Joe Gibbs Eyeing NASCAR Title While Facing Toughest Challenge as a Father
HUNTERSVILLE, N.C. — Joe Gibbs has coached three teams to wins in the Super Bowl and helped build and guide Joe Gibbs Racing to three championships at the top tier in NASCAR.
He's also held hands and prayed with one of his former NFL players, Dexter Manley, as Manley was chained to a chair in a Houston jail, battling demons that Manley thanked Gibbs for helping him through. And he's seen his grandson, Taylor Gibbs, now 10 and cancer-free, fight courageously through a three-year battle with leukemia that began when Taylor was just two.
So Joe Gibbs knows triumphs and challenges, peaks and valleys. He long ago recognized that life is full of all of them.
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As he gears up for what he hopes will be JGR’s first NASCAR title in 10 years in the Chase for the Sprint Cup, the man whose racing employees still call "Coach" is straddling all of the above. Even as his racing team continued its remarkable hot streak with another victory in the first race of the Chase last Sunday at Chicagoland, where Denny Hamlin won, Gibbs is facing what he says is perhaps his greatest life challenge yet.
His eldest son and JGR's team president, 46-year-old J.D. Gibbs, continues to undergo treatment for what Joe Gibbs described as "brain function issues." The hardest part, Joe said, is that the Gibbs family still does not quite know what is wrong with J.D. Gibbs, nor do doctors seem to yet understand how best to treat him for, in the words of Joe Gibbs, "speech and processing issues" that he and others closest to J.D. first started noticing almost two years ago when J.D. would sometimes slur words or become uncharacteristically forgetful.
"I would say this has been one of the biggest challenges I've ever faced—certainly from a personal standpoint with J.D.," Joe told Bleacher Report in a sit-down interview at the gleaming, spacious JGR facility, his voice cracking from time to time with raw emotion. "For me, it would be like any dad. You step in and step up and do whatever you can do to help."
With Gibbs, now 74, continuing to pitch in at work when others his age are more likely to be pitching golf balls at the nearest country club, JGR has rallied around its stricken team president and is on quite a roll. Hamlin's victory was the organization's third Sprint Cup win in a row and its ninth in the last 12 races. As the Chase heads to New Hampshire this weekend, Gibbs drivers comprise a full one-fourth of the field, with Hamlin, Matt Kenseth, Kyle Busch and Carl Edwards all in contention.
"In pro sports, it's hard to get on a roll like this where you're confident that everything you do is going to work out just right," Gibbs said. "I don't care what sport you're talking about, it just doesn't happen that often. You better enjoy it while you can."
Searching for Answers
While Gibbs is riding the positive momentum his drivers and race teams have provided, he and his family continue to search for answers concerning J.D. They recently spent time in Berkeley, California, with what Gibbs called "a consortium of 34 doctors" who are trying to offer clues, if not outright answers.
"We know that there is no definite medical answer right now. That's what we're searching for," Joe Gibbs said. "When you ask them point-blank about it—and one of the guys is a Nobel Prize winner, along with 33 other brilliant people—they say we're probably about three years away from having medical treatment for what J.D. has. But we also know that right now they're doing clinical studies and what have you, so our goal is to get him in those."
Until then, J.D. continues to show up for work every day. He works out with the trainers who also plan workout regimens for the pit-crew members of the four JGR race teams. Then J.D. sits in on team meetings and works closely with his father on everything from personnel issues to dealing with sponsors to making sure the bills are paid on time.
J.D. declined to be interviewed for this story but was cordial in the JGR lobby after arriving for work a little after 8 a.m. He graciously accepted well-wishes and went on his way, saying only: "I'm here. I'm working hard."
For that, his father is not only appreciative but sometimes dumbfounded, as well as flooded with pride. "He's my hero. I don't know anyone more courageous," Joe Gibbs said.
Others at JGR have long admired the leadership of father and son in the company. But among those who say it has now been taken to an entirely new level is Kyle Busch, driver of the No. 18 Toyota for the organization.
"Joe and J.D. have always been there for me, and especially Joe has always had my back," Busch said. "He's one of the great leaders not only in his race team, but in the world of sports. … It means the world to me just to have Joe put his arm around you and tell you how much he believes in you and it's always helped me to become stronger and more confident.
"We are really one big family at Joe Gibbs Racing and it seems that we all feed off each other. And that kind of starts at the top there, no doubt."
A Season Filled with Emotions
Joe Gibbs and only a handful of others in the JGR organization carried the secret of J.D.'s health issues with them to Daytona this year for the opening of the NASCAR season. The news remained quiet even when their promising year seemed to take a major hit one day before the Daytona 500. It was then, during the season-opening XFINITY Series race, that Kyle Busch was involved in a wreck that left him with a double compound fracture of his right leg and a broken left foot.
"I'm not certain that you're ever sure what's going to happen when someone gets hurt that bad," Gibbs said. "Things like that can really affect you mentally. To come back from that, you've got to be mentally tough as well as physically tough.
"But I'll say this: Two days after those surgeries, I went to [Busch's] house. He was already off pain medication and trying to work out. I mean, he got after it."
Busch said he got after it in large part because he was motivated by Joe—and J.D.
