A hard life, well-lived

 Down in Mooresville, N.C. the other day, Bobby Allison went to his reward, and no one can say he didn't earn it. If you don't know who he was, stock car racing isn't your deal. If you do, you know it gave him everything, and took away damn near all of it.

Allison won 85 Cup races, three Daytona 500s and was the 1983 series champion. He was the paterfamilias, along with brother Donnie, of the Alabama Gang that came out of Hueytown to become one of the driving forces in NASCAR for the better part of two decades. It's why, when NASCAR launched its Hall of Fame, Bobby Allison was inducted in its second class in 2011.

By then, racing had cost him two sons, his marriage, and nearly his life. Hell of a tradeoff, that was.

The darkness descended in 1988, when Allison got up in the fence at Pocono and hurt himself so bad he was initially declared dead. Instead he emerged with severe brain damage that wiped out his memory for awhile, and forced him to re-learn virtually everything a healthy brain provides a human being.

Four years later, his son Clifford, a Busch Series (now Infiniti Series) driver, slapped the wall at Michigan and died. A year after that, son Davey, one of  NASCAR's brightest young lights, died in a helicopter crash while arriving at Talladega for a Cup race.

A year after that, another of the Alabama Gang, Neil Bonnett, was killed in a practice crash at Daytona. And two years after that, Bobby and his wife Judy divorced.

Racing gave him everything. Racing cost him everything.

And yet ...

And yet, he lived long enough to recoup some of the losses.

He and Judy remarried in 2000, and were together until her death in 2015. He recovered from his near-fatal crash and the deaths of his sons and his good friend, although the heartache of the latter never goes away and never would for him. And of course there was that Hall of Fame induction in 2011.

So when he died the other day at 86, he could at least say his scales had some balance to them. He could at least say racing gave back a small portion of what it had taken.

He could say, yes, it had been a hard life sometimes, rougher than a cob as they say in the country. But it was also a life well-lived.