Jeff Gordon Almost Became a Water Skier Instead of a Race Car Driver

• Jeff Gordon, four-time Cup champ, was almost a professional water skier instead of a professional driver. Who knew?

• While a teen, not sure how to progress in his career, he started skiing.

• Luckily for motorsports history, Gordon came to his senses.

You already know Jeff Gordon—93 victories in Cup, four-time NASCAR Cup champion—with his titles coming on the heels of those won by Dale Earnhardt Sr., thus forcing fans to choose either #3 or #24. It was a long and colorful career. But did you know that Jeff Gordon almost became a water skier instead? Here’s the story.

Gordon’s mom and dad divorced when he was just six months old and he was raised by his mom and his stepdad, John Bickford. While his mom helped, too, it was his stepdad who made him a champion. Young Gordon began competing on BMX bikes when he was four and quarter-midgets at five. It wasn’t just for fun, even then. Bickford had big plans.

“We’d been racing quarter-midgets and go-karts all around California, and we went back East too, and did quarter midget and go-kart racing and it was going extremely well,” Gordon said at a banquet in his honor at The Amelia. “But you kind of get to this place where, at that time, this is like 1983, ‘84 something like that, there was no Mini Sprints, there were no Bandoleros, there was nothing that you went to next after quarter-midgets and go-karts. So we were in this place of, ‘What do we do next?’ We’d won a bunch of races in those cars. And so somehow, we started going to the lake and started waterskiing.”

In addition to being a good driver, Gordon’s mom was an excellent water skier, which probably helped. But it seemed like Bickford couldn’t do anything that wasn’t competitive.

“It wasn’t, ‘Let’s go to Lake and have fun.’ There was a competition ski boat—it’s ski lessons, it’s ‘Let’s see if Jeff can be a competition water skier or slalom skier.”

He almost did.

“I got pretty good at it, but... if you want to be a good water skier, you better be able to really stretch out and get around those buoys. So luckily, that didn’t last too long. Plus, I didn’t like early mornings and cold water, so it was not gonna go very far.”

Nonetheless…