you guys obviously were asking me to do. And in the, I was, I was working on a big project for Lowe’s Home Improvement, and I talked to Matt Jones, and Matt Jones said, hey, what do you think about coming and working here full-time because, you know, Matt, Matt’s not afraid to ask a question. He’s gonna lay it out there. I was like, okay, that’s pretty bold. Yeah, I don’t know, man.

I remember the meeting when we decided to, you know, me and him kind of sitting around the cauldron shaking the 08 ball. All right, I’m gonna ask him. Let’s ask him.

Let’s see what happens. So I thought about it and I’m like, you know, that’d be pretty cool. There’s a fulfillment that’s hard to explain. Although I had found really a lot of unique ministry opportunity where I was at and enjoyed. We were running a Bible study at my house for teenagers, young teens, junior high age kids. That was going awesome. And a lot of cool stuff happening. So as I started to process this, guys are not naturally smart, so I had to kind of work through this, through some experiences. But I just put it before my wife, said, Here’s the deal. They’ve asked me to move up there. That’s a that’s a big deal. And for people that don’t really understand, if you think about, you know, I lived in a community where there was there was a Walmart, there was a Lowe’s, there was a CVS and more than one grocery store that had actual choices to move to the middle of nowhere, Andrews, North Carolina. You lose a lot of that luxury.

It’s a remote mountain valley. It’s beautiful here. I mean, it’s unbelievable.

It’s just different.

You ain’t gonna run to Starbucks or Target.

No, you can. Target’s an all-day trip.

That’s, you know, you gotta plan a day for it.

Yep. And that’s cool.

People can’t believe that.

Yeah.

A lot of times.

I love that, by the way. But, hey.

Yeah, buddy.

So I put this before my wife and my wife, the cool thing is, you know, when I came to faith, when God saved me and I started going to that Bible study and God got a hold of her heart, we’ve been, really in tune and in track with that same kind of drive and desire. There’s not anything that I feel like that I’ve done ministry wise that she hasn’t been right there, a part of doing, like the whole time that I was at Venture, she’s teaching kids Bible studies and very involved. And so together we’re working for that same common goal. And so she had a love for Snowbird as well. And so I just later before, hey, what do you think we should do? I’ll give you, take a couple weeks, think about it, let me know, no pressure. Heck, I move on, I go back to work and I really am not thinking that much about it. About three or four days later, she calls me, she’s like, We’re moving to Snowbird. I was like, okay, now, before you jump on board with this and jump off the diving board into the deep end, let’s talk about it.

You know, we’ve got a daughter that’s going to be a senior in high school. We’ve got this, we’ve got that. This is going to be massive. This is going to be, you know what? And so, like, even as I say that now, I think about people that pack up and go to the mission field. I mean, it’s really not, but you kind of want to prepare for hope for the best and prepare for the worst. So I kind of set her up for that and she’s she’s set her face like Flint and so we started the preparations to move house that we built together lived in for 15 years raised our kids in we sold that and we’ve moved up here to Snowbird and man it’s been such a huge blessing. It’s been awesome. It hasn’t been without its battles, you A lot of people don’t know all the backstory, but it’s like as soon as we move up here, we had obstacle after obstacle, health issues, car wrecks, two of my kids broke their arm on the same day, two weeks after moving here. It’s like crazy, crazy, crazy stuff. But in the middle of it, we have felt a peace about where God has us and the way that God is using me in this particular role here.

Like, you know, you come from a background where you’re a race car driver or people recognize something about you and they want to put you on a pedestal and put you in a place where you’re automatically a person that’s in authority or the top dog and you get the spotlight and all that stuff. And so I come in here and I assimilate right into the group. I have position here, but I’m not the guy up on the stage speaking. I’m right where God wants me to be doing the things that I think that he has through my whole life prepared and equipped me for and is growing me in. I’m certainly not all the way there, but it’s really cool to get behind something that’s not about a personality like Brody Holloway or another personality, but we’re all on task for the mission of making the gospel known So that people, specifically junior high, high school students, married couples, men and women come to know and follow Jesus and grow in their faith. I can’t imagine, can’t imagine the impact that this ministry has on so many lives with the clear mission to exposit scripture well and to allow God to do his work.

