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Scotts fertilizer (one of Edwards’s sponsors) if they were standing up to their knees in a weed-infested garden.
    Come to think of it, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine Edwards daydreaming even now—that is, except for the fact that he’s living out his dreams with the world as his witness.
    Jeff Gordon has his own brand of wine. Carl Edwards deserves his own line of comic books. He couldn’t get a movie deal because his story is too hokey. In a way, it’s a shame that Edwards isn’t an actor because, now that Mickey Rooney’s day is past, he alone could play Andy Hardy. If Jack Roush could build Edwards a Ford out of Lincoln Logs, he’d try to race it. Edwards is one of the last people alive who could say, “Gee whiz, that’s swell,” and keep a straight face.
    The occasion of Edwards’s first Nextel Cup victory, the Golden Corral 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway on March 20, 2005, was just as hokey, uplifting, and, well, swell as everything else about him.
    “I was trying to get by Jimmie [Johnson], which is just about impossible,” said Edwards after doing so on the final lap. “It just worked out at the end. I can’t believe it worked out.”
    The thing is, when Edwards says something, despite the fact that it’s sickeningly wholesome, it’s impossible not to believe him because, well, he delivers the goods, whether it’s executing a backflip off the roof of his car or an otherworldly pass of the most productive NASCAR driver of recent vintage.
    Anyone other than Edwards would be laughed out of the room. Somehow, in an age when all the various and sundry icons—Mark McGwire, Martha Stewart, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Clinton, maybe even Jeff Gordon—are being brought to their knees, Edwards lifts us up with his wide-eyed charm and makes us believe in the aforementioned truth, justice, and the American way again.
    And that backflip! Edwards almost slipped up at Atlanta, completed as it was just a day after the one he wowed a smaller crowd with after his first Busch Series victory.
    “The first time I saw him do it, I thought it was luck,” said Jack Roush, the owner of Edwards’s number 99 Ford. “I went over and said, ‘We’re going to be doing this a long time, and if you keep doing that, and rely on luck to do it, it’s not going to work.’
    “[Edwards] said, ‘Don’t worry. When I was in college, I had a girlfriend who would help me with it, and I was in a padded room, and I fell a lot, but now I won’t fall down. I can do it.’ It’s not bragging if you can do it, and he’s been doing it really well.”
    That observation could be made both of Edwards’s backflips and his driving, but, of course, he doesn’t brag about either. He even credits Tyler Walker, then a sprint car driver but now in the Busch Series, with giving him the idea for the celebratory backflips.
    Heck, Edwards even thanked the media: “I just want to thank you guys because you’ve written some really nice things about me … and I know it won’t always be good. There’ll be times when you have to write bad things about me, and I’ll be grateful for that, too.”
    That alone ought to be enough to make NASCAR officials dock him twenty-five, or even fifty, points. Thank a sponsor, okay, but thank the media? Them’s fightin’ words.

    “Not to discredit them in anyway, but NASCAR has become this black hole sucking up sponsorship, fans, TV viewers, and all the things that make racing work. It’s like a giant vacuum cleaner. So how everybody gets along with reduced crowds, reduced money, and reduced ratings to me is the real issue. Look at what many others perceive as the crisis in open-wheel racing; a lot of that has to do with NASCAR just taking over the audience.”
    —DAVE DESPAIN
    host of Speed Channel’s
Wind Tunnel

    “I couldn’t tell what was coming out of that little ‘yap-yap’ mouth of his.”
    —RICKY RUDD
    referring to Kevin Harvick, after a post-race altercation at Richmond in 2003

    “I was about