You will be missed, my friend

David Poole types his notes while Mike Mulhern and I record our interview with Speedway Motorsports Inc. CEO Bruton Smith at Charlotte Motor Speedway in 2008. 

Photo by Dwight Drum, racetake.com

On Tuesday morning, I knew exactly what this week’s column was going to be about, but that all changed at 3:28 p.m. when I received an untitled e-mail from the National Motorsports Press Association.

The first line of the e-mail was clear enough. “It is with great sadness that I inform you that David Poole of the Charlotte Observer died this afternoon of a heart attack,” wrote Dustin Long, NMPA president.

I had to read it a couple of times and I even fired off an immediate response hoping this was some sort of sick joke.

But it wasn’t. My friend, David Poole, had died.

Now, I know this doesn’t mean a whole lot to anyone out there other than the most devoted NASCAR fans that remember me mentioning David’s name in my column from time to time, but to me it was chilling — in more ways than one. I couldn’t believe it. I had just heard him doing his radio show on Sirius XM Satellite Radio a few hours earlier. And in two weeks, we were going to meet and discuss a project that we began last year because he had better access to some of the people were needed to speak with. On the radio, he sounded a little congested but I would have never known he was about to die. And neither did he, apparently.

Later in the day, I found out that he had made plans to meet with NASCAR legend Buddy Baker about an upcoming article he was working on and that he had just spoken with Texas Motor Speedway’s Eddie Gossage the night before. No one knew that David’s heart was about to give out.

If you ever saw Poole or heard his show, it was no secret — he was a big guy. He and Tony Stewart would even joke about finding the buffet in the media center during race weekends.

Anyway, David would probably deny it but he was a nice guy. Behind his gruff, ornery demeanor he was always willing to help. And that included reporters who were still trying to gain membership in the tight-nit group that is the NASCAR press corp. David helped me with that and he would always give a wave or yell “Hey, Jerry” or “Hello” from across the room when he saw me. He was my friend and I know I will miss seeing him at the track later this month when I go to cover the All-Star race and the Coca-Cola 600 in Charlotte.

After the news set in, I did some basic research and found that each year there are about 1.5 million people in the United States that suffer from a heart attack and that one-third of them die. So, 500,000 people each year die from a heart attack. Someone is stricken by a heart attack about once every 20 seconds, which means that someone dies from a heart attack every minute or so. Wow, that is a pretty strong statistic.

Suffice it to say, if you are at risk of a heart attack you probably should get checked out or, at the very least, start eating healthier and exercising.

Leave it to my wife to point out that I am no poster child for the cover of Men’s Health Magazine. Yeah, I can stand to drop a few pounds — hell, I can stand to drop a few dozen pounds. This wasn’t something that I wanted to face just 30 minutes after I told her of David’s death, but it is a harsh reality.

To those in the NASCAR community — the ones that travel the circuit regularly — David Poole was the go-to guy for NASCAR news. Think about it this way. When David Poole wrote a column, covered a race or interviewed a driver, it was people like Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jack Roush and Richard Childress who read his work. Being based in Charlotte and working for the Observer, he was the “local” reporter for the NASCAR. In the media center, he was the person that set the tone and he could be very vocal about it. But if there was something that he could do to help facilitate getting the story out to the fans quicker, he would push for it.

I have read a lot of quotes about what David meant to different people but I think the one from Dale Jr. says it all, “David Poole was as much a fixture in this sport as the actual cars themselves.”

As for David’s wife, Katy, his grandson Eli, daughter Emily and sons Matthew and David and other loved ones, you all should know that David was very special to a lot of people that you never met, including myself. As I listened to Sirius throughout the afternoon on Tuesday, it was overwhelmingly apparent that David Poole had touched many, many people’s lives. He cared about what he wrote and he cared for the people he wrote it about. That is an ability that not every journalist has. I looked up to David Poole and I hope that I can be half as good at covering this sport as he was. I will miss seeing him at the track each time I cover a race in the future. His loss is huge and I don’t envy the person who has to come along behind him and try to fill his shoes.