This article appears in the May 3 issue of ESPN The Magazine.
Kurt and Kyle Busch hear the boos.
They've also watched replays of the moments that earned them the weekly verbal beatings that
cascade from the grandstands like acid rain during prerace intros. The Las Vegas natives know their stunts haven't endeared them to what the league calls its traditional fans (and the rest of us call Southerners). YouTube is packed with classic Busch brother moments: Kurt laying the bumper to Jimmy Spencer at Bristol, denying NASCAR's most beloved junkyard dog a rare trip to Victory Lane; Kyle punting Dale Earnhardt Jr. off the lead at Richmond, sending the sport's most popular driver around in a cloud of camera-flash-fried tire smoke; Kyle again, raising his Nashville Superspeedway trophy, a hand-painted Fender guitar, then smashing it to pieces like Pete Townshend at Wembley Stadium.
Call it arrogance. Call it win-at-all-costs. Call it what you want. The Busches don't care. All those infamous incidents were the product of one all-important aim: the win. Whether the Cup faithful like it or not, these interlopers are marching inexorably to the front of the line of legendary NASCAR brothers, a straightaway of stock car sibling success that runs from Terry and Bobby Labonte to Ward and Jeff Burton to -- hands over hearts -- Bobby and Donnie Allison, the by-god Alabama Gang. One day, most likely sooner rather than later, Kurt and Kyle Busch will be considered the greatest brother duo of all-time. So let the people jeer.
"Do I hear the boos?" Kurt, 31, asks with a laugh. "Sure I do. But not like I used to. And not like he does."
"These days I hear a little more," agrees Kyle, younger by six and a half years. "But it's changing. I measure the percentages each week. It used to be 90-10, boos to cheers, now it's 70-30, maybe 60-40.
Winning always helps the situation." He turns to his big brother. "You still booing me?"
"Not all the time," Kurt says with a smirk. "Winning does fix most things."
Apparently, "most things" includes a sibling rivalry taken to the extreme. Because this smiling, joking pair was not long ago a family in full fracture.
Kurt and Kyle Busch hear the boos. They hear them every time someone screams, "Why should I like you? Hell, your own brother doesn't like you!" There was a time when that one bothered them, back when it was true.
Today's meeting, on a prerace Friday at the Talladega infield motor coach lot, begins with a fist bump. Then the brothers slouch into some casual chilling time in a pair of folding chairs set in the shade of Kyle's towering new RV, the very same bus in which he proposed to longtime girlfriend Samantha Sarcinella on the night of Feb. 4 at Daytona. As soon as she said yes, he walked next door to big bro's bus to deliver the news. "Of course I did," Kyle says with a shrug. "Why wouldn't I?"
Well, for starters, because for a while the two were barely talking to each other. "We had a rough patch," Kurt admits as Kyle listens. "We had a moment that took place in front of the world, then we let that moment eat us up a bit. But we dealt with it and we moved on."
Kyle interrupts. "We're not the ones who keep bringing it up."
May 19, 2007. Charlotte Motor Speedway, the Nextel All-Star Challenge, an old-school, 80-lap, Saturday-night dash for a million-dollar check. Kyle, a 22-year-old self-confessed wild man, was
behind the wheel of a Hendrick Motorsports Chevy. Kurt, the 28-year-old, seven-year Cup vet who'd won a championship in 2004, was in his second season as Rusty Wallace's replacement in the legendary No. 2 Dodge. Under the lights, in front of 100,000 fans, they hammered their 3,400-pound machines into Turn 1 of Lap 63. Kurt, preoccupied with Jeff Burton on his outside, took the bottom lane through the front-stretch tri-oval and hit the turn at more than 190 mph. Suddenly his spotter called over the radio, "Inside ... he's making it three-wide!"
Kyle.
