MOORESVILLE, N.C. (April 4, 2018) – It’s hard to imagine, given the fact that he is Dale Earnhardt Jr., but there was a time when he was at the mercy of corporal punishment at the hands of his parents.

Apparently, there were a few occasions that bore remembering, and on this week’s Dale Jr. Download, you can hear about a few of them. Earnhardt Jr. and co-hosts were playing the “top three” game (i.e. name your top three instances of whatever the topic is), and Dale Jr. went first.

“They’re all pretty severe,” he said by way of explanation, and after giving it a listen, I’m sure you’ll agree.

“I stole $80 out of my dad’s change jar and bought a Game Boy,” he said, laughing. “Teresa (his stepmother) put locks on every door in the house after that. That was pretty damn embarrassing and shameful.”

Check. No. 2 was a doozy as well.

“I brought home a long sheet of class work that I had not done for the week, and that brought the belt from Daddy,” Earnhardt Jr. said, with a slight shiver. “It was what you would imagine. It was awful. The belt that I got was a championship belt, the 1980 championship belt, and you can look at the pictures... it was a big SOB. This was the belt he used.”

The third and final instance of parental “this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you” moments was more...lasting.

“I was sent to military school as punishment for getting expelled from Christian school,” he recounted. “I had been written up so many times for talking in class, being a jokester, not paying attention, not listening. If you got written up a certain number of times, they were going to expel you no questions asked or how severe the write-ups were. I had the amount that you needed. We were taking a break for Christmas break and when I came back, they were going to expel me.

“My parents decided to take me out of that school and send me to military school as sort of a last-ditch effort to get me to figure it out. And I did. It worked. I credited military school for being so good for me. It taught me a lot. I was really, really close to leaving Mooresville for my senior years in high school to go back and do my senior year at Oak Ridge (Academy). I went the last half of my seventh-grade year and all of my eighth.”

Despite the fact that distance gives a certain perspective, there were some hard times.

“It was hard as hell being away from home,” he said. “You cried for a couple weeks, missing home really bad. You have to remember you’re doing it with a lot of other new kids. You meet a lot of them that are there for really bad things. You would be with kids that had no structure in their lives, and you were rooming with them or living down the hall. We had a lot of fun though.”

Among the other topics included the just-passed Easter holiday—his last with just him and Amy before the arrival of their daughter in May—and some advice to men about being on the dime when it comes to remembering holidays, anniversaries and the like.

That sort of leads into another similar topic, which is respecting embargoed information release times. That’s something that Dale Jr. sort of forgot when announcing a new fantasy game from new employer NBC Sports.

The tire dragon—which is a machine used to lay rubber down on tracks before the drivers arrive to practice and complete the process—was also a large topic, and Earnhardt Jr. had plenty to say about its use at Texas prior to this weekend’s events.

“The bigger question, really, is where