For the Joy of it: NASCAR broadcaster Mike Joy still passionate about racing, Daytona 500

The historian in Mike Joy never takes a day off. Not even in the offseason.

“This will be the first Daytona 500 in which there is not a driver in the field who raced against Dale Earnhardt, since his death,” Joy matter-of-factly spouted out during a phone interview in late January.

The veteran sportscaster and lead race announcer for Fox’s NASCAR coverage since 2001, who has been calling races in some capacity since the mid-1970s, was referring to the retirement of Kurt Busch.

Then, he dug a little deeper.

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“This will be the first Daytona 500 without an entry from a team with the name ‘Petty’ in it," he added. "The only constant is change.”

And while things in the world of stock-car racing have certainly done that, including Petty GMS Racing rebranding into Legacy Motor Club, Joy’s presence in the sport and his passion for it have remained largely unchanged. Like all race fans, that includes a lifetime of memories at Daytona, and in particular, the Daytona 500, a race he'll help call for the 44^th time next Sunday.

“You drive in that tunnel and suddenly you’ve driven into a city of 200,000 people right there in a couple of square miles and they’re all there for the same reason you are and with the same interest you have, which is really quite cool,” Joy said. “You go in there and it’s very much a Super Bowl sense of being and the difference is, when you go in that garage area the morning of the Daytona 500, there’s 40 teams there that think they can win. And that’s really cool.”

Mike Joy’s favorite, and most memorable, Daytona 500s

As it turns out, the two things aren’t one in the same.

If you ask Joy about his favorite Daytona 500?

“Whenever anybody says, ‘What’s your favorite Daytona 500?’ My answer is always, ‘The next one’ because there’s always so much to look forward to.”

It’s a fair response, especially for a man that’s been watching the Great American Race in person since Gerald Ford was in office.

But, if you as Joy about his most memorable Daytona 500, that draws a different response entirely. Like most of us, his answer goes back to his first one.

And it was a doozy.

“The very first Daytona 500 I was in the track on race day was in 1976,” Joy began. “It wound down to a two-horse race, it came down to Richard Petty and David Pearson and I was on pit road and I walked down to Richard Petty’s pit and it was just packed with people. You couldn’t get near enough to see what was going on those final 10 to 12 laps.

"So I walked up pit road to the Wood Brothers pit and I was standing right behind Leonard Wood as those cars came off of Turn 4. And we could not see them, but we could here Ken Squier over the blaring PA speakers describe the crash between the two leaders and as they spun down into the infield grass, Pearson put the clutch in and feathered the throttle to keep it running, Petty stalled and Pearson shoved across the line at 15 miles per hour to win the race.

“Everyone in that pit, including me, ran out to pit road and started running down to Victory Lane. Getting all swept up in the emotion of that and what might have been the wildest Daytona 500 finish ever. It's hard to eclipse a moment like that.”

A silver lining on the darkest day

It’s hard for most race fans to forget the first Fox NASCAR broadcast, which occurred at the 2001 Daytona 500 and ended with the death of Dale Earnhardt after a last-lap crash.

With the haze of tragedy covering the sport like a storm cloud, it was up to Joy, then-broadcasting partner Darrell Waltrip and analyst Larry McReynolds to soldier on, bringing races to the masses as the season continued.

The following year, the slate once again opened at Daytona and though the wound was still somewhat fresh, Joy had to find a way to turn tragedy into optimism. And before he convinced the viewer, he had to convince himself. He found the necessary inspiration in the additional safety measures NASCAR implemented.

“It was but I think the very next year when we came back, you take a look at that area at that part of the racetrack and you realize all the steps that had been taken in the aftermath,” Joy said. “The teams thought they were building the best cars possible and putting their driver in the safest environment possible to get the job done and that’s something we always felt. Now, you go to the NASCAR Hall of Fame and look at some of the cars from the '50s and '60s and go, ‘How in the world could we have raced cars like this?’ It’s because that’s the best we knew at the time.

“I think when you return you go back with a positive attitude because you know the hard work that’s been done to try and prevent a recurrence and you go with the hope that something like that is not going to happen again.”

Up for the challenge

So, what keeps Joy coming back?

Sure, he loves racing, but racing can be taken in from the stands or from a sports bar or a living room.

But like the very drivers he interviews on a weekly basis, it’s the challenge that keeps Joy hard at work.

“It’s a technical sport and you don’t get to see the range of emotions in a driver that you do in a baseball pitcher or a quarterback or an athlete in other sports as they compete,” Joy said. “Secondly, in other sports, there’s only one ball in play at a time. In NASCAR there’s 40 of them and the next storyline you need to flush out can come from any driver anywhere in the pack at any time.

"That makes our job way, way more difficult to prepare for and difficult to anticipate as the event is going on, compared to traditional stick-and-ball sports.”

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: NASCAR: Broadcaster Mike Joy set to call 44th Daytona 500 on Fox