1961 -- As a car dealer, Ollen Bruton Smith had grown accustomed to the ups and downs of a life in business, but nothing could have prepared him for the disappointment of watching his first racetrack fail within two years. There had been problems with the project from the very beginning, when Smith teamed up with a lumber baron and stock car driver named Curtis Turner to build a facility in Charlotte, North Carolina to host contests sponsored by the National Association for Stock Car Racing (NASCAR). As a child, Smith had dreamed of racing cars for a living and was racing and promoting stock car events by the age of 18. He quit the sport at his mother's request, explaining years later that "She started praying I would stop. You can't fight your mom and God, so I stopped driving." Still, Smith loved the sport and continued to work as a regional promoter. When the chance came to build a new "superspeedway" in Charlotte, Smith jumped in with both feet. Financed by Smith's wealthy brother-in-law, the project broke ground in 1959. Within a few weeks, excavation workers had struck a massive slab of solid granite -- a half million square yards of it -- that increased the cost of the speedway by hundreds of thousands of dollars. When the track opened the following year, the surface crumbled after a few races. Combined with poor turnout, the costly repairs sent the shareholders into a mad frenzy, leading to Smith being ousted from the company. Broke and discouraged, Smith declared bankruptcy and left North Carolina altogether in 1962. The Speedway was turned over to a wealthy furniture dealer, and Smith headed off to Illinois.
2007 -- One of the wealthiest people in the United States, O. Bruton Smith couldn't help but marvel at the road he'd traveled since his bankruptcy almost a half century before. His induction into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame was simply the latest honor in a career filled with great risks and even greater rewards. The chairman and CEO of Speedway Motorsports, Inc., Smith oversaw six major NASCAR tracks, including Lowe's Motor Speedway (formerly Charlotte Motor Speedway), as well as facilities in Atlanta, Tennessee, New Hampshire, Las Vegas, Kentucky, California, and Texas, where in 1996 Smith opened the second-largest track in the nation, the $250 million, 150,000-seat Texas Motor Speedway. With a net worth of $1.5 billion, Smith owned some of the most important racing venues in the United States, as well as nearly 200 car dealerships.
After the failure in Charlotte, Smith went back to dealing cars for a living, eventually building up a chain of ten dealerships in Illinois. He set aside a large amount of his income, however, and within a few years began purchasing stock in his old racetrack. By 1975, he'd regained control over Charlotte Motor Speedway and returned to the sport at the right moment, when tobacco giant RJ Reynolds launched an unprecedented sponsorship deal with NASCAR and helped turn a regional sport into one with a national fan base. Though he had failed the first time around, Smith couldn't leave behind the abiding passion of his life. As he joked to a reporter in the late 1990s, "All of us who were in the business [had] tried to kill it, but it would not die. So I figured it must be a hell of a sport." Throughout his career, Smith devoted nearly all of his energy to promoting the sport he loved, trying to convince others that it was in fact a "hell of a sport." He spent millions on improvements at his racetrack, adding luxury suites and upscale restaurants while improving the landscaping and adding lights for night racing. Smith staged lively pre-race events, featuring Elvis impersonators and a car-crushing mechanical giant called "Robosaurus." In short, Smith dedicated himself to something he loved and tried to figure out how to bring others to the show. His dedication had much to do with making NASCAR one of the most popular spectator sports in America today.