The Weight of Glory

On the Daytona 500 trophy and what it takes to win it, make it and lift it

I am client/job hunting. I’ve been a journalist for 31 years, and I have a broad range of experience writing about everything from small-town politics to big-time sports.

I’m open to full time, but ideally I would land something like half a job – writing/consulting/editing/podcasting. I have spoken often about storytelling to high school and college classes and other groups. Maybe your company could use a primer.

My writing moves people to take action … even painful, challenging, difficult, heartfelt action … such as 3,292,687 burpees in a month. Reach out if you’re interested: mcrossman98@gmail.com.

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The National Motorsports Press Association recently announced the results of its annual writing contest. I won an award for this story about how joining Twitter changed Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s life.

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Below is my latest piece for NASCAR.com, for which I borrowed an expression from C.S. Lewis. I highly encourage you to watch the accompanying video.

This story has nothing to do with burpees, but it has a lot to do with striving, yearning, trying, reaching, stretching for a goal that seems just out of your reach … to which I know you can relate.

Plus, I thought you all might get a kick out of it for this reason: When I write about how heavy the trophy is and not wanting to drop it, I left out a crucial fact: I did 1,000 burpees the day before and I wasn’t sure my arms still worked.

WORTH THE WEIGHT

The first thing you need to know about the Daytona 500 trophy is that it is heavy, as in, it weighs a lot. Like, really heavy, like, I don’t care how strong you are, you would not want to lift that thing over your head on live TV, especially not after racing 500 grueling miles on the high banks of Daytona International Speedway.

The second thing you need to know about the Daytona 500 trophy is that it is heavy, as in, the pursuit of it weighs on drivers, consumes them, eats up their insides. The endless chase to win the Daytona 500 exacts an unending toll on them, their families, their friends, their teams, even their fans. Chasing dreams, especially dreams that if fulfilled make you a legend, is not free or easy. It leaves scars if you never catch those dreams … and even if you do. The cruel irony is winning one only makes you want another one that much more.

Since 1996, Daytona 500 winners have borne the weight of trophies crafted by Omaha sculptor John Lajba (LIE-buh). The trophies weigh on him, too. He feels an obligation to the entire sport as he creates iconic art meant. He strives to convey weight in both the literal and metaphorical sense to represent, to borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis, the weight of glory.

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It’s a bitingly cold Friday in January. Wind slices through downtown Omaha as Lajba welcomes a crew from NASCAR.com to his studio. The Daytona 500 is less than a month away in sunny, warm Florida, 1,387 miles from freezing, dreary Nebraska.

The Harley J. Earl trophy sits on a table under plastic sheeting in Lajba’s studio. There’s three of them, actually, one for the winning driver, one for the winning owner, and one for the Thunderbirds to celebrate 25 years of flyovers.

The trophies are not literally glowing under there, it just seems like it. Lajba has spent the past five months creating them with a team of about 10 others. He finished them in the last few days; the NASCAR.com crew is the first to see the finished products.

We keep our distance at first, which is fine by Lajba. “I won’t even look at them without putting gloves on,” he says, and he’s joking, but barely. He stores them in a dust-free and static-free environment, and he “washes” them only with Lemon Pledge and microfiber towels. He never wears rings or belt buckles near them and is wary of shirts with buttons.

He dropped a wheel from the car on the trophy once, years ago. It clanged on his floor like a steel rod and cost him three weeks and several hundred dollars.

Maybe nobody would have ever seen the tiny dent.

But he knew it was there, and there was no way he could leave it like that. There was too much at stake. Lajba has been making the trophy since the 1996 race, and he approaches each one with something close to awe at being chosen for such a privilege. “It’s beyond pride,” he says. “It really touches me. I feel honored and blessed.”

Lajba obliges a request to uncover the trophies, and they glisten when he does. I’ve seen versions of the trophy many times—on TV and in person in the media center at Daytona and in trophy cases. But I’ve never looked down on one from above, as I do now. I never realized the base is shaped like Daytona International Speedway.

Lajba gives me a pair of gloves and invites me to lift it. Confession: I don’t want to. Hockey players are superstitious and won’t touch the Stanley Cup until they’ve won it. My trepidation is more practical: I don’t want to be known as the guy who dropped the Harley J. Earl trophy. If dropping a wheel cost him three weeks and hundreds of dollars, what would it cost him if I dropped the whole thing?

