Jumping through hoops: Competition spurs Burton (NASCAR.com)
March 30, 2010
Jeff Burton with wife, Kim, and daughter, Pagie, before a race in Atlanta.
His favorite college basketball team is poised to complete a run at a national championship.
And make no mistake, driver Jeff Burton is a passionate fan of Duke basketball. But that’s not all that consumes him in his life away from the race. During a break between raindrops at Martinsville Speedway, Burton discussed not only Duke’s Final Four chances and which of the other three remaining teams in the NCAA Tournament concern him the most, but also his passion for being a father to 14-year-old daughter, Paige, and 9-year-old son, Harrison.
Q: Your Blue Devils should win the NCAA Tournament now, shouldn’t they?
Burton: There are a bunch of teams that should have won it all when it started who aren’t going to. What’s cool about the tournament is that there is no second chance. If you win, you’re in; if you lose, you’re out. … The teams are really evenly matched, no matter what people want to say about one being a No. 1 seed or another being a No. 10 seed. When you get to this point in the tournament, it’s usually going to be two top-20 teams playing each other. In college basketball, 14 points usually is considered a blowout. That’s seven made baskets, and that’s pretty close. That’s why I like college basketball so much. You never know what’s going to happen.
Q: What other teams left in the Final Four worry you the most?
Burton: Well, in my pool I had West Virginia going to the final. From watching them, I thought West Virginia was really good. I had West Virginia and Kansas in the final, if that tells you anything.
Q: What do you like so much about West Virginia?
Burton: I don’t want to say they play dirty, but they’re real aggressive. They’re in your face all the time—and that causes other teams problems.
Q: Well, doesn’t it seem like their coach, Bob Huggins, has them sort of playing with a chip on their shoulder?
Burton: He has a chip on his shoulder, doesn’t he? But they’re good.
Q: Transitioning to another subject, with a 14-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son, are you going to be giving fatherly advice to any of these drivers currently participating in NASCAR’s baby boom?
Burton: There used to be a lot of kids around the garage amongst drivers, and then, just because there was a shift in how old the drivers were, suddenly there were none. It’s nice to see it come back around. It’s good to see.
For my daughter, there were a lot more kids her age growing up in the garage vs. the way it is now. It’s good to see it coming back—because it’s part of life, part of growing up. Having a family is pretty rewarding. I think it provides balance in your life. I don’t know if I have any advice to offer, but I really enjoy being a father. It’s fun; it’s challenging; it’s hard. But it’s very rewarding.
Q: Both of your children are active in different sports, aren’t they?
Burton: My daughter, she competes in the jumpers—so she’s racing, too, but with horses. She just kind of stepped up and started competing against more people in the national arena. Competition is pretty tough, but it’s more fun for me. When they’re judges out there, it’s hard for me to know what’s going on. But when they do it with a stopwatch, I can figure that out.
So it’s been a lot of fun for me. She’s jumping really high stuff at high rates of speed, so it looks dangerous to me. But she loves doing it and she works hard at it, which is what I really care about. That’s a lesson in life right there. You can’t have success if you don’t work at it—unless you’re so good you can get by with it, and most people aren’t. So she puts a lot into it every day, and that’s a quality I respect.
Q: How often are you able to see her compete?
Burton: Once we start racing, I hardly see her at all. During the winter, she competes in Florida. My son races in the winter, as well. I know more about the racing, so I end up going with my son and my wife [Kim] knows more about the horses, so she ends up going with my daughter and we split it up like that in the winter on the weekends. I don’t really like that a whole lot, but there is no way around it. This winter I went to three of her events. But in the summer, I don’t get to go to any of ‘em.
Q: You weren’t sitting in the stands with your own stopwatch, were you?
Burton: No, you can see all of it [on a scoreboard]. But this winter I started walking the course with her, because I can relate to that. You’ve got one jump and then you’ve got to turn and get ready for the next one. That’s my world. I can relate to that—not that I tell her what to do, because I don’t. It’s pretty competitive. It’s cool.
Q: And your son, he races?
Burton: Mostly he races quarter-midgets. He raced some Bandoleros this winter, and we might do that some this spring.
Q: And how is he doing?
Burton: Good. He was in the upper end of his age bracket last year, so he had an advantage. This year he’s on the lower end of his age bracket, so he’s at a disadvantage. He’s racing against 14-year-olds, and that’s a big step.
But it’s fun. You meet a lot of people from all over the country, and that’s cool. It’s really good, hard racing. But the kids, they race hard and then get out of the car and play football, or X-box. It’s fun to be a part of it.
Q: You’ve got to remember they’re kids, right?
Burton: Listen, man. I don’t care if you’re playing football, riding horses, playing soccer or racing, there are always a group of people who become very committed to it and put a lot of effort into it. You see that in everything. And sometimes we take it too far.
But it’s taken very seriously. It’s easy to forget you’re dealing with an 8-year-old, or 9-year-old or 10-year-old. You’ve got to always keep that in mind. [Saturday]night he raced [in Salisbury, N.C.] and didn’t have the result he wanted and I had to step back and tell him, ‘Hey, if we’re not going to have fun, we need to go do something else.’ It needs to be fun. It needs to be taken seriously, but at the same time you’ve got to keep it in perspective.
Q: How much of a challenge is it for you, as a competitor, to do that?
Burton: It’s hard as a professional to step back and do that. I’m used to attention to detail by the world’s finest racers—with access to technology and access to a lot of stuff. That’s the world I live in.
Then I step back into going racing with my son. I have to step back a little bit and keep perspective. This [Sprint Cup garage] has become normal to me—and it’s anything but normal. When you walk through that shop on Monday, there are hundreds of people working to make that race car go faster. We think that’s normal. But it’s not.