What kind of effect that would have had in my life earlier, what that kind of effect that currently has on a lot of families and Man, it’s, it’s, if, if I ride off into the sunset and this is it, this is going to be a highlight. This is kind of back where Tim Fiedorek told me a long time ago, these are the good old days.

Yeah.

I’m getting to do this every day. And so that’s kind of how, that’s kind of how I got here.

The, a couple things that I thought about when you’re walking through it. Um, well, one, For people to understand how our board works, what we’ve tried to do is we’ve tried to put together a board of directors where each person on that board brings an area of expertise that’s gonna help guide Snowbird, the big machine. So for instance, we’ve got a pastor on the board who was a student pastor and a worship pastor, now he’s a senior pastor. So he gets all perspectives of pastoral ministry. He knows what it’s like to be a student pastor trying to raise funds to come to camp. He knows what it’s like to be a senior pastor and to try to put wind in the sails of a student pastor. So he brings the ministry, the local church, he’s super valuable because of, like when we’re in a board meeting, he can speak to where our average pastor, youth pastor is coming from. We got a guy who’s a commercial real estate guy, that’s his thing, and he’s big time. Big land deals, condo complexes, high rises, stuff like that. We got a guy who’s in commercial construction, hospitals, dorms, big universities, I mean, major construction.

Those guys bring, we’re doing all this land acquisition over the last three years, That board member that’s commercial real estate, he’s invaluable. He becomes the point man on all that stuff. We’ve got a board member, one of your best friends in the world, who Blake is like, he understands the personnel side of like at the end of the day, dollars and cents in a corporation, he works in the corporate world. But he knows, hey, we got, you know, this company has 2000 employees. We, we’re not going to be profitable until we have 1700. He knows how to cut 300 jobs and cut the right ones. And, I mean, that’s a valuable dude to have at the table. And so, you know, we got a guy that’s, that has pioneered online, online wholesale or retail, online retail for the likes of galleons filled in stream. Academy Sports, Gap, Athleta, the women’s brand for Gap. So he understands online sales and retail. Everybody on the board brings something to the table. Well, we were in a position at the time where I approached you and said, Hey, will you come on the board where we needed to go to the next step, the next level as far as our marketing, our media because Mark, in this day and time, marketing and media run that they’re together.

Yeah, because everything’s done through, everybody’s got a phone in their hands. So social media and commercials and apps and the way all that stitches together. And so you came to that chair, you came to the table and sat at that chair of marketing and media. I mean, the way the Lord had prepared you for that is crazy. Yeah. Because just like that Pastor that’s on the board had been a youth pastor, so he gets that. He’d been a senior pastor, so he gets that.

That.

That is super valuable. Well, you had been on the competitive side of professional sports. Nothing is more competitive than being a professional athlete, but. Ding, ding, ding, as Kahne used to say. The bell goes off. The most marketing driven sport in all of sports is NASCAR.

You better remember your sponsors at the end of the race, ’cause you’re gonna have a laundry list to go to.

That’s right. That guy gets up there and he goes, I want to thank Coca-Cola and Nabisco and Levi Garrett chewing the bark and Goodyear tires and 76 racing fuel. And he’s going down through there and you’re like, oh my gosh, what is this dude doing? And you’re like, they’re writing a check.

Yeah.

He’s making money. And then you look at the car, I remember being so mad, I was in about the seventh grade and I bought a Dale Earnhardt Wrangler. You know, when he was driving the Wrangler, I bought that car and I put it together. And then I remember looking at a poster and I realized it don’t have all the stickers on it. The model car didn’t have all of the sponsorship stickers. It just had the big ones. And it’s because there’s no way they could make all those little stickers. But you look at the side of a race car and there’s about 50.

It gets a little confusing. It does.

So you come into, so you come from a marketing standpoint. They don’t do that in the NFL. The NFL is its brand. Nike and Reebok and Adidas are fighting for the NFL contract. Right.

That’s right.

They don’t, you know, there’s sure there’s airtime, Super Bowl commercials are big, but as far as, it’s different. NASCAR is driven by the marketing machine. You don’t have a team like even you’re talking about, when you lost your ride that that year right after the homestead race. It was a marketing thing. It was a they took a hit. GNC took a hit.

I’m sorry. You’re out.

