by Darrell Waltrip

(Ric Feld / Associated Press)

People give me pins and a lot of things to wear. I collect them, and I save them. Very seldom do I use one because I get so many of them. On Saturday at Bristol this year, a young lady who works for Hendrick Motorsports gave me a blue bracelet for the Hendrick Marrow Foundation, and she said that Rick Hendrick wanted me to have it.

I knew the foundation meant a lot to Rick, and it would have been his son Ricky's 25th birthday. So I took it out of the package, and I put it on.

It was raining so we weren't doing the race, but we did an update later on that afternoon. When we went on, I had the bracelet on, and lo and behold, Rick was at home just trying to find out what was going on with the race. He called me right after we went off the air, and he said: "I wasn't even watching. I just happened to be flicking around, trying to find out if they were going to race or not. There you were standing there on TV, and you had the bracelet on. It meant so much to me to see that you were wearing it."

I just thought that was a God thing. I wouldn't normally wear something like that, but for some reason, I felt that I needed to put on that bracelet that day. It meant so much to Rick so it was such a blessing to me, and I think it was a blessing to him, too.

You can get bracelets at HendrickMotorsports.com. They have a store, and you can buy them there for $1. They've sold about 500,000 of them, and the proceeds go to the Hendrick Marrow Foundation. If you get one, you'll see that there's an inscription on the bracelet that reads, "Life is a team sport."

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When Rick was going through treatment for leukemia, he talked with his daughter Lynn about the doctors, friends, family and bone marrow donors who helped him. Together, they came up with the slogan "Life is a team sport" because it takes a lot of people to overcome leukemia and other life-threatening diseases. Oh, by the way, Lynn is an absolutely incredible young lady. If you happened to see the Hendrick memorial service last fall on SPEED, you'll remember her. There wasn't a dry eye in the house when she talked about her brother, uncle and cousins and how much she loved them and what they meant to her.

Lynn and Rick rolled out this program two weeks before the plane crash at Martinsville last year. After that tragedy, they decided that not only was it a way of raising money and awareness for the Hendrick Marrow Foundation, but it was also a way of paying tribute to all those that were on the plane crash. The bracelet has a lot of meaning. Life is a team sport because it took so many people to get him through his physical problem with leukemia. But after what happened in Martinsville, life is a team sport took on a new meaning because it takes a lot of people to get through a tragedy like a plane crash.

I wholeheartedly agree that life is a team sport. We can never get through tragedy, hard times and disappointments without a lot of people in our lives supporting us and encouraging us. A lot of people have asked me about the bracelet, which pleases me. I just thought that you might like to know a little bit about it.