‘The Last American Hero’ is must-watch TV for fans of racing, writing
Fifty years ago, a wool-suited writer journeyed to North Wilkesboro to profile a local racing legend, and in so doing transformed both the sport of racing and the art of journalism.
Esquire magazine sent Tom Wolfe to sift through the lore that surrounded bootlegger/driver Junior Johnson, and the story that Wolfe brought back, “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson! Yes!” remains one of the most remarkable stories of the 20th century. That story, along with the culture that surrounded it and the two men at the center of it, is the centerpiece of a highly recommended new short film premiering Wednesday night on FS1’s Race Hub.
It’s tough to appreciate now how revolutionary Wolfe’s story —which you can read in full right here—was in both its subject matter and its form. But Wolfe’s story barreled into the staid New York literary scene like a hot rod into a garden party. Here’s one particularly fiery passage, about Johnson’s driving style:
It was Junior Johnson specifically … who was famous for the “bootleg turn” or “about-face,” in which, if the Alcohol Tax agents had a roadblock up for you or were too close behind, you threw the car into second gear, cocked the wheel, stepped on the accelerator and made the car’s rear end skid around in a complete 180-degree arc, a complete about-face, and tore on back up the road exactly the way you came from. God! The Alcohol Tax agents used to burn over Junior Johnson. Practically every good old boy in town in Wilkesboro, the county seat, got to know the agents by sight in a very short time. They would rag them practically to their faces on the subject of Junior Johnson, so that it got to be an obsession. Finally, one night they had Junior trapped on the road up toward the bridge around Millersville, there’s no way out of there, they had the barricades up and they could hear this souped-up car roaring around the bend, and here it comes—but suddenly they can hear a siren and see a red light flashing in the grille, so they think it’s another agent, and boy, they run out like ants and pull those barrels and boards and sawhorses out of the way, and then—Ggghhzzzzzzzhhhhhhggggggzzzzzzzeeeeeong!—gawdam! there he goes again, it was him, Junior Johnson!, with a gawdam agent’s si-reen and a red light in his grille!
Detail, spectacle, kinetic fury…it’s all right there, and Wolfe captured his subject perfectly for the time. In the mid-1960s as now, the Eastern literary establishment looked upon the racing South as a barbarous, subliterate land, but Wolfe saw more: he saw the courage it took to strap yourself in behind the wheel of an automobile you’d built with your own hands, he saw how the automobile was a means of escape from a humdrum life, not just a means of transportation. His story catapulted racing in general and Johnson in particular into the national spotlight, and helped inspire an entirely new form of cinematic, colorful journalism that persists to this day.
The documentary, which premieres at 6:00 ET, crams an awful lot into its 30 minutes, but it’s well worth watching for every single segment, from the old racing footage to the reunion of Johnson and Wolfe earlier this year. It’s a reminder of how, in the right hands, every story can be a transformative one, and the drivers of old deserve special recognition for both their bravery and bravado.
“I’ve never been scared in a race car or any other kind of car because I thought I was good enough to handle it,” Johnson says, then pauses for effect. “And I was.”
“The Last American Hero” (FS1, 6:00 p.m. ET Wednesday) is absolute must-watch for fans of old-school NASCAR, great sportswriting, or American journalism. Don’t miss it.
____
Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at [email protected] or find him on Twitter.
And keep up with Jay over on Facebook, too.