We can’t we can’t pay for your race team. Oh, well, then who can pay for it? Good luck.

Yeah, that’s right.

We’re gonna call Apple, Nike, you know, like this is a niche world of so you bring such a I don’t think people can fully appreciate I don’t think people in this organization can appreciate what where you come from because we were talking the other day and There was a video floating around because we’re doing all this. We were doing all of this this coming weekend as we’re dropping this episode. This coming weekend is the memorial service for Big Kahuna, which by the way, I’m gonna talk, I talked about it in the intro. I’m gonna talk about it again in the outro, but want everybody that can to come attend. We’d love to have you. And you’re welcome to stay on site here at Swoon in one of the cabins. Either, either night or both nights, the memorial service will be on Saturday. But anyway, I was talking to a group of staff. There was a video where I think two or three of us are guiding boats down the river. We used to guide a boat down the river every day. Led mountain bike trips. Every wreck we do here, I used to run that wreck.

Well, I haven’t run a wreck in seven years, eight years. So even our Even our full time staff that are not older than about 30 years old, they don’t know that side of Snowbird. So like, wait, you used to you. I saw a picture of you guiding. I was like, I’ll guide circles around you. You’ve been guiding two years. I got it for 12 years. I guided the New River in West Virginia. I guided the Ocoee. I guided class five whitewater. And when we’d run As soon as camp ended, I’d work full time as a river guide. But they don’t know that side.

That’s right. They know you.

It’s the same thing. Like Hank, oh Hank, he’s an executive and they’ll even confuse it. They’ll say, He’s a director. Well, you’re not a director. We have a team of directors. You’re not a director. You’re on the board of directors and it even gets confusing in-house. They don’t understand. What a competitive world from the marketing standpoint.

Well, what I love about that is, My past and what really gets me excited, people ask me, Do you miss racing? Would you like to go back and race? Well, sure, that’d be fun. Be awesome to collect one of those paychecks. All that stuff would be cool. There’s a few races I’d love to go back and run, but that’s gone and over and I’m old and whatever. But what I miss most is my team. I miss those guys. We would sit in a meeting and we would come up with ways to get better. And I mean sometimes it was heated and we pushed each other and we strove and we wanted to win and at the end of the day we patted each other on the back and that’s what I like about here.

We do that.

Do what you take. You might be leading a trip down the river. I don’t know, you’re crazy. You know, like we were crazy hours here, but it’s like everybody’s all in and if at the end of the day, I don’t care about the title, I don’t care about whatever the egos stuff, you know, I’m past all that. I’ve, you know, I’m at a place in my life where that, you know, one day when I was younger, maybe that would have been very appealing to me. But what I care about is being on a team that’s sold out for the, the making the glory of Jesus known as far and wide as possible. And that’s the team that I’m on here. And that’s, that’s pretty encouraging and exciting every day to wake up and go do that. I put my boots on every day.

Because we’re doing it.

Let’s go do it.

We’re doing it. We’re doing it, man. It grew about 13% in COVID.

It’s crazy. It’s nuts. Yeah, the first time, I mean, that’s a really good example. The first time we had a meeting in COVID, you stood up and said, I don’t care what we have to do, we’re going to figure it out and we’re not going to stop. And, you know, right when you first, I mean, I agreed with you when you first said it, but I was kind of like, God, this He’s a little crazy, maybe being a little bit ambitious here. And then as we kept going, man, it was just bigger for the fight, you know? And so it wasn’t like we want to be irresponsible. It isn’t like we didn’t follow rules. It wasn’t like we wanted to be reckless and stupid and didn’t care about people. But at the end of the day, we’re not going to live our lives controlled by fear. We’re going to live our lives in a way that we understand what our calling and our mission is and whatever it, we even talked about one time, I don’t know if you remember this, Hey, if we got to split up and go to churches and stand out in the field and do it, we’re going to do it, whatever it takes.

So it wasn’t about being reckless, it was about laying our lives down and doing the work that it takes to make it happen.

Yeah.

I mean, it’s- yeah, ’cause the big picture- It’s good stuff.