But I also don’t want to be so afraid of life that I won’t lift a trophy. Holding it from the side is awkward. Add the weight and yikes! I hoist it a few inches off the table and set it down. He says it weighs 62 pounds. It felt like more than that, and that heft “is a necessity,” Lajba says. The Daytona 500 trophy has to have presence, physicality, meatiness, otherwise it wouldn’t be worthy of the victory it represents.

It goes without saying that this is the most coveted race trophy in American motorsports. It’s also the most displayed. I can’t prove this, but I feel confident in saying none of Lajba’s trophies is gathering dust in a warehouse as countless lesser trophies surely are.

Jeff Gordon, for example, won 93 Cup races. He couldn’t possibly display all of them. I interviewed him in his trophy room in his basement once. He had seven race trophies; three of them were from the Daytona 500.

William Byron, winner of last year’s race, has examined his Harley J. Earl trophy closely, admiring Lajba’s craftsmanship. He has moved it from his living room to his front entry to his office, where it lives now. He likes how the coloring and the material come together. “The weight of it,” he says, “closely relates to the weight of the win.”

The weight of the win … that’s not there yet on the trophies in Lajba’s studio.

The life of the Daytona 500 trophy is like the life of the winner of it: It changes dramatically when the race ends. As it sits in Lajba’s studio, the Harley J. Earl trophy represents one thing: hope. Everyone in the sport yearns to win one. Then the race ends, and that hope vanishes because who hopes for what he already has?

The second the race ends, the trophy becomes about “strength and power and speed,” just as Lajba crafted it to be.

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Lajba’s 14,000 square feet studio spreads across three floors, and inside it looks like an antique shop’s warehouse. The items scattered about reflect the curiosity that propels him.

His studio features a statue of a man crawling out of the wall, an old pickup truck and a ping-pong table he uses as a desk. On it sits a book called “Telegraphy Self Taught: A Complete Manual of Instruction.” He has old suitcases, old strollers, old picket fences, old pictures he bought at garage sales.

The three brand-new Harley J. Earl trophies share space with those artifacts. The Firebirds that sit atop the trophies are made with rolled, extruded bronze that is then dipped in blue liquid that coats it in silver. The car, shockingly heavy, looks futuristic even though the late Harley J. Earl, GM’s head of design who also designed the Corvette, created it in 1954.

“I really wanted it to look like it was moving, like it was flying,” Lajba says. He pulls out his original, which is red and made of balsa wood. He gave it to his son as a toy, and he promptly broke the tail off.

That’s an echo from Lajba’s own childhood. His dad would thumb through an encyclopedia, find something that looked like fun to make, and they’d make it together out of clay and wood. In 1963, Lajba won first place in the Nebraska state fair for sculpting a kangaroo and a mouse out of clay. He celebrated by smushing the clay back together and making something else.

He never envisioned sculpting as a career. Only in looking back does his boyhood hobby seem like the beginning of a thread that as it unspooled became his life. He dropped out of the University of Nebraska-Omaha and jumped around odd jobs for a few years – washing dishes for $1.62 an hour, working in a mailroom, and wondering what to do with himself.

He enrolled in a sculpting classes at Creighton University and Bellevue University, from which he graduated summa cum laude with a BFA in sculpture. Suddenly he was passionate about learning for the sake of learning. That cranked the engine of the rest of his life. “It just opened me up to not be afraid of looking at the truth about things and discovering things,” he says. “That attitude carried me through my artwork, and it carried me through all of my classes—English, geology, speech, everything. It was like an energy. I had this thirst of wanting to know things and wanting to learn and wanting to be educated.”

After that intellectual awakening, his life story sounds like a racecar driver’s: Talented nobody from nowhere gets a few breaks and crushes them when he does.

He made a sculpture of Gen. Jimmy Doolittle, a Medal of Honor winner who spent 42 years in the Army and Air Force. Someone at Mutual of Omaha—where Lajba had worked in the mailroom—saw the piece and liked it. Mutual of Omaha bought it and gave it to the Air Force Association, a private 501c3 that Doolittle helped found and served as its first president.