The No. 5 Chevy's driver had whisked across the back bumpers of Kurt and Burton, letting his inside tires graze the grass as he nosed into the bottom line alongside his brother's door. There was contact, then more contact. Not able to hold the line, Kyle hit the flat apron at the entrance to the corner, lost control and sent both cars directly into the outside retaining wall, wrecked.
"I was waiting for the day we'd get together," Kurt said later as he stood over his destroyed ride. "I guess he was thinking I'd give him some room, and I was thinking he'd give me some room. Clearly, no one gave anyone any room."
Until that night, their age difference had kept them from racing against each other much. But they had always felt the pull of the track. By the time he was 6, Kyle was working on Kurt's race cars with his brother and their father, Tom, himself an obsessively dedicated short-track racer. "Spend a few minutes with Tom Busch and you understand the boys much better," says Roger Penske.
The three worked shoulder-to-shoulder-to-shoulder all week in the shop Tom built beside the family house in the suburbs west of Vegas. But when Saturday rolled around, Kyle, too young to hang in the pits, had to watch from the grandstands. "I was in charge of videotaping Kurt's races. There's a lot of video that's kind of shaky because I was also his spotter. I'd have the radio in one hand and the video camera in the other."
Kurt won early and often, and on Sundays the boys spent the day in front of the TV with Tom, watching race video as if it were game film. Kurt, tell me what you were thinking here. Then they'd all watch the day's Cup race together. See what Earnhardt did there? Watch how deep Jeff Gordon drives it into the corner ...
After the race ended, they pulled the family go-kart onto the cul-de-sac off Duneville Street, set up a slalom with crushed soda cans and took turns running the course against the stopwatch. Because he couldn't measure his skills against his brother's head-to-head, Kyle became obsessed with matching, then bettering, Kurt's track times at each rung of the developmental ladder, from the entry-level divisions of the Bullring at Las Vegas Motor Speedway to the lower levels of NASCAR and beyond.
"Kyle has always been dead-set on, 'I can do what Kurt can do,'" Tom says, sitting in a crusty little race shop office in Mooresville, N.C., on land Kurt owns, as he sifts through drawers of Busch brothers memorabilia. "Regardless of the age difference, that was always his motivation: catch up, keep up, then eventually pass whatever Kurt had done. It's what has made him so good. And Kurt likes applying that pressure."
Kurt helped Kyle's advancement in other ways, too. His quick NASCAR success opened doors for his little brother. After he exploded onto the scene for owner Jack Roush, Roush quickly inked Kyle to a development contract. In less than a year, citing the logjam in the team's driver pipeline, Kyle bolted for Hendrick Motorsports, NASCAR's version of ditching the Red Sox for the Yankees. The real reason for the move was more personal: Kyle's entire racing life had been blanketed by Kurt's shadow. "It was to get out from under my brother a little bit," admits the driver with the garage nickname Shrub, as in little Busch. "I was 17, I needed my own identity. When Kurt came in he was Kurt Busch. When I came in I was Kurt Busch's little brother. I was proud of that, but I needed something of my own."
Two years later he joined Kurt in the Cup Series. "That was the first time we'd raced each other on a regular basis," Kurt says. "He won some, I won a couple. But we never really had to race each other hard or battle for a win. Not until the All-Star race."
After the crash, a few days went by as each brother waited for the other to apologize. Kurt
finally made the call, but little brother answered the phone with only a curt, "What?" Both
described the resolution as agreeing to disagree. Thus began the Silent Time.
"Racing against your brother is so hard," says Jeff Burton, who ran against big brother Ward a total of 372 times between 1994 and 2007. Unlike the Busches, though, the Burtons had worked out most familial issues on the short tracks before arriving in the big leagues. "There's a level of emotion that doesn't exist with just another guy," Burton says. "And so many more people are involved. Our mother had to sit us down and say, 'Stop making the family miserable or no more racing.'"
