NASCAR: Ben Blake – a tribute by his daughter Eva, and RACER's NASCAR writer Tom Jensen

Ben Blake, former NASCAR correspondent for RACER, was a deeply gifted journalist, because he had the cornerstones firmly in place – he was a great news-hound and a very eloquent and thought-provoking writer. Blake could convey a strident message yet with subtlety, humor and wit. But perhaps more importantly than that, Ben wrote with great passion yet also a sense of perspective. That's a truly rare blend in journalism.

So many sports writers become blasé about their profession as the years and decades pile on; their seen-it-all-before attitude starts to obscure the fact that they are writing for people who may not have seen it all before and who are still seeking to learn the sport and feel enthused by it. And then there are other writers who feel so deeply involved in the sport – and entrenched in their own views and self-regard – that it is to the exclusion of all else.

That never happened to Ben Blake, which is why he will always be held in deep admiration by both his ex-colleagues and also those involved in racing. He always remembered that NASCAR was a sport, above all else, and what happened on track was at least as important as the political gossip from behind the scenes. In other words, without the show, the rest was just background babble. I loved that about his work.

Blake also had an innate ability to unpick the most intricate set of storylines and then weave them together into an article that could even draw in those with just a passing interest in NASCAR. He was conscientious, too…literally to a fault. His last story for us, in 2008, arrived about four days late and approximately 40 percent longer than we'd asked for. But it felt sacrilegious cutting it to fit the pages, and somewhere on an old computer, I retain the original because it was stuffed full of background information that only Blake could have delivered.

Ben Blake wrote with wisdom and smarts, with insights and incisiveness and he never, ever forgot his audience. Which is why his audience will never, ever forget him.

Ben's memorial will be held Oct. 10 at Battery Park Christian Church, 4201 Brook Rd, Richmond, VA 23227. More details to follow.

David Malsher, RACER editor

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But first, click on the links below to two stories by Ben from the pages of RACER – the first, from 1999, describing the route to NASCAR Cup, and how there was no set way to reach the apex of stock car racing. The second comes from our April 2006 issue, when Toyota confirmed it was graduating to the top level in 2007. As ever, Ben asked the right questions and led the reader to thoughtful conclusion.

• The Covers Are Off (2006)

BEN BLAKE by TOM JENSEN

I’m pretty sure Ben Blake would have hated being eulogized. Blake, the longtime Senior NASCAR Editor for RACER, was not someone who cared anything about formalities and recognition. He was a blue-collar worker to the core, a grunt and a grinder.

Blake – he always called himself Blake – didn’t toil to haul coal out of the ground or frame houses or drive a tractor-trailer. His coin of the realm was information, his workplace the NASCAR garage. And nobody was better at finding things out than he was, which is why he had an educated and fervent reader base.

Blake was an original and an iconoclast.

His appearance rarely varied – jeans or painter’s pants, old boots, a nondescript work shirt and a baseball cap were standard issue most days, along with the ubiquitous cigarette. Taken as a package, he looked like either an aging rock star about to enter or exit rehab, or a dot.com multimillionaire who’d cashed out to live in the woods.

“What endeared him to me was that he had absolutely no pretense about him. One of the most plain-spoken, direct…earnest…people I knew on that circuit,” recalled Ford Racing’s Greg Shea. “What you saw was what you got.”
 
More than anything, Blake had the two skills necessary to be a great journalist: He was a fantastic reporter and arguably an even better writer. Most people in the garage perform the two functions with varying levels of competence, but Blake was great at both, which put him near the top of his profession.
 
“He was one of those guys who wasn’t showy in appearance, but his writing did all the talking,” said Ford Racing’s Kevin Kennedy.
 
You’d walk into the NASCAR garage and there Blake would be, sitting behind a hauler on a director’s chair, waving a cigarette around for emphasis, while talking to Bill France Jr. or Richard Childress or Jack Roush. To the untrained eye, it looked like two old friends sitting around and shooting the bull. But Blake was hard at work, gathering information, either for a lengthy feature story or one of his daily notebooks, which were rich repositories of hard news.

“Blake was an expert at ‘notes’ columns,” said Mike Hembree of USA Today. “He could make a lap around the garage area and come back with great tidbits nobody else had.”
 
“He was a hell of a reporter,” said Kennedy. “He was one of those guys who you knew was working all corners of a garage, looking for something no one else knew. I totally respected that.”
 
One of Blake’s real virtues was that he cared not a whit about other people’s opinions. He called ’em as he saw ’em and wasn’t afraid to go head-to-head with anyone. Unlike some of his peers, he didn’t write to poke the bear – in this case, NASCAR – or to show people how clever he was. He wrote the truth as he saw it because it was the truth as he saw it.
 
Of course, not everyone saw it the way he did. Once, in a preseason column, he compared the 38-race NASCAR Sprint Cup Series schedule to the Bataan death march and then called Saturday night races, “the worst idea since concentration camps.” Needless to say, those comparisons didn’t fare well. Still, one of the reasons he had such a large following is that he was unafraid to say anything to anyone, ever. You could disagree with his conclusions, but you trusted his information and the thought he put into arriving at his conclusions.
 
“His research was impeccable and his writing had a nice flow, a meter to it that you just don’t see,” said Lisa Morin, one of Blake’s former editors. “Kind of the old-school writing that you just don’t find much any more.”

For as good a writer as Blake was, making deadline was often a challenge.
 
“He was one of the greatest reporters at tracking it all down and putting puzzle pieces together but one who hated to write,” said Judy Kouba-Dominick, the veteran GM public relations rep. “He did it quite well, but he hated it.”
 
And, yeah, like many of his contemporaries, Blake enjoyed howling at the moon every now and again.
 
He was an intensely private person who loved his family, baseball and woodworking. And he left an indelible mark on those who knew him.
 
“My favorite image of him is him in blue jeans and a flannel shirt with soft cap on his pony-tailed head ... cigarette hanging from his mouth, looking down at his notepad while he scrawled quotes from whomever he was speaking with,” said Shea. “And then he'd pick his head up, put the pen behind his ear, grab the cigarette with his free hand, and let the notebook hand drop to his side... and cock his head to ask the next question.
 
“That's the way I want to remember him.”

Next page: Eva Blake remembers her dad

(ABOVE, Ben, second from right)

MY DAD by EVA BLAKE

How do you put into words the life of a man…especially when that man is your father? Words were his life, produced with such dizzying fervor it’s a wonder they came out with any coherence. But what did come out from that complex, brilliant mind were words that made people think, sometimes made people angry, but always words that were his very own.

In truth, my dad’s life on the road following the NASCAR beat is a mystery to me. He was gone a significant part of my childhood, leaving my mom to play the part of both parents. I don't know how she did it. And just to demonstrate the paradoxical situation I found myself in, I held deep resentment toward my father, yet you'd be hard-pressed to find a daughter who adored her father as much as I did…and still do.

Ben Blake, the father, spent most of his days in our basement, pounding away at the keyboard, cigarette and/or Miller High Life in hand, always focused on the deadline that he would barely make. It was late at night that I would come down to talk with him about any and every thing, my chance to connect with my dad. And he would always make the time.

Sometimes, I could also hear him on the piano, playing Maple Leaf Rag or any other number from the Scott Joplin pantheon. At Christmas, Handel's Messiah was required listening. He and Mom took us to Civil War battlefields, both sharing their love of history with their children. One of my father's proudest moments was seeing me graduate from VCU with a degree in History. He wasn't perfect, but he loved us, and we knew it.

As most know, Dad had a penchant for hard, fast living, and the body can only take so much abuse before it revolts. My dad's did just that. When he first got sick, around 2004, we thought it was the end. His liver was shutting down. His team of doctors managed to bring him back from the brink, but one thing was clear: no more drinking. He quit, but the damage had been done and his once strong, invincible body was broken down by the lifestyle that fueled his genius. He lost almost all function in his legs, and if you knew my dad, you know how devastating this was for him. He was never quite the same.

And yet, in all honesty, the last 10 years of his life were some of the best of my life with him. He was sober and, most importantly, home. It was at this time that we bonded over one of our great loves, baseball. I will forever be grateful to him for that gift. He supported my Nationals fandom, he the ever-loyal Reds fan.

He spent much of his final decade with his grandchildren. He was like a father to my niece, Lucy, and both of my children loved him. They only knew “Poppy” bound to and by a wheelchair, but his sense of humor and boisterous personality ably replaced any physical activities in which he couldn’t quite participate with them. Those last 10 years, he and my mother divorced but then remarried, and their relationship was even stronger the second time. I don't know that my dad could have made it as long as he did without her. I do know she was holding his hand when he passed away.

It's strange. I resented my father's work for the majority of my life. Yet, in the wake of his passing, I'm finding immense comfort in the truly kind words and stories from former colleagues. I've been trying to think of what Dad would have wanted at this time. I know he wouldn't want people emoting or boo-hooing, but I know he would feel great pride knowing that each and every one of you held him in such high regard.

My dad's legacy is strong. I believe at the end of his life he felt his value as a man had diminished along with his body, but it couldn't be further from the truth. There was always his brilliant mind, his intellect, his humor, his biting wit.

I can't imagine my life without it, and I'll be grateful until the end of my days that he was my dad.

Eva Blake