Dale Earnhardt was one of the most beloved drivers in the history of NASCAR.
But there’s a side of him off the track that fans never go to see.
And Dale Earnhardt Jr. revealed one awkward late-night situation he walked into with his dad.
A young Dale Earnhardt Jr. was shocked by what his dad was doing in the kitchen
Dale Earnhardt Jr. appeared on the Sports and Forks podcast with host Kelly Senyei, where he shared a never-before-told story about his dad.
He was staying at his dad’s house when he was younger when the sound of sizzling coming from the kitchen woke him up in the middle of the night.
So he went to investigate what was going on in the kitchen.
And there was Dale Earnhardt, cooking up a batch of frog legs in a frying pan.
“Maybe frog legs. I remember three o’clock in the morning, I’m probably, I don’t know, 10, 11, 12 years old,” Earnhardt Jr. recalled. “And I heard some sizzling in the kitchen and no one was ever up at this hour.”
“This was really strange,” Earnhardt Jr. continued. “I go into the kitchen and dad was standing there in his PJs, cooking frog legs in a frying pan.”
This was the one and only time he could ever remember his dad eating frog legs.
Apparently, Dale Earnhardt got a late-night hankering for some frog legs and fired them up in his kitchen.
“I had never seen this before and I have never seen it since,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “And for whatever reason, he wanted to get up and eat frog legs. I didn’t eat one, but I was like, I looked at them, and I’m like ‘Yep, those are definitely frog legs.’”
But it gave him an opportunity to spend some quality time with his dad, who had a time-consuming career in NASCAR.
“I loved it because no one else was awake, and I had dad to myself, right? If you know my father, famous guy, and every waking moment, everybody in the world is trying to get a minute of his time,” Earnhardt Jr. explained.
“And I, sitting there watching him cook frog legs for about 15 minutes, I’ll never forget that. That’s probably something I would never eat,” Earnhardt Jr. added.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. talks about his dad flipping a bulldozer
Dale Earnhardt Sr. was one of the best drivers in NASCAR history, with seven Winston Cup championships during his illustrious career.
One of his passions outside of racing was working on the property that he owned.
“Dad loved land, loved owning land,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “He had like a vision of how he wanted that land to look and literally would move tons of dirt.”
He saw his dad using a bulldozer where he was building a log cabin.
“I was in my little S-10 pickup truck about 16 years old and I was driving down to this log cabin as he was building it,” Earnhardt Jr. recalled. “He’s on a bulldozer in front of the log cabin clearing some land and he pushed this tree over. Giant freaking tree. When the tree goes down, right, this big tree falls down, the roots come out of the ground, flipped over a giant bulldozer on the side.”
He rushed over to discover that his dad wasn’t hurt after the accident.
“He jumps in the truck and we drive on the back of the farm and he gets another tractor, another bulldozer,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “And he drives this bulldozer wide open, probably about a quarter mile, maybe longer, to this spot and flips the other one over, jumps on it, cranks it up, and back to work.”
