Twenty years later, my most vivid memory of that day is glancing to my immediate left in the press box and seeing the somber look on Orlando Sentinel colleague Ed Hinton’s face.
Hinton, then the Sentinel’s iconic racing writer, simply shook his head and said three words, “This ain’t good.”
It would be a couple of hours before NASCAR made the official announcement that the legendary Dale Earnhardt had died when he slammed head-on into the wall on the final lap of the Daytona 500, but Hinton already knew because he had been covering death for decades.