EDITOR’S NOTE: This story originally published on Dec. 24, 2020. Since then, Bubba Wallace earned his first career Cup win — making him the first Black driver to win a Cup Series race since 1963. That win came on Oct. 4, 2021, at Talladega, the same track that what was believed to be a noose was discovered in his garage a year earlier. On Tuesday, watch the E60 special “Fistful of Steel” (7:30 p.m., ESPN and ESPN App) which explores Wallace’s upbringing and the events that shaped him into the man he is today.
THERE WAS A specific moment during this most extraordinary of years that Bubba Wallace believes changed him forever.
It wasn’t June 10, when NASCAR finally banned the Confederate flag from its racetracks. It wasn’t June 22, when every person from the NASCAR Cup Series garage pushed and cheered Wallace’s No. 43 Chevy down Talladega Speedway’s pit road after a rope fashioned into a noose was found in the garage stall of NASCAR’s only full-time racer of color. It wasn’t Sept. 21, when Wallace signed to drive for a new Cup Series team co-owned by current NASCAR star Denny Hamlin and Basketball Hall of Famer Michael Jordan. It wasn’t even March 13, when the coronavirus pandemic forced NASCAR to leave the racetrack for more than two months.
No, the day that changed Darrell “Bubba” Wallace Jr. forever was May 5. It was when the months-old video of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery being run down and shot dead as he jogged through a neighborhood was released to the public. The incident had taken place Feb. 23, just days after Wallace had finished 15th in the Daytona 500, a mere 150 miles south of where Arbery died in Brunswick, Georgia.
The proximity of time and place was one of many reasons Wallace stayed up until 2 a.m. watching the footage, taken by one of the assailants, over and over.
“You heard the gunshots, and I was…
Source : espn
