CHARLOTTE, N.C. — If you have ever wondered how it would feel like to go to your own funeral, NASCAR driver Ryan Newman can probably fill you in.
Newman returns to driving a racecar Sunday, the same day that the NASCAR Cup returns with an honest-to-goodness, real live race — but without any fans — at Darlington (Fox, 3:30 p.m.).
The storybook ending would be for Newman, 42, to actually win the race. That’s unlikely, but the fact that Newman is even in the field at all at Darlington’s egg-shaped track is startling.
Newman sustained one of the most ghastly “OMG” wrecks anyone has ever seen at the 2020 Daytona 500 in February — first slamming into the wall, then going airborne after another car hit him, then flipping through the air while his car caught on fire.
The wreck looked worse — more violent, then more silent, as everyone feared the worst — than the one that killed Dale Earnhardt at the same race in 2001. It took safety workers 15 minutes and 40 seconds to extricate Newman from his car.
Mercifully, Newman remembers none of that. The last laps of the 2020 Daytona 500 are erased from his memory, as are most of the next few days until he walked out of the hospital holding hands with his two young daughters.
Messages of relief and condolence poured in, and he does remember some of those.
“The amount of texts and communications that I got — it’s not a joking matter,” Newman said in a video teleconference with reporters Thursday. “It’s like being at (your own) wake — but you live through it.”
It wasn’t bad to almost die, Newman said. He found out a lot of people cared about him. He heard a lot of touching stories. And best of all, he not only has lived through the wreck, but he also apparently doesn’t have any long-term injuries other than what he calls a “brain bruise.”
Newman’s return to his sport comes during a rare opportunity for NASCAR — one of the first sports in the world to resume “new normal” operations as the coronavirus pandemic continues.
NASCAR generally competes every weekend with either the NBA, Major League Baseball, the NFL or just about any other sport you can name. This time nearly everything else is shuttered. But NASCAR is about to run four high-profile Cup races in an 11-day period — two at Darlington on Sunday and Wednesday, then two more at Charlotte Motor Speedway on May 24 and May 27.
No fans will be allowed at the tracks for any of that. But the hope is that NASCAR can capture some interest from casual sports fans who generally never give the drivers turning left a few hundred times every Sunday afternoon a second glance.
“Sunday at Darlington is going to be a huge opportunity for us to connect to millions of people in ways that maybe we haven’t had since 1979, when we had a snowstorm on the east coast,” Newman said.
Newman’s reference was to the famous 1979 Daytona 500. That race was televised on a day when much of America was stuck inside due to bad weather. It concluded with an exciting finish and then an all-out fist fight between three hot-tempered drivers. Many people inside the sport consider it to be the most significant race in NASCAR history.
For Darlington to have a similar cultural impact, something thoroughly spectacular would have to happen (like Newman winning). Even then, it’s probably not possible.
Still, Newman himself is what he calls a “complete walking miracle.” So who knows? He has seen videotape of his own crash, but it still strikes him as something that happened to somebody else.
“As I watched the crash,” Newman said, “and had to make myself believe what I had went through, I really looked to my dad to say, ‘Hey, did this really happen?’ …. There’s no deja vu when there’s no deja.”
Newman’s father assured him the crash had happened. “It was just kind of like, ‘All right, I believe you,’ ” Newman said.
Somehow, Newman missed only three races after almost dying — the coronavirus postponements actually helped his own personal 2020 season. Now he’s back, as is his sport.
Like much of 2020 so far, all of this would have been almost impossible to imagine in late 2019.
And yet here Newman and NASCAR are, racing again.