Remembering Alan Kulwicki, a guy who really did do it his way

MARTINSVILLE, Va. - When you're on the road as much as you have to be to cover the Nextel Cup circuit it gets kind of hard to keep up with things like dates.
It wasn't until mid-morning Saturday that I realized it was April 1. Which means it was the 13th anniversary of the plane crash in which Alan Kulwicki was killed.
Ironically, a couple of other writers and myself had decided last week that we'd cut out after Saturday's Truck race here and go over to South Boston Speedway to see the USAR Hooters Pro Cup series race at that historic track.
The Hooters series is backed by Bob Brooks, the owner of the Hooters restaurant chain. Brooks' company, of course, sponsored Kulwicki's No. 7 Fords in NASCAR, and his son, Mark, was one of the people who died along with Kulwicki in that crash near the Tri-Cities airport near Bristol, Johnson City and Kingsport, Tenn.
I wasn't covering NASCAR the night Kulwicki's plane went down. I was working at the Charlotte Observer, on the sports desk, though, and I remember it vividly. The phone started ringing that night with people asking if we knew anything. After about three or four calls, we all started looking at each other and saying, "Uh-oh."
Before long, there was word that a plane was indeed down. From that point on, it just became surreal.
Kulwicki's championship in 1992 had been such a remarkable story. And now, he was gone. In our paper the next morning, the story said that Kulwicki and four others had been killed in that crash.
That's because that until very late on that tragic night it was believed that a man named Tom Roberts was on the plane, but he wasn't.
Roberts was Kulwicki's public relations man, and he'd made a late decision not to attend an appearance in Knoxville that night with the driver. That's where Kulwicki and the three others were coming from when the plane went down. Tom is still working in NASCAR - he worked with Rusty Wallace for years and now is the PR guy for Kurt Busch and the No. 2 team - and right after I got on this beat he and I started talking one day about Kulwicki's championship and the 1992 Hooters 500, the final race of that year in Atlanta, and how remarkable that race was.
I wrote a story on that race, in which Kulwicki, Bill Elliott and Davey Allison battled for the championship and Richard Petty drove his final Cup event and Jeff Gordon drove his first, for the newspaper and decided there was so much more to write about it. The led to the first racing book I wrote, which is called "Race With Destiny."
The company that published it went bankrupt about the time it came out, so the book never got any distribution. I'm still proud of the book and hope one day I can somehow rescue it from the financial limbo it's stuck in and get it back on the shelves.
Hardly a weekend goes by when somebody in the NASCAR garage doesn't mention how different the sport might be today if Kulwicki, Allison, Tim Richmond and Rob Moroso had been able to realize their full potential before being cut down by tragedy.
It was 20 years ago this year when Kulwicki left Wisconsin and came south to chase his dreams. The fact that he won the championship just six years later is just one of the many amazing things about his life. There'll never be another one quite like him.