NASCAR’s best drivers often polarize fanbases. Jeff Gordon did it with his dominant run of three Cup Series championships in the 1990s. The late great Kyle Busch drew boos from crowds when he dropped down to O’Reilly or Truck Series races and coasted to wins against younger drivers, adding to his legacy as the winningest driver in the sport’s history. What did they have in common? They were both great. Kenny Wallace realized that a little late.
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In an interview on NASCAR’s Substack, Wallace spoke to reporter Kaitlyn Vincie about his childhood and how he and his family were hated in the St. Louis area.
“Well, my dad won about 400 races around the St. Louis area back in the day, and he was very good, but the fans did not like us. My mom and myself would get into fights with fans back in the day, and I was just this little kid at the track,” Wallace said to Vincie.
Wallace’s dad, Russ, was an icon in local short-track racing and did win more than 400 races in the 1960s and 70s. Valley Park, Lake Hill Speedway, and the I-55 Speedway were practically his playgrounds, and racing fans in St. Louis were quite familiar with the Wallace family name. But success at that level also has drawbacks.
As a child, Kenny used to see his dad get all the hate from fans, despite winning so much. And for about three decades, he didn’t understand why. It was only Jimmie Johnson‘s era of dominance that made him realize that the St. Louis-area people gave them so much grief because Russ was a legend.
“The fans were brutal back then to my dad, which always really bothered me until I saw Jimmie Johnson dominating. Then I realized they just hated him because he was so good,” Wallace continued in the same interview.
In all of sports, this is a common occurrence. A team, player, or driver winning almost every game or race can turn what was once a spectacle into something boring. When Johnson was dominating the sport and being ridiculously dominant, the predictability of the race results made NASCAR boring for some fans and turned him into a villain in their eyes.
Johnson won five consecutive Cup Series championships between 2006 and 2010, forming an unstoppable machine with his crew chief, Chad Knaus, while rarely making a mistake. Another thing that made Johnson infuriating to watch in NASCAR was his lack of a rash personality or heated rivalries. Unlike the likes of Dale Earnhardt Sr., who earned himself the nickname “The Intimidator,” Johnson had a clean-cut, corporate-esque image.
Clint Bowyer, a former Cup Series driver who shared the garage with Johnson, even joked, “The biggest thing that sucks about Jimmie Johnson is you want to hate him, but you can’t.”
Rusty Wallace was a different character. He was feared because he was aggressive and unafraid of bumping people out of the way to win. He treated racing like serious business, but he was also a hard-working man who did everything he could to support his family. He delivered the St. Louis Post-Dispatch starting at 4 a.m. before heading to work at King Dodge. He also created a dynasty of drivers, all of whom eventually made it to NASCAR.
Rusty Wallace became a Cup Series champion in 1989 and recorded 55 wins at the level. Mike Wallace won four O’Reilly (Nationwide) Series races in his career, while Kenny, who revealed the story about his father being “hated,” went on to set the record for the most starts in O’Reilly Series history. In the same interview, Kenny also explained how his father being hated helped give birth to his popular nickname within the NASCAR community.
How Kenny Wallace got his iconic nickname
Wallace is one of NASCAR’s most respected voices today, and hosts one of its most listened-to podcasts: Herm & Schrader. His co-host, Ken Schrader, is also a NASCAR veteran. As for Herm, that’s our very own Kenny Wallace himself.
He said that he would fight a lot with others in the St. Louis area because of how his dad was treated. And because of that, a track promoter named Bob Miller gave him the “Herman” or “Herminator” nickname.
“There was a track promoter named Bob Miller, and he was a big German man. So, he nicknamed me Herman the German from those fights because Herman was an actual person, a warrior from Germany back in 9 A.D. His statue is actually up in Illinois somewhere. So, that’s how that came about, and it eventually graduated to the Herminator, like its own character,” Wallace said in the same Substack interview with Vincie.
It was quite a comparison, and one Miller, being German, would know quite well. “Herman the German” was historically known as Arminius, a Germanic tribal chieftain who handed the Romans a disastrous defeat at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 A.D.
Kenny Wallace’s nickname tells the story perfectly. His father was hated because he was so good, earning a nickname inspired by a Germanic warrior known for his strength and skill in battle. That same story eventually became part of Kenny’s own NASCAR identity, with “Herman” sticking with him throughout his career.