Now, while 2009 was quite the eventful season by your standards, it is also memorable for a completely different reason on my end, because that also happens to be about the time that RED POLO FRIDAY came around. To explain:
I had a dress code while I was in high school. Collared shirts, tucked in, no graphic prints or embroidery on those shirts bigger than your own hand. And they had to be basic.
But being the ever-resourceful person I am, I figured that there would be a way to get around this so I could still find a way to support you.
My answer? Wear a polo that was the same color as your car on Fridays, as my way of saying “good luck, Smoke!”
To be fair, it was an orange polo in 2008 that started everything. But it was ’09 when it really took off, because I was way more consistent about it.
Every Friday during the season, it was a red polo that I would wear, and as it kept on happening, people kept noticing (though the summer slew of victories that season might have kept me motivated).
They would ask me why on earth I wore the same color polo every Friday, and I would tell them about you. It worked as an excellent PR tool.
There were even a few people that I was friends with that joined in on the fun with me, and eventually, we had an army of people in Red Polos on Friday! It became my calling card throughout high school.
That included another standard competitive season in 2010, though slightly less so. And carried through into 2011.
I had a lot of fun with the Red Polo Friday before the Daytona 500 that year. My closest friends from high school pooled their money together and bought me a leather jacket emblazoned with your name and number and sponsors and the like for Christmas the year before. I guess that should say something about my status as a Tony Stewart superfan!
I figured that it being the weekend of the 500 and all, I would do something extra special. So I brought that jacket out and broke the dress code for a day!
There is photographic evidence of it too. One of my classmates took it. She nailed the caption too, given that we were reading Crime and Punishment at the time: “NASCAR and Dostoyevsky… the perfect combination.”
Never mind the fact that the book was so fitting, given your nature. I just like the fact that I think I am single-handedly responsible for being the person to bring Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Tony Stewart closer together than any person before or after me!
I just wish that the 500 would have gone as well too. Had Mark actually had a car worthy of being up towards the front of the field, maybe things would have been different. But as it stands, that was you last good shot to win the 500.
I saw you fall away from the front of the field, and by that time – with the disappointments of ‘05, ‘07 and ‘08 behind me – let’s just say that I knew what to expect by now, and it wasn’t totally shocking.
Given that that was your last realistic shot to win the 500, I think I’m going to cease mentions of the 500 here. It’s hard for me to say that my favorite driver is the man most deserving of winning the 500 to have never actually won the race.
So I’ll conclude by saying that either I will go back in time someday to make sure that that wrong is righted, or that I will make sure that someone else does. Promise!
Meanwhile, life went on, and I kept on wearing Red Polos. By the way, I also wore that leather jacket in the “fun” photo that our high school graduating class took. That still hangs in the halls of Forsyth Country Day School today, if you ever run across it. (Fun fact: in that photo with me is Ty Dillon, who was also in my graduating class! I figure they would be your obvious tour guides at some point, since he and Austin are alums too.)
But you can only stay in high school for so long, and eventually, we all have to graduate and move on to college. So that’s what I did.
I started college at Chapel Hill, and it eventually proved to be way too large a school for me. There were not many bright spots during my time there, but there was one that very clearly stands out from the rest.
