Three words summed up the announcement: “It is finished.” On the afternoon of June 15, Steve Waid’s friend and podcast partner Rick Houston posted them, and anyone who had followed over the previous few years instantly understood. Waid, 77, passed away in North Carolina following a protracted battle with cancer and, in the precise language his colleagues continued to use, the aftereffects of cancer—a distinction that suggests how difficult those last years must have been. The illness itself is a single struggle. Another is frequently left behind by treatment.
It seems perfectly in character that neither Waid nor those close to him ever made his illness a public spectacle. The tributes that poured in from Bob Pockrass, the National Motorsports Press Association, and NASCAR’s official statement all described a protracted, arduous struggle without listing its clinical specifics. There was something archaic about that reticence in a time when hashtags accompany celebrity health updates. Waid was a print person. Some things were left off the page by print men.
His origin story should be told again because it would not be possible today. After graduating from Old Dominion University in 1970, Waid asked if the Martinsville Bulletin needed a sportswriter as he entered the office wearing jeans and a T-shirt. In twenty minutes, he was hired. The golden age of NASCAR was in full swing as Martinsville Speedway sat down the road, and a career took shape almost by coincidence. Later, he told the Roanoke Times about his decision to leave a comfortable newspaper job in 1981, complete with company cars, marble construction, and expense accounts, to join Grand National Scene, which at the time was a nine-thousand-circulation startup based out of a Concord country store that had been converted. A Royal typewriter, a chicken-wire basket, and a metal desk. He recalled thinking, “What the hell have I done?”
It turned out that he had joined the magazine that would eventually become NASCAR’s scripture. Under his editorial direction, Scene reached six-figure circulation, showing up every week in mailboxes throughout the South during a period when racing news was hard to come by and valuable. Waid’s commentary was a must-read for both drivers and fans for almost thirty years. The accolades piled up as a result: NMPA Writer of the Year in 1989, the Hall of Fame in 2014, and the Squier-Hall Award from the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2018. He was so taken aback by the news that he asked Mike Helton to repeat it.
When Scene folded in 2010, retirement never quite materialized. He continued to work as a freelancer for Frontstretch, and in 2018 he and Houston started The Scene Vault Podcast, which mined fifty years of garage tales for a younger audience. The episodes continued even as his health deteriorated. There’s a feeling that discussing racing was more of his body’s natural metabolic process than a job.
His passing coincides with a significant decline in the profession he represented, with beat writers going extinct and coverage shifting to social media. It seems highly unlikely that anyone will ever get to know the people of the sport the way Waid did over the course of fifty years, face-to-face, week after week. Margaret, his wife, and their two kids survive him. The family recommended donations to either Victory Junction, a children’s charity founded in response to another of racing’s devastating losses, or cancer research. In a sense, a fitting final byline.