Comedian Bob Hope, a friend of Doolittle, saw it and liked it, too, and Lajba was hired to make a sculpture of Hope for Bob Hope Village in Florida. Someone on the board of Bob Hope Village was close with NASCAR founder Bill France, and Lajba was hired to create a sculpture of France and his wife, Anne, and eventually Dale Earnhardt, Bill France Jr., Betty Jane France and the Harley J. Earl trophy.

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Lajba has hands like a lumberjack. They are gnarled, bent, thick. And yet he uses them like a jeweler, sanding and sculpting, refining, chasing perfection that he knows is impossible. He notices details and seeks them out because it is in details that “the truth about things” starts to emerge. Sometimes those details are literal, like the year of the lucky penny that Dale Earnhardt glued to the dashboard of his 1998 Daytona 500 winning car. Sometimes those details are intangible, like what it feels like to be with a person.

In crafting the statue of Bill France Jr., the son of NASCAR’s founder, Lajba’s biggest challenge was capturing France Jr.’s presence. Here Lajba chooses his words carefully. He was very fond of France Jr., NASCAR’s CEO from 1972 until 2000, and doesn’t want to say it the wrong way. But the sculptor in Nebraska knew about Bill France Jr. what every driver in North Carolina knew: He commanded a room, and when he talked, people listened.

NASCAR history pulsates with stories of big-time stars being called into France Jr.’s office, at which time they learned exactly who was in charge. The sport also overflows with stories like the one Lajba tells about stopping by to say thanks to France Jr. as he left Daytona one morning. Lajba planned to simply leave a message, but France Jr. walked out of a meeting to come out and shake Lajba’s hand and tell him goodbye, an act of class he still appreciates all these years later.

France Jr.’s mix of power and grace is an elusive combination to capture in a static medium, and to do so, Lajba immersed himself in the statue for more than a year. He thought about France Jr. while in his car, in his studio, everywhere.

France Jr.’s pose—his mouth slightly open, as if he was about to speak—illuminated a part of France that those who knew him recognized immediately. “It’s Bill Jr. It’s him,” then track president Joie Chitwood said at the 2012 unveiling. “I can almost hear the words coming out of his mouth when I see his expression.”

For the statue of Dale Earnhardt, Lajba flew from Omaha to North Carolina, then drove to Welcome, home of Richard Childress Racing headquarters. While there, he stuck his head inside the cockpit of Earnhardt’s 1998 Daytona 500 winning car. While awed to be near such an important piece of history, he pulled out a piece of dental impression material and pressed it against the dash to create a cast of the lucky penny that was glued there.

That’s how he knows that penny was a 1977.

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The trophy is heavy to lift, it’s heavy to win, and it’s heavy to make. “There’s a great deal of pressure,” Lajba says. “I want it to be perfect. There’s a lot of people counting on me.”

He’s not just making it for NASCAR or the track or the driver or the owner. He’s making it for the whole sport — “for everybody who experiences the joy and power of NASCAR, the fun of NASCAR. It’s more than a trophy. It’s a celebration.”

He jokes that he mothers the trophies to death, and that’s a fitting analogy. This year, as every year, he raised them from before it was even a thing, when they were just a disconnected collection of materials. He oversaw (or did himself) the engraving, the carving, the screwing on of the wheels and more.

Finally, he finished them, covered them in plastic … and hoped like hell nothing happened to them.

He spent several hours on the last Monday in January packing the three trophies into custom-made crates for transport from Nebraska to Florida. A moving crew arrived—he uses them so much they’re on a first-name basis—put the crates in a truck and drove off.

He tried to let them go, like a parent sending a kid off to college.

But he didn’t. He can’t. He still feels responsible. He always does.

That starts to fade when the trophies arrive safely in Florida. That mothering instinct ends only when the race does, and a driver’s life is changed forever, a change made manifest when he lifts that trophy and struggles to hold it up under the weight of glory it has just attained.

Lajba has always watched that from home. He will attend the Daytona 500 for the first time this year, at which he’ll get an inside look at the life of his trophy that he’s never seen before.

He’ll watch when his trophy is awarded, at which point it will stop being his and become someone else’s … and not a moment too soon. He’ll do his best not to care when the trophy gets doused in Gatorade and beer and covered in confetti. He’ll smile knowing he played a small part in that raucous, exuberant, joyful, celebration.

And then he’ll head back to Omaha, unburdened, light, free of the weight of trying to meet the expectations of the entire sport.

Until it’s time to build the next one.

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