It is, man. And a big part of that was we can’t do this if the health department wants to shut us down, they can. So it’s not, hey, we’re going to do it by now, it don’t matter what anybody says, we’re doing it. Well, no, it’s not that simple. That sounds great. We’re going to do it and we’re going to do it with the blessing of the state. We’re going to do it right and we’re not going to get shut down and our insurance company is still going to cover us. And that’s what we’re going to do. And we did it. We did it. We can look back now two and a half years later and go, we did it. And not only did we do it, but the insurance companies coming in saying, hey, can we recommend the way you guys operate to other camps that we cover? We’ve become not just an authoritative, like, like, like two of our guys were at a large denominational camp last week running a conference, speaking and leading worship at a conference. And that camp is, has a lot bigger budget than we got. And they got, but they’ve got, they’re subsidized.

They got a bunch of money coming in. I don’t know a bunch of money, but I know that, I know they’re supported by their state, the denomination in that state. And they said, we want to be like you guys. What do we basically? How do we become more like y’all? Because we talked, we met with people at the state level. We did what it took and that’s a mentality that you came here equipped with already is what I’m getting at. A lot of people, you take some of the directors here, some of the managers, they’ve grown up in this ministry, so it’s ingrained in them.

That’s right.

They don’t know anything else.

That’s right.

But, but, but what’s harder is people that transition in here and they can’t handle it because it’s a, it’s a pressure. We don’t, like you said, is Holloway crazy? I don’t know. I don’t know. But he don’t, you know, and it’s like, we’re gonna do it. We’re gonna, we’re gonna do it. We’re gonna keep doing it. We’re gonna keep growing. And we, and we, and everybody here has got to be, Don’t care who gets the glory.

That’s right.

Jesus gets the glory.

That’s right.

Nobody cares what they’re, there are people that come in here and struggle because they want a title. They want some, they want some status. I want to get up front on stage or I want to do this. I’m like, okay, then you’re not getting on stage.

Yeah.

Yeah. Like you’re not ready. We want people that are behind the scenes. It’s like, The duck in the water on top of the water, that dude’s just slowly cruising along and under the water, his feet are flapping 90 miles an hour. Yeah. And you just cruise along top and behind the scenes, we’re running 90 miles an hour and then we’re we’re doing what we do. That’s right. And you came in here already with a an, like an understanding, a professional level understanding of marketing. But and then a professional level understanding of media because you ran a production company But then you also understood what a whatever it takes mentality that’s why it synced up. That’s why it synced up when me and you went on turkey hunt the first time and I saw in you talk about crazy your psychotic when we’re trying to kill a turkey. Yeah, and I was like, oh, yeah, that’s my people. It’s like, okay, we’re good. We’re gonna be fine and now you didn’t like how we got to that church.

We had to ride a bicycle 800 miles.

Me and Hank got a, we got up at five, we got up 4 30, got up 4 30. Well we sat up and talked till two in the morning.

Oh yeah.

And then got up at 4 15, 4 30, out the door, had some mountain bikes loaded, went behind the Forest Service gate and we knew if we get on bikes we could get there faster and quicker and these were not electronic or electric bikes. These were pedal on mountain bikes on.

The side of a mountain.

We went up a switchbacks on the side of a mountain. It was steep. That’s a ravine. That’s a gorge. We got way out there and we killed a bird. Almost.

Second one made it happen.

And at one point, we’re dangling off the side of a cliff.

Yeah.

And literally feet dangling off, trying to shoot a bird.

But.

But after that, that’s the thing, though, man, you had. You spend a day with somebody and, you know, yeah. Like me and this guy. Yeah, we’re on the same team.

We’re.

And likewise, I spent some time with people and I go, oh, we’re not on the same team.

Yeah. It makes it hard. And, you know, we talk about, we talk about how the Lord used this ministry pre, during and post covid and what that all looks like. And that’s the one thing that drives me back here. There’s, there’s such There’s such an honor held to the authority of God’s scripture. This ministry I believe is going to continue to move forward. We’re going to continue to do things, but we’re going to have to continue to do that relying on God’s grace and allowing him to lead through all of this by not giving into cultural whims and different things that are going to come down our path, but just staying true to what the Lord has called us to. By his grace, we’ll continue to stand firm in that. And that’s something you can hang your hat on that. That’s long-term stuff. I’m raising my kids and I’ve got a son that’s 15 and a son that’s 11. I’ve got three daughters as well. But my two boys coming up here, hanging out in the creek all day long, fishing, trout fishing, sitting in services, being around guys like you. So they’re hearing it from me, but it’s being reinforced.

