Dale Earnhardt’s Longtime Best Friend Says Teresa Was Key To Dale’s Success: “He Really Loved Her”

A very different perspective on the polarizing figure that is Teresa Earnhardt.

If you’ve been online at all over the last couple weeks and are a sports fan in any capacity, you’ve probably seen clips and articles from the recently released Prime Video series Earnhardt, which focuses on the life and legacy of the late, great NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt. Featuring interviews from Dale’s friends, family, and obviously his son, Dale Jr., the documentary also features never-before-seen footage of Dale during his racing career from both his personal and professional life.

It’s an incredibly interesting, and nuanced, look at Dale Earnhardt the race car driver, the man, the friend and the father, and Dale Earnhardt Jr.  and his sister Kelley played a huge part in the production of the series, in addition to being heavily featured in it, telling stories about their dad and memories that were both good and bad.

There’s a ton of details about his life with his widow, Teresa Earnhardt, who is not exactly a well-liked character in the world of NASCAR to put it nicely… she infamously kept Dale Jr. from being part of Dale Earnhardt Inc. after Dale Sr’s tragic death at Daytona in 2001, and that’s just scratching the surface on some of the issues she’s had with others in the family, mostly between her and her step children.

It’s honestly really sad for Earnhardt kids that they have been put in this position in terms of all the public battles they’ve had with their stepmom, and while they do have a half sister named Taylor, who Teresa had with Dale, it’s unclear what their relationship is like because they never really speak about her publicly. I mean, Teresa was fighting with Dale Jr. and Kelley’s mom Brenda way back in the day…

For good reason, it’s an almost universal opinion that she’s pretty wicked (she has been nicknamed “The Wicked Witch of the South” if that helps you understand how fans really feel about her), mostly because of how she has treated all of Dale’s kids, including his oldest son, Kerry Earnhardt. While she’s completely out of the public eye, I do wonder if there’s anyone with stories or reasons as to why Dale Sr. was so in love with her. No one is completely all bad, so I’m sure she has some redeeming qualities, and on an episode of the Dale Jr. Download podcast, Dale’s longtime best friend Donnie Rives was a guest, and he talked about a different side of Teresa.

Jr. asked him:

“I’d love to hear your thoughts on Teresa. We’ve all said what we said, we’ve all had different opinions from time to time, and I had a, you know, hot and cold relationship with Teresa over the years. But I’ve always said at this table, she’s fair.”

And Donnie’s response might surprise you… he explained that he still “held her in high regard” and “thought the world of her.” He shed some light on the fact that she was really good at managing Dale, and he needed that a lot of the time to be able to focus on his career:

“Well I have high respect, because even before Dale’s passing, she had a lot on her. And Dale said, it might take her a while to get it done, but when it’s done, it’s right. As husband and wife, he really loved her. Teresa was really good at managing Dale.

I’ve heard him tell lots of people, ‘If it wasn’t for that lady right there, I wouldn’t have nothing.’ You know, I still hold Teresa in high regards and think the world of her.”

Listen, this is certainly NOT going to make me into some kind of Teresa Earnhardt fan or anything close to that, but with all the (very deserved in most cases) bad press she has gotten over the years, and especially in the wake of the aforementioned new documentary being out, it seems fair to talk about some of the people who knew her and Dale’s relationship and saw the good in her too.

I think while he was still alive, a lot of that is probably true, but even when the kids were young they had issues from the get go in terms of how she treated them. Of course, like Jr. talks about in the film, Teresa was thrown into this situation having to watch after her step kids when they were forced to move in with their dad at 8 and 10, so that put a major strain on their relationship.

Had that all happened differently, maybe there would’ve been less resentment and things could’ve been different, but who really knows… they might’ve turned out the exact same way, unfortunately.

But at the end of the day, she was Dale’s wife, and I think it’s obvious that he loved her very deeply and needed her to help keep everything on the rails. Sadly, everything went off the rails when he passed and DEI didn’t make it because of a lot of her decisions, but I do appreciate Donnie’s perspective because he knew Dale Sr. better than just about anyone.

You can watch the clip here:

The full episode is available here:

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