Issue date: August 13, 2000

In this article:
The end of his NFL career
Can Gibbs tame Tony Stewart?
Also this week:
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Drive. His coaching skills earned three Super Bowl rings -- but at a cost. Shift. Now, he's conquering a second sport, NASCAR, and this time his family's along for the ride.

The Joe Gibbs Way

By Dennis McCafferty

OUR TOP STAR, Bobby Labonte, 36, is a family man from Corpus Christi, Texas. He's a calculating driver. A seasoned technician. If he has an eccentricity, it's that he's a Weather Channel geek. He's driving harder and faster than NASCAR's very best stars. So nothing less than a championship will do.

Your up-and-comer, Tony Stewart, 29, is a simmering pot of racing-ignited passion. In 1999, he had the biggest rookie year ever. This year, he's gritted his teeth after a stumble of a start and has steadily climbed as a champion contender. He's so competitive he'd race shopping carts in a Wal-Mart parking lot. But he can be his own worst enemy. He's as likely to win big as he is to explode in a profanity-peppered tirade after losing.

If you're Joe Gibbs -- the football coaching legend-turned-NASCAR owner -- you don't wring your hands over this potent brew of fire and ice that represents your stake in racing. You chuckle. The conflicts and triumphs seem so familiar.

"Everything that has happened to me in football has happened to me here," Gibbs, 59, says in his gentle North Carolina drawl. "You have dramas going on in everyone's life. You have heartbreaks. You have great times. It takes just as much work to keep a good racing team together."

The former Washington Redskins coach is talking in Labonte's 18-wheeler that hauls the driver's #18 Interstate Batteries Pontiac to Dover, Del., or Daytona Beach, Fla. -- wherever the circuit goes -- and back again. Today, it's parked smack in the middle of Lowe's Motor Speedway in Concord, N.C. Tonight is The Winston, NASCAR's equivalent of baseball's All-Star Game. All the sport's elite are here: Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhardt and Dale Earnhardt Jr., and 1999 champion Dale Jarrett. Labonte is racing better than all of them. As Gibbs talks about their success, the walls rumble with the roar of 750-horsepower engines revving outside. But on this day, good fortune takes a bad turn. Before the evening is over, Stewart tumbles into a wreck with Gordon and two other drivers. Labonte tussles with mechanical problems. And, as if that weren't enough drama, a pedestrian bridge collapses, injuring 107 people and grabbing national headlines.

Welcome to Act II in the life of Joe Gibbs. He walked away from Act I in 1993 the most revered NFL coach of his time. Today, he's driving his way toward the top at the elite level of NASCAR racing. This month, with fans gearing up for two immensely popular upcoming races -- the Goracing.com 500 on Aug. 26 and the Southern 500 on Sept. 3 -- Gibbs could take big steps toward another championship. But in Act II, there's a twist: Gibbs is winning on his terms.

No more 100-hour weeks spent sleeping on office couches, away from his wife, Pat, and their two sons. His racing operation is a full-fledged family affair. Outside Gibbs' Huntersville, N.C., office, 2-year-old grandson Jackson sports a Labonte uniform over his overalls and plays with a toy Stewart car. Next door, Jackson's father and Gibbs' elder son, J.D., works quietly at his desk as president of his dad's racing operation. When he visited football practices, J.D. recalls, there were many days when his dad wouldn't even look at him -- much less engage in conversation -- because he was so intensely focused. "I missed a lot," Joe Gibbs confesses, watching Jackson play on the floor. "I could never do this in football. There would be coaches waiting on me with the game plans."

Not that he regrets that ride. Gibbs won three Super Bowls in just 10 years. More remarkably, he skillfully redefined each team as if he were overhauling one of his expensive race cars. No single Redskin championship team resembled the others; each won with different styles, quarterbacks and key supporting players. No other Super Bowl coach -- not Shula, Landry, Knoll or Lombardi -- accomplished that.