Man, this is all the things that people would look at in my life. My dad, my racing career, all the things that I’ve gotten to do. This is just as big, if not bigger, than all of it. It’s such a blessing to be a part of it. And so as we go forward, I’m excited about what the future holds. I’m excited about my part in it. I’m excited about seeing younger generations come up and what this ministry will look like 10, 15, 20 years from now. And I think that by God’s grace, we’re gonna continue to stand firm in our core values and our mission statement that we’re gonna proclaim the good news of Jesus and we’re not gonna waver from that. And you’ll continue to bless that as we go.

Yeah, the truck. Truck, man, it’s just crazy to think what’s happened in 25 years. And right now we’re at the hardest, fastest momentum we’ve ever been at. What’s gonna happen in the next 25? The Lord only knows, but I’ll tell you this, the core values are solid, the mission statement’s solid, and so we’re not gonna change.

Right. And he’s faithful.

And the Lord’s faithful. He’s carved this thing out, he’s got a plan for Snowbird. Now we just need some sugar daddies. Come here and start dropping millions. Develop that new property. We need some big NASCAR sponsors.

That’s what I was about to say. We should start going to more races.

We need the Bisco and we need GNC and the Bisco and shoot, we’ll take a beer sponsor. We’ll take Budweiser. Y’all come on down here. Winston Cup cigarettes. They’ll come down here and sponsor a lake for snow.

It might be a hard sale.

It might be a hard sale. Oh, man. It’s exciting. Well, thanks for coming on. Let’s try to kill something in the next 48 hours.

Absolutely. I’ve got a pack of Swacker broadheads just with your name on it ready to be used. You’re the only guy I know that recycles broadheads.

Shoot, I take them apart, sharpen the blades, oil the little hinge pin, put it all back together and kill another one with it.

I’ll have to get you some more.

Last year I ran out of swackers and y’all were, y’all had just moved and stuff was all packed up. Be like, I’ll get you some. And you did, but I’m like, I got, I got, I’d shot like, I shot up eight swackers a year before I was out, you know? So I went and I bought some, I don’t know what there was some, I did the research, made sure it was a reputable broadhead, you know, and bought them. Killed a few deer with them and then you got me. Got me some swackers.

Got your back. Ready to go. Yep. Ready to roll.

Kill them all. I tell you what else, though. I like shooting them with them swackers, but I like shooting them with that seven mag, too. Hogs, deer, bear, elk.

All of it.

We’re equal opportunity big game killers.

Yes, we are.

And consumers because I like to eat it.

I like to eat it too.

All right, man. Thanks.

Thank you.

Well, thank you all for listening. Trust that was an encouragement to you. One thing that I think just understanding how we work, we talked a lot in that conversation about the board of directors. The board of directors is eight, there’s eight seats on the board of directors. And three of the board members are me, Hank and Matt Jones, AKA mugs. And we are the, the three of us make up the executive team at snowboard Outfitters. So we are board members and we are snowboard Executives and each with a corny title, whatever. Got to do all that stuff. But each of us, just with a different area of how we lead the ministry and, and do, do it together, do it in partnership. And, and Hank specifically oversees Media, marketing, that involves Snack Shack sales. So Snack Shack manager, store manager, is on Hanks team. Registration and booking, that front office, that crew, they’re on Hanks team. Programming guys, they’re on Hanks team. Mugs, Matt Jones, oversees the operations side. So food service, transportation, construction, maintenance. Those guys are on Muggs team. But that’s what Hank does here. He’s an incredible friend, a huge blessing to my family and has been an incredible gift to this ministry.

And I love him, appreciate him as a brother, love his family. And I hope you get to meet him next time you come up. And if you’ve never been, go ahead and start making plans. We’ll see you soon at Snowbird Wilderness Outfitters at an event this year. It’d be awesome. And thank you again for your support, for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Thanks for listening to no Sanity Required. Please take a moment to subscribe and leave a rating. It really helps. Visit us@SWOutfitters.com to see all of our programming and resources. And we’ll see you next week on no Sanity Required.

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