Each of the six letters of Sam Ard’s name were written with painstaking precision over and over again.
Saturday morning at the Memory Lane Motorsports and Historical Automotive Museum was Sam Ard Benefit Day, and Ard signed autographs, slow and steady. The two-time NASCAR champion was dressed dapperly in a white, blue-striped sweater and khakis with sharp creases — as if he would be headed to the country club for 18 holes after the last hero card was signed.
But there is no country club, no golf game waiting for Ard, who will turn 69 on Valentine’s Day. Unlike the museum, which basks in the cool crispness of florescent lights, Ard’s Memory Lane is fraught with gaslight shadows and the unceasing fog of Alzheimer’s, his ability to communicate stymied by Parkinson’s disease.

... Ard’s Memory Lane is fraught with gaslight shadows and the unceasing fog of Alzheimer’s, his ability to communicate stymied by Parkinson’s disease.

Slow and steady, letter by letter — it is a tragic, ironic twist in the life of a former race-car driver who built a career on the pursuit of speed. Some days are better than others but there aren’t nearly enough of the good days. Not anymore.
There is routine. There are arduous trips to the doctor’s office. There is constant care. There are mounting medical bills. There is the increasingly faint hope of cure. There is fear.
“I dread the day I come home and he doesn’t know who I am,” said Robert Ard, Sam’s 37-year-old son.
Robert, who bears a striking resemblance to his father as a young man, raced himself until three years ago. The love for the track, for the rumble of engines was something the two had always shared. Even after he got sick, Sam loved going to the track, so Robert raced on until his father’s health faltered.
“You wouldn’t believe just how much he has deteriorated from three years ago — from that point to now,” Robert said, shaking his head. “His quality of life is terrible. He lives very modestly, no, almost in poverty.”
Doctors have told the Ard family that a crash during a Grand National race at Rockingham, N.C. in 1984, during which Ard sustained serious head injuries, hastened the advent of Alzheimer’s if it didn’t cause it altogether. After 22 series victories and 24 poles, it was Ard’s final race.
Had Ard been born 20 years later, perhaps he would have cashed in on the boon with a seven-figure contract from one of the Cup series mega-teams, endorsements and fame. Maybe the things NASCAR has learned about driver safety over the decades would have saved Ard’s retirement years.
Maybe the four walls at home in Pamplico, S.C., wouldn’t seem so small. Maybe the fog would be gone, and the letters would come quick and easy.
Because drivers are independent contractors, and there is no collective bargaining agreement as is the case of Major League Baseball, the NBA and NFL, NASCAR has no obligation to help Ard — or his ever-graying contemporaries, many of whom came to sign autographs and lend Ard a hand on Saturday.
Robert said members of the NASCAR family, including some of its Daytona-based chiefs such as Mike Helton, have helped with donations on other days like this. But NASCAR, the corporation, has done nothing.
It is not NASCAR’s duty to help every retired driver who never made it to the big pay window. But in an extreme case such as that of Ard, whose pain today stems from a wreck in a NASCAR race some 24 years ago, is there not a moral obligation to do something? Anything more than a pat on the back at the future  opening of its own museum?
NASCAR has a philanthropic arm with its foundation — perhaps it should consider using it to reach out to a generation of drivers who built the sport over the past 50 years.
Charity, they say, begins at home.
With the benefit over, money raised for an old friend, home waits at the end of the day for Ard — good days and bad.
Slow and steady.