Clint Bowyer to delivery room doctor: 'Get the hell out of my way'
As with just about anything that Sprint Cup Series driver Clint Bowyer does, the birth of his first child -- a baby boy named Cash -- was anything but ordinary.
Let's just say that Bowyer, one of the most gregarious, free-spirited, comical personalities in the entire NASCAR garage, wasn't going to take a backseat to anyone in the delivery room -- including the attending nurse and physician -- if it meant missing a second of his son's big arrival.
"All of the sudden that little gremlin comes out of there and you're like, 'Oh my God, this is real,'" Bowyer said on Friday at Kansas Speedway, two days after his wife, Lorra, gave birth to their son. "I was probably not the norm as far as spectator in an event like that. In the room there I was high-fiving people and I was kind of pushing the doctor out of the way at one point because I was trying to get a better view of him coming into the world. Of course the nurses are trying to hold me back, and they're like, 'You can't get that close.' I'm like, 'Get the hell out of my way, here he comes.'
"It was a lot of fun. We were all laughing. An amazing experience."
As with most first-time dads, Bowyer has been waking up all times of night by a baby's cry -- a big adjustment, to be certain.
"He's running really good during the day," Bowyer said. "You think this is way too easy, this is no problem at all. Then his engine drastically takes a turn for the worst about the time you're trying to go to sleep on that really comfortable couch over in the corner that's about this wide, and basically like sleeping right here on this tabletop, he starts really screaming very loud."
And that hasn't been the only source of Bowyer's sleep shortage the past few days.
"The nurses tend to come in to do paperwork at 3 a.m., which is really handy," he said, clearly tongue-in-cheek. "They want to ask you about your education and things like that, and you're like, 'Lady, can we wait until daylight maybe -- that would be a good goal' -- 3 a.m. is not a good time in the morning to be talking to me with him screaming, (Lorra) pissed and now I am. It's been a wild deal, and Cash is awesome."
As for the Bowyers' somewhat eccentric choice of a baby name, the driver of the No. 15 Michael Waltrip Racing Toyota offered a thorough explanation.
"Probably for all the cash that he's going to cost me over the years when he gets to racing cars or something," Bowyer joked. "I'm going to try to put a guitar in his hand, because I always laugh at Blake (Shelton, country artist). I'm like, 'Just because you breathe a little bit better than I do and you can hold a guitar, you get paid to go all across the country, and you don't really do much -- you just breathe a little bit better.'
"Then these golfers, I don't even think they carry their clubs. They just walk around and swing a club every now and then and make a hell of a good living. I'm thinking we're going to try one of them two (careers) first, and if that doesn't work, then he'll probably be over here battling out all my peers."
Bowyer indeed envisions a day when Cash could share a racetrack with the young children of several of his fellow drivers.
"It will be fun to watch how this all unravels, because a lot of us racers right now have kids pretty well within a five-year radius of all this," he said. "We're going to be back battling each other probably for the rest of our lives. ... I don't know if you've ever been to a T-ball game or a soccer game with the parents -- that's when it gets out of control. I can just see us yelling and screaming at each other and still fighting when we're 60 or 70 years old and our kids are racing, just like our dads did."
