Barber: Life takes Ernie Pierce from football field to NASCAR's pit row

Ernie Pierce had big dreams when he was growing up in San Diego. None of them involved working on a NASCAR pit crew, or marrying into the most famous cheese family in Sonoma.

But here he is, returning to his “second or third home,” as he put it, for this weekend’s Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma Raceway. And he’s on a winning streak. Pierce is the jackman for the car driven by Clint Bowyer and owned by Stewart-Haas Racing, the winning ride at Michigan International Speedway two weeks ago before the Cup series took a one-week hiatus.

“To be quite honest,” Pierce, 30, said by phone a few days ago, “I used to make fun of NASCAR, and find it hilarious how I’m into it now.”

When he enrolled at Kansas State University in 2007, Pierce figured his future was in football. He did have one monster game for the Wildcats, catching 11 passes for 176 yards against No. 4-ranked Oklahoma in October of 2008, but mostly he was a secondary receiver. After college, he tried out for Edmonton of the Canadian Football League, played for Utah in the Arena Football League and then for Virginia in the United Football League, where his coach was Marty Schottenheimer.

“By the age of 24, I was like, ‘You know what? I can go make money not smacking my head against people,” Pierce said.

But how? He and his wife, Chelsea Viviani Pierce, wound up in Charlotte, North Carolina, in a move that Ernie Pierce described as “kind of like a spinning of the globe.”

Pierce tried his hand at door-to-door telecommunications sales, which he loved, and banking, which he loathed. One day, as he neared the end of his rope at the bank, a man walked in wearing a Hendrick Motorsports polo. Pierce had actually visited the Hendrick headquarters shortly after he arrived in North Carolina, but dismissed it as too much like a football operation. He didn’t check out other teams, because he had no idea there were other teams.

The banking customer clued him in, and in December of 2014, Pierce started making calls. He found out he lived three minutes from Joe Gibbs Racing.

At 8 a.m. one morning, he got a tour of the facilities from Mike Lepp, then Gibbs’ athletic director.

“Then I just showed up every day at the same time,” Pierce said. “Every single day, I showed up at the same time. And eventually they gave me a job. I wasn’t going to give them a reason to say no.”

There he learned the art of jacking up fast, expensive cars. The problem was that Joe Gibbs Racing didn’t really develop crew members. The company simply used its clout to poach from other teams. So Pierce began to look around, and soon got an interview with Stewart-Haas Racing. The morning after flying back from the Sonoma race in 2016, he worked out for that team. Pierce, who measured 6-foot-3 and 208 pounds at his pro day, had kept himself in football shape. He killed the workout and went to work for Stewart-Haas.

The fundamental job of the jackman, as you might surmise, is to lever one side of the car into the air so that other crew members can change the tires. It requires the quickness to clear the retaining wall and get to the appropriate jack post.

And now that NASCAR has trimmed the over-the-wall gang from six people to five, it requires the strength to lift and hang the right front tire for the changer.

More than anything, though, pitting for a professional race team takes nerves of steel.

During Sunday’s race at Sonoma, the Clint Bowyer crewmen will spend most of their time waiting and listening to the driver and the crew chief talking over the radio.

This inaction, though, will be punctuated by bursts of insane pressure. The crew might jump over the wall only three times, but each of those pit stops has to be immaculate if Bowyer is to have a chance of winning here for the second time. There truly is no room for error.

In football, Pierce had to get his blood boiling before every game. Race crewing is the opposite.

The trick is to stay composed, because inevitably you will encounter a problem at precisely the worst time.

“That’s just the nature of the sport,” Pierce said. “You want to be able to assess it just as quickly as it happens, and then react. Being a jackman, to serve as an example, you’re running in the direction of where a changer just was taking lug nuts off it. There could be brake dust sitting on the floor, there could be lug nuts in the path that you take to run. Your car could be pointed nose-in because there’s a car parked in the pit stall before you. It could be nose-out because someone’s behind you. You could be closer to the wall than you intended to be. There’s cars coming behind you going 60 miles an hour. So it’s better to be calm.”

And to be agile.

“You’d be surprised when you don’t want to get hit how fast your feet move,” Pierce said.

Ernie met Chelsea at Santa Barbara City College, and they enrolled together at Kansas State.

Her great-grandfather, Celso Viviani, co-founded the Vella Cheese Company in 1931. Celso later split from that partnership and started his own operation, the Sonoma Cheese Factory, now a landmark just off the plaza in downtown Sonoma. The company passed to Celso’s son, Jack, and then to his son, David Viviani.

Chelsea is David’s daughter, though she has not been lured into the cheese business.

Ernie Pierce said Sonoma is one of two races he circles on the NASCAR calendar, along with Fontana. That one, in San Bernardino County, is the closest event to Pierce’s roots in San Diego.

There’s another angle to Pierce’s career that I hadn’t mentioned yet. He’s African-American. He is not alone among NASCAR pit crews, but even in 2018, he stands out. Pierce estimated there are 16 or 17 black men crewing on the Cup circuit. He’s the only person of color in the Stewart-Haas pits.

Pierce’s reaction? If you take him at his word, he has barely noticed. He works hard, pays attention to detail, assumes that he will be treated accordingly. And for the most part, he has been.

“If it is a problem for you, I don’t care,” Pierce said with a laugh. “Because that says more about you than it does about me. … I’m not gonna change who I am to make you comfortable.”

Still, there is no denying that NASCAR has a mostly white fan base, a pale workforce and a good-ol’-boy legacy. You can still find confederate flags flying in NASCAR campgrounds. Yes, even in Wine Country. Pierce said he has never focused on the sport’s demographics. But he isn’t blind to his role, either. At the same time Pierce is jumping over the wall, he’s breaking down a barrier.

“Obviously, I’m not the first African-American in Victory Lane in a Cup car, but I think if we win the championship I would be the first African-American pit crew member on a championship Cup-level team,” he said.

“That’s not lost on me. It’s not something I’m hanging my hat on or that’s gonna define my career, but it is something that I am aware of. And I think that it would be cool to have that barrier broken, and for kids to look at it as something else to kind of subconsciously go, ‘I can do that, too.’”

That’s Ernie Pierce, jumping over walls, breaking down barriers and getting Clint Bowyer merrily on his way.