This is second in a series of promised posts about drivers I have rooted for in my attempt to understand why fans root for certain drivers and against others.

By the end of 1984, I was totally into auto racing, the way most 12-year-olds are into baseball or football. I watched like every race on ESPN (and there were a lot back then!) and I clipped articles from our local newspapers and USA Today and kept a scrapbook of every major racing series’ results.

I was still a Richard Petty fan, but I think, like a lot folks, I began to sense that a decline had begun with the King after the big 200th win. Plus, with dozens upon dozens of drivers in several major racing series (I’ll get into my Mario Andretti fandom later, promise), you could root for more than one driver. Couldn’t you? Well, in the winter of 1984-85, I totally bought into the hype that magazines like Stock Car Racing were selling that winter, and adopted, yes, Geoff Bodine. Why?

Well, one of the things Bodine had going for him in my mind was that he was from the northeast. Growing up in New England – and being very aware of that – I had adopted the Boston Red Sox and the New England Patriots as my teams. But, of course, one of the things that separates auto racing from other sports is that drivers and teams are not tied to a particular geographic location, at least in the same way that sports teams in the major sports – baseball, football, hockey, basketball – are. Sports fans generally pick allegiances based on the teams that are close to where they live or the college that they or a family member attended. There are important exceptions, but that’s the general rule. Racing is different.

Now, sure in Formula One, a lot of folks will root for the driver from their home country. Brits are cheering for Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (and Nigel Mansell before them), Spaniards for Fernando Alonso, Brazilians for Felipe Massa, etc. In the old CART days, Paul Tracy and Scott Goodyear attracted Canadian fans (although plenty of U.S. fans cheered them on, too), and for the various Villenueves, it was not only Canadians, but Quebecois, who saw Jacques and Gilles as the vessels of their hopes and dreams. But NASCAR in the 1980s was still very much a southern sport, and there were few drivers not from the American southeast – you had Bodine, Ron and Ken Bouchard, Tim Richmond, Dave Marcis, probably one or two I’m forgetting, but that was pretty much it. Things were a decade away from the big influx that would bring a steady stream of west coast drivers (Jeff Gordon, Kevin Harvick, Jimmie Johnson, Kurt Busch, Kyle Busch, Carl Edwards, et al.) and more midwesterners (first the Wallaces, the Mark Martin, then Alan Kulwicki, then Kenseth and Bowyer, et al.) to NASCAR. So, anyway, jumping onto the Bodine bandwagon had a whiff of supporting the “home team” to it.

Of course, then Bodine posted a big 0-fer in 1985. Finally, in 1986 he won the Daytona 500. He almost won it again in 1987 (but for a gallon or so of gas). But that was kind of the height of his career. He won races for Bud Moore and Junior Johnson after leaving Rick Hendrick, and then bought the Kulwicki team. It’s weird, his last Cup win (the 1996 Watkins Glen race) really sticks out in my mind.

Maybe it’s because in the mid-80s I had also adopted Billy Joel as my favorite singer, but I’ve always sort of equated Billy Joel and Geoff Bodine. Think about it – both grew up in New York State (one upstate and one on Long Island); both have similar shaped faces, with kinda sad eyes; both worked their tales off in the late 70s and early 80s to make it big (Bodine won Cup Rookie of the Year in 1982, Joel’s awesome album The Nylon Curtain was released in 1982), both were at the top of their game in the mid-1980s, and then each began a long, downward slide punctuated by car crashes and failed marriages.

When Bodine won Watkin’s Glen in 1996, it was a really jarring moment. He had won the race by good fuel strategy – pitting before a late yellow and remaining on the track when everyone else refueled – so it was a big surprise. And then, when he was in victory lane – his ex-wife Kathy wasn’t there and his current girlfriend was. Geoff looked older and wore an expression of surprise and gratitude. As he (and we all) might have guessed at the time, it was to be his last Cup race win.

For this race fan, seeing Geoff’s win, and seeing how he had changed, it was a small marker of the changes that transpired in my own life. Now in my mid-20s, I just finished my first year of graduate school. My parents’ divorce had finally become final earlier that year. I’d long since put away my Billy Joel in favor of R.E.M., Pearljam, and Dave Matthews. And now one of my first favorite driver was beginning the a long ride into the sunset.

At the time I imagined, subconsciously, that this must be what it feels like to grow up.