Gibbs' story is that of a profoundly decent man who mastered one exhaustively competitive sport and reinvented that winning formula in another. How rare is that? It would be like Phil Jackson quitting the Lakers only to emerge as an owner of thoroughbred horses favored for the Triple Crown. Perhaps more impressive, Gibbs has won in both sports with honor and commitment. His rivals admiringly call it the Joe Gibbs Way. It is not so much described as understood.

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By the end of his NFL career, Gibbs was nearly spent. Among type-A football coaches, he was a workaholic's workaholic. In the thick of the Iran-contra scandal, the man who lead Washington's team confessed he didn't know who Oliver North was. He'd take a helicopter to make it in time to watch J.D. play football at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.

Today, there is considerably more quality time, though Gibbs packs a lot into his day. He gives pep talks to sales staffers of sponsors who ante up millions to have Stewart and Labonte don their logos. After a race, he huddles with crews to discuss slicing seconds off pit stop time; it kills a team to take more than 17 seconds to change four tires and pump 22 gallons of fuel into a car. Each second could be worth 100 yards.

That pressure demands meticulous organization, Gibbs' strength. His "shop" is a $13 million complex in a pristine business park, complete with motion detector lighting. Outside, a robot mower cuts the lawn. Inside, like a well-organized biotechnology lab, experts in individual shop wings provide surgical attention to $35,000 engines.

"Joe Gibbs is so professional," says NASCAR star Dale Earnhardt Jr. "He uses the same technique as when he was a coach, with his preparation. It's making the Gibbs teams smarter as a whole."

The success Gibbs is having this year -- with the potential to represent the present and future of NASCAR championships -- has pumped even more excitement into an already thrilling year. Amid it all, Gibbs has remained all business. At The Winston, he looks very much as he did during his NFL run. Headphones on, he paces back and forth briskly, then settles, arms crossed. All that's missing is a clipboard.

And, for now, a victory. Labonte's neon-lime car finishes ninth. Stewart's multi-car crash provides the evening's TV highlight but leaves him in 15th place. "There were people getting hot," Gibbs says. "It's just a matter of talking things over."

With that, the night ends. Within weeks, Gibbs' fortunes turn for the better. Labonte remains at the top, and Stewart hits a hot stretch and rises sharply in the standings. He'll cross the finish line first in two major races on two consecutive weeks in June -- the MBNA Platinum 400 and the K mart 400 -- and emerge as the first Winston Cup driver to win a third at last month's thatlook.com 300 in New Hampshire.

It's the triumph and heartbreak that keep Gibbs in the game. Football players reach a summit, then say goodbye, only for another set of champions to emerge. Cars crash, then get rebuilt and put back on the track. A man steps from one world to another -- the gridiron to the track -- and sets standards in both.

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Can Gibbs tame Tony Stewart?

ON BREAK DURING THE WINSTON WEEKEND, Tony Stewart is using words you don't use in front of a Christian man like Gibbs. NASCAR is just one of Stewart's pursuits. He also owns a team that races in the Indy Racing League, an alternative circuit. Stewart's life is pretty much about things that go fast. After Winston practice, he marches to his trailer and turns up the volume on ESPN. The commentary about his Indy car is not kind. "Give me a [expletive deleted] break!" Stewart spews. "That was a piece-of-[expletive deleted] motor we had. We waved it off after two [expletive deleted] laps."

Stewart doesn't shy from a scuffle. He got into a shoving match this year with driver Robby Gordon. He complained about fans who invade his space, then was booed by 18,000 spectators. "Tony the Terror called a news conference Thursday," Nashville's Tennessean recently reported, "to deny that he's a jerk." One would think Stewart's explosive demeanor would clash with the storied Joe Gibbs Way. But it hasn't. Yet.

Gibbs has imparted a sense of leadership to his young racer. Says Stewart: "One thing I'm learning from Joe -- not to say I'm good at practicing it every week: If I keep a positive attitude, it keeps the team in a positive attitude. There are days when it's hard to do that." Gibbs' take: "In football, I had all kinds of characters. I talk to Tony about his temper. I talk with him about everything. Tony is young. I say, 'What can we learn from this?' [But] there's a lot at stake here, and you're going to have some explosions."

Photo by GREG FOSTER for USA WEEKEND