Fennig Funeral Home

C. — Dick Trickle had a name that was so easy to mock that anchors on ESPN’s “SportsCenter” made him famous by mentioning him regularly during the network’s auto racing reports in the 1990s. If that playful teasing ever overshadowed what he accomplished as a short-track racer in the Midwest and as a mentor to some of Nascar’s best, it never diminished Trickle’s impact on the sport.But now Trickle has become a mystery to those who knew and admired him. He died on Thursday at age 71 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to the Lincoln County, N.C., sheriff’s office.Trickle’s body was found next to his truck, which was parked at a cemetery in Boger City, N.C., where his granddaughter is buried. Officials said he had apparently called the Lincoln County Communications Center and said that there would be a dead body and it would be his. Trickle’s family released a statement through a funeral home on Friday that read, in part: “He had been suffering for some time with severe chronic pain, had seen many doctors, none of which could find the source of his pain. His family as well as all those who knew him find his death very hard to accept, and though we will hurt from losing him for some time, he’s no longer suffering and we take comfort knowing he’s with his very special angel.”As Nascar drivers and crew members prepared for the annual Sprint All-Star Race on Saturday night at Charlotte Motor Speedway, Trickle was on the minds of many.“I knew Dick a long time,” said Jimmy Fennig, a former driver from Trickle’s home state of Wisconsin and now the crew chief for Carl Edwards, who paid tribute to Trickle during his pole-winning performance Friday. “I used to race against him in upper Wisconsin, you know,” Fennig said. “Dick was a racer’s racer.”Fennig, who won a Cup title with Kurt Busch in 2004, was Trickle’s crew chief when he was the rookie of the year in what was then the Winston Cup in 1989. Fennig recalled the first race of Trickle’s rookie season, when he showed up at North Carolina Speedway ... (New York Times)

TALLADEGA, Ala. — In sports, loyalty oftentimes can be difficult to come by.In the NFL, coaches are hired and fired with little hesitation. Players being released before their contracts are fulfilled is the norm, not the exception. And fans adopting multiple favorites or simply abandoning one losing team for another winning team is somewhat of an epidemic.It’s not hard to see why being a “bandwagon” fan is easy, though. Across all national sports, teams and their members are covered more closely than ever before and even if that team is not located nearby, it’s easy to learn everything there is to know about it, using any method from television to the internet to following teams’ and players’ every move on various forms of social media.As sportswriters, whether for a local newspaper or a national entity, we either conceal our rooting interests or abandon them altogether. I have used this space to write about NASCAR many times before, and will do so again here, but I have always done so in as unbiased fashion as I am capable. After today, I will resume doing so.But anyone who knows me personally understands I have a couple rooting interests that really matter to me, to which I am fiercely loyal and that predate my time writing for this newspaper — which just so happens to be my first home in any professional news writing capacity. One of those interests is the Oakland Raiders, who rewarded me enough when they returned to the NFL playoffs for the first time in 14 years this past winter. The other is NASCAR driver Ricky Stenhouse Jr.As you may have heard by now, Stenhouse claimed his first career Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series victory in the GEICO 500 at Talladega Superspeedway on Sunday. I had the great fortune to be with my father in the grandstands for that win, witnessing what felt like a huge reward for my loyalty to Stenhouse, a two-time XFINITY Series champion, and the No. 17 Roush Fenway Racing team.I wasn’t the only diehard “RSJ” fan in attendance by any means, however. My good friend Jay Wil... (Morganton News Herald)