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Beard or no beard, Johnson can get the job done

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Updated Mar 31, 2009 1:15 PM ET
     
 
Jimmie Johnson's new, scruffy face has given him a tougher, meaner appearance, with his thin semblance of a beard replacing his clean, boyish looks. He's not exactly Tony Stewart, whose menacing five o'clock shadow gives him a sinister look, but he's no longer looks like baby-faced Jeff Gordon or Kyle Busch, either. Johnson's crew chief, Chad Knaus, hates it. Johnson's grandmother hates it, too, and has begged him to shave because his face is "too good looking to have a beard on it." His beautiful wife, Chandra, has been mum on the subject, but she must like it or he wouldn't have it. The beard has given Johnson a harder edge, making him appear to be a man not to be messed with. It seems to have carried over onto the racetrack as well, as evidenced by Johnson bullying his way past Denny Hamlin on Sunday to win at Martinsville Speedway. Though Johnson insists he didn't intentionally bump or shove Hamlin out of his way with 16 laps remaining, he clearly forced the issue, showing an intensity and aggressiveness not typically seen from the mild-mannered three-time champion.

Johnson typically wins races the modern way, by taking sleek, highly engineered cars and driving them faster than everyone else. He wins with focus, determination and superior driving talent. He is not from the old school, where pushing and shoving and trading paint was the name of the game. Or the school of hard knocks, where knocking the competition into the fence was OK, too. Johnson usually wins three ways: By running away from the competition; by running down the competition; or by sitting back and waiting on his brilliant crew chief to tweak his car or devise another winning strategy. He'll go door to door with NASCAR's best, but he rarely has to resort to roughhouse tactics. He makes it look so easy, in fact, that it's rarely much of a contest. He just drives his dominant car where he knows it will go and makes it stick. (Poor Carl Edwards ran his car into the wall trying to beat Johnson at Kansas last year and still lost.) Rarely do you see Johnson roughing up other drivers and inciting a riot. Rarely does he use his bumper to nudge someone out of the way. And he never, ever wrecks another driver to win. As a result, he is boring. Boringly good. He is so good and so clean (and clean-shaven), that he is perceived by fans as dull. He is vanilla — flavorless, unexciting and, usually, unsatisfying. He is booed on Sunday not because he is an arrogant, mean-spirited, dirty driver, but because he is not. He wins too often and too easily. Yet Sunday, Johnson showed that he does indeed have an edge and some spunk, that he is not afraid to mix it up and get physical when he has to. He didn't wreck Hamlin, and he didn't really use the bump-and-run tactic that drivers such as Dale Earnhardt made famous and that current stars like Gordon, Kyle Busch and Carl Edwards have shown a knack for. Instead, he merely forced the action, bullying his car to the inside of Hamlin, initiating contact and, as a result, forcing him out of the groove.

It was the kind of aggressive move you expect out of more fiery drivers, but not the normally calm, cool and collected Johnson. He bumped, pushed and shoved, but in a nice way. He was cleanly aggressive, using both muscle and finesse at the same time. Johnson made his aggressive move for the lead seem so totally acceptable that not even Hamlin could complain. He claimed Johnson did move him out of the way, but he wasn't angry — only disappointed, again — and admitted that he would have done the same thing. What Johnson showed Sunday is that he does indeed have an edge to him, and he wants to win badly enough that he is willing to get physical to do it. That is a quality his many detractors should admire. Maybe it's the beard. "The beard has nothing to do with it," he says. "(But) Chad hates the beard, so I'm going to keep it as long as I can."

Jeff Owens is a writer for NASCAR Scene, which is published weekly, 46 weeks per year. Visit www.scenedaily.com for more information.

Tagged: Jimmie Johnson, Carl Edwards, Jeff Gordon, Kyle Busch, Tony Stewart, Denny Hamlin

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