"I think some of the things that Joe has said, especially more recently, is that you are going to have good days and you are going to have bad days," Busch said.
Busch returned in just 11 weeks, ahead of doctors' projections, and soon started winning races again. He won a total of four in one five-week stretch and raced himself into the Chase after NASCAR ruled that he was eligible so long as he finished in the top 30 in points over the first 26 regular-season races (he finished 25th despite competing in only 15 of them).
And when Busch won the Brickyard 400 in July, he took J.D. along for a ride around the famed Indianapolis Motor Speedway in his race car afterward.
"To be able to have J.D. share in that moment with all of us and to take him for a ride in the car around the race track afterward really meant a lot," Busch said. "It was special for sure and those are moments you cherish."
The Man Behind the Success
In the months since, J.D. has continued to be an inspiration to everyone at JGR, said Joe, who has long admired his son's fierce determination. He recalled one time in the mid-1970s when Joe was serving as running backs coach under Don Coryell with the then-St. Louis Cardinals of the NFL.
"J.D. was the kid I never, ever had to encourage to do better or try harder. He always gave it everything he had," Joe Gibbs said. "When he was just a small kid, growing up, they had this floor hockey, which was one of the first things he ever played. It's hockey, with a puck, but they play it on a gym floor. I go to this game with him and I'm up in the stands with all the other dads, and all of a sudden that puck comes flying over to our side of the deal and J.D. is right in the middle of the pack and everything.
"And real loud, I went, 'J.D., get that puck!' Just like that. And he looked right up at me and yelled back, 'I'm trying!' It was at that moment that I told myself I would never say anything like that to him again, because it was obvious he was giving it everything he had."
Joe Gibbs says flatly that JGR wouldn't exist without J.D., noting that the organization's last championship, in 2005 with driver Tony Stewart, came during his own four-year return to coach the Redskins, when J.D. ran JGR without him. A devout Christian, as is J.D., Joe doesn't throw the word "miraculous" around lightly. But he does use it to describe how JGR came to be in 1992, shortly after J.D. wrapped up his own football playing career as a quarterback and defensive back at William & Mary.
"J.D. went into day-to-day operations and running the race team," Joe Gibbs said. "That was a natural for him. It was a fit; that's his world. He was a quarterback; he was the guy who gets along great with people."
It was J.D. who first spotted Hamlin and guided the young driver into the JGR fold—a fact that Hamlin has never forgotten.
"It was about 12, 13 years ago when J.D. happened to just show up at a Hickory test where we were running some late models, and he made a phone call to his dad and said he thought maybe he had something there that was special," Hamlin said. "They signed me up, and J.D. was the key to making that happen. I thank my lucky stars every day that I was able to get in the car that I was able to get into because so many young guys come into this sport and don't get an opportunity with a good team."
The Work Continues
The eldest Gibbs son (younger son Coy founded and runs the motocross arm of JGR) was the guy always out doing something. J.D. had a love for extreme sports, including mountain biking and snowboarding. He even briefly drove a race car. And in 1993, when driver Dale Jarrett notched JGR's first win as an organization in the Daytona 500, one of the tire changers was none other than J.D., who always liked being not just close to but in on the action.
That's another aspect that would seem to make J.D. Gibbs' current situation frustrating. Yet Joe Gibbs says his eldest son has never complained—not now, not when J.D.'s son, Taylor, waged his battle to beat leukemia. Not ever.
Doctors still aren't certain if J.D.'s condition was caused by previous head trauma that could have occurred playing football or participating in another athletic endeavor. They may never know, Joe said. But he added that it doesn't seem to matter to J.D., whom he said focuses on work, doing what he can to get better and spending time with his wife, Melissa, and their four boys.
Meanwhile, Joe Gibbs is as busy as ever at JGR at a time when most of his ex-coaching buddies have long retired. The company has grown from 17 employees in its first year of operation in 1992.
Gibbs laughingly jokes, "We've got 500 people here now. I won't hire anybody at Joe Gibbs Racing unless they sign a statement saying they're a Redskins fan. So we've got a lot of Redskins fans here. There may be one or two who root for another team, but they're hidden. They don't come out in the open."
Gibbs adds that he prays constantly for J.D.'s return to good health while savoring every moment he gets to work by his son's side in the interim, especially in bountiful times like these on the race track. He added that he's not only proud of his son but also of the way JGR has rallied around him.
Then Gibbs looked down and glanced at his watch. It was time to go. Preparations for the next race already were underway.
"We're meeting here at 10 a.m., and J.D. will be in there with us. We'll have prayer, and then we'll start our week," Gibbs said. "There's a lot going on here. Right now it's been our best 14 or 15 weeks in 24 years here. We've got a lot of momentum and we want to keep it going. So it's a great time to be here, really.
"This hasn't necessarily been easy...but J.D.'s working every day. He's in all of our meetings. He's a big part of what we've done in the past and he's going to continue to be a big part of what we do in the future."
All information was obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted.
Joe Menzer has written six books, including two about NASCAR, and now writes about it and other sports for Bleacher Report while also working as a Digital Content Producer for FoxSports.com. Follow him on Twitter @OneMenz.
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