In the Busch household, it was their paternal grandmother, Joann Kelly, who delivered that message. Kelly had moved to North Carolina to be near her family, but her grandsons had avoided each other for nearly an entire racing season, even at the NASCAR awards banquet on Nov. 30 in New York, during which they were recognized for finishing in the Top 10 in points -- Kyle fifth, Kurt seventh. She wasn't about to let the excruciating tension ruin her Christmas dinner. "Grandma announced we were going to play board games," Kurt recalls. "Kyle and I had to play as a team. As you can imagine, we weren't real happy about that. Things weren't fixed that day, but it started to thaw the ice."
The happy reunion seemed to hit a snag the following season when Kyle, now with Joe Gibbs
Racing, led the league with eight regular-season wins and made the postseason Chase while Kurt won only once and finished 18th in points. What's more, Kyle dominated the racing headlines in 2008 because of an ongoing spat with Dale Jr. For the first time, Kurt was the lesser-known Busch. But to hear the brothers tell it, what looked like more trouble actually helped complete the reconciliation. "See, that's where everyone thought we weren't speaking, but we were," Kyle says. "Suddenly, I'm winning races in bunches and
getting booed like crazy, and I was in a feud with a popular guy. Kurt had been in those shoes
several years earlier, so I was constantly asking him how he handled it."
"If I only knew then what I know now," Kurt says, referring to the three-year rivalry with fan- favorite Spencer that firmly established him as a racetrack black hat.
"That's okay," little brother tells him with a slap of Kurt's knee. "You knew for me. It used to kill me when I'd hear people bashing Kurt early in his career. I think he felt the same when it happened to me, though I did play it up more than he did."
They've tried it apart and it just didn't work. "He learned from me and I learned from him," Kurt says. "So now we're back to doing it together. I have my two teammates at Penske Racing and I have my family teammate in Kyle."
Busch family gatherings are no longer an exercise in strained diplomacy; they're just dinners. The boys politely sit for a while and listen to whatever their mother, grandmother and significant others want to talk about, then slip away with Tom to talk racing and, of course, to break down video. "They're a unified front," says crew chief Steve Addington, who guided Kyle to his best seasons in 2008 and 2009 before being fired last winter and promptly rehired to fill the same position for Kurt this season. "People still want them to be these feuding guys, but they're older and settled and getting along. And that should be scary to some people."
Walt MacKinnon is waiting on Kurt and Kyle Busch. The oil field worker from Louisiana stands on a homemade wooden deck bolted to the roof of a retired school bus that has been painted to
resemble Earnhardt Jr.'s Chevy. Each year, the 42-year-old MacKinnon, covered head-to-toe in Dale Jr. gear, picks this parking spot in the Talladega infield, up against the chain-link fence that lines the bottom of the five-story-tall Turn 3, and waits for the Cup drivers to take their prerace, crowd-waving turn around the oval in convertibles. Because here, far away from the enormous grandstands, drivers can hear his every word.
"Here comes Kurt," Walt says, cupping his hands around his mouth to bellow messages that echo off the asphalt banks. "You suck, and so does your baby brother!" Minutes later, Kyle rides by and is similarly showered with abuse.
"They're getting along now?" MacKinnon says, peering over his shades in disbelief, when someone updates him on the Busch brothers' status. "That makes me want to hate them even more. We don't need any cooperation out there." As Kyle disappears into Turn 4 he fires off one more, "And you're ugly too!"
Three and half hours later he will see the Busches ride by again, on the race's final lap, hooked up nose-to-tail in an aerodynamic draft. For the final restart with two to go, the top dozen cars will pick their dance partners. Kurt and Kyle will choose each other and push their way to eighth and ninth, respectively good enough to move Kyle to fifth and Kurt to seventh in the points standings.
But for now, satisfied that his messages have been delivered, MacKinnon flops into his plastic seat. Friends congratulate him on a fine effort, laugh loudly, then settle into the silence that always follows a group guffaw. Walt takes a sip of beer, thinks for a moment. Suddenly, he perks up to offer a very serious confession: "I'll tell you this, though. The sumbitches can drive."
Ryan McGee is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine.