by Ryan McGee

"You wouldn't believe what happened one night in Birmingham ... "

"Hell, that's nothing. This one time in Nashville ... "

"Yeah, but you should have seen this deal we had Murfreesboro ... "

When Hamilton walked away from the Cup Series two years earlier, most people thought he was nuts. He was a four-time race winner with a couple of top 10 points finishes and more than $15 million in the bank. He'd been the man who put the famous No. 43 back in Victory Lane for the first time in a dozen years. He'd won on short tracks and superspeedways, grabbing the top spot for three different teams and managing to leave them all without burning any fences.

Still, with guaranteed employment in NASCAR's top series for at least a few more seasons, he had walked away.

Why? Because of moments like this one in Darlington. Sitting around, talking racing, not being able to sort the truth from the B.S. and not caring about it one bit.

After winning the 2004 title, Bobby Hamilton started 2005 by winning the season opener at Daytona when a video review proved that he led Jimmy Spencer when the yellow flag came out to end the race. (Streeter Lecka / Getty Images)

"The Truck Series reminds me of my short track days in Nashville," Hamilton told me that weekend, when he finished second to Kasey Kahne. "All anybody cared about was the racing. The Cup series used to be that way not so long ago. You and your buddies worked on the car during the week, drove the truck to the track, unloaded, raced, drank beer and told lies, then went home. You know what? That's basically my schedule this week. It's fun. I don't think I was having fun anymore over there in Cup."

Hamilton always found racing fun, even when the rest of his life was anything but. His father was "a mean drunk" and his grandparents soon did what they could to keep Bobby from that meanness, bringing him in to live with them when he was only 18 months old. It was through his grandfather, a part-time short track racer and car builder, that little Bobby was introduced to racing. As a kid he picked up odd jobs around Nashville race shops, including the team owned and driven by country music legend Marty Robbins.

When his grandmother died, racing was there for Bobby. Just as it would be when his grandfather passed and he found himself homeless at the age of 13. Racing friends of his grandfather's looked after him until he was 17. He'd already led a grown up's life, but when he finally became a legal adult he knew exactly what he wanted to do.

"I built a racecar. I put a '64 Chevy Nova on a '55 frame and went racing."

He blistered the short tracks of Tennessee, from the Nashville Fairgrounds to places you've never heard of like Highland Rim and Duck River. For years Hamilton lived exactly the kind of life that he described to me that day in Darlington. He and his buddies worked on the car, loaded it up, hauled it to the track, raced, and did it all over again.

He was a Music City hometown hero that caught the eye of a local legend, Darrell Waltrip. When D.W.'s boss, Rick Hendrick, was looking for divers to pilot the cars he was building for the film Days of Thunder, Darrell suggested Hamilton.

"Those cars were built for the movie, to get shots of actual racing, make it look as realistic as possible," Hendrick recalls. "But they weren't supposed to actually be competitive. Well, Bobby goes out there and qualifies in the top 10 and starts passing people and racing up front. From that point on, the secret was out."

In 1991, two decades after being a homeless teenager on the streets of Nashville, Bobby Hamilton was a full-time NASCAR Winston Cup driver. Over the next 13 seasons he started more than 350 Cup races and quickly became one of the most popular men in the garage. He went door-to-door with Dale Earnhardt at Rockingham, promising to "kick his ass the next time I see him." He won for The King, Andy Petree, and Morgan-McClure Motorsports, but never lost touch with the rough hewn kid from Music City, describing then-rookie Kevin Harvick as someone "who thinks he's Dale Earnhardt because he's in Earnhardt's car. But he isn't a pimple on Dale Earnhardt's butt."

Which brings us back to that day in Darlington. He was only a few hundred yards away from the Cup garage, but it might as well have been a few hundred light years. He was one week away from being crowned Truck Series champion. His son, Bobby Jr., was himself a firmly established NASCAR racer, and his granddaughter, Bobby Jr.'s daughter, was barely one month old. Cancer was still one year away, death two.

"This right here," he said with a smile on his face, looking over the boys and their B.S., "This is all I ever wanted."

We should all be so lucky.

Ryan McGee is the managing editor at NASCAR Images. He can be reached at his e-mail address: rmcgee@foxsports.com.