Dale Earnhardt Broke His Own Hand Defending His North Carolina Farm From Poachers

Dale Earnhardt Jr. revealed on Wednesday’s episode of “The Dale Jr. Download” that his father, seven-time NASCAR Cup Series champion Dale Earnhardt, once broke his own hand while confronting a man who had illegally shot a deer on the family’s North Carolina property.

The 1993 incident, as Earnhardt Jr. told it, began when a man doing tractor work on Earnhardt’s land spotted deer on the property during the day. That evening, the man went to a bar and told a friend what he’d seen. The two decided, with encouragement from a few drinks, to sneak back onto the land after dark and shoot one of the animals.

“The more they drank, the braver they got,” Earnhardt Jr. said.

Around dusk, the men hopped the fence onto Earnhardt’s property. Unbeknownst to them, Earnhardt and his farm manager were walking a nearby power line clearing at the same time. The two heard a gunshot and saw a wounded deer run down the clearing before it collapsed. Rather than confront the trespassers immediately, Earnhardt and his farm manager retreated into the tree line to wait.

When the men came to retrieve the deer, Earnhardt charged the one holding the gun, tackled him, and punched him repeatedly in the face — hard enough to break his own hand in the process. Earnhardt recognized the man’s voice as the same worker who had been on his tractor earlier that day, and held him until police arrived.

Protecting the herd, not a trophy

According to Earnhardt Jr., his father wasn’t defending a deer he intended to hunt himself. Earnhardt kept a herd of impressive bucks on the property but preferred simply watching them rather than shooting them, and he didn’t want word getting out that his land held prized deer, for fear it would draw more trespassers.

That secrecy extended to how he explained the injury publicly. When Earnhardt showed up to the 1993 NASCAR awards banquet with a cast on his broken hand, he gave a different story for how it happened rather than reveal the poaching confrontation.

“He didn’t want people to know about his deer,” Earnhardt Jr. explained. “He didn’t want more people showin’ up, trying to sneak into his property.”

Earnhardt reportedly had a black-and-white cast made to match his tuxedo as he accepted his sixth Cup Series championship trophy that night.

The injury caused a separate problem heading into the 1994 season: Earnhardt was told he would not be permitted to race in the Daytona 500 while wearing the cast. According to his son, Earnhardt simply cut the cast off himself to get around the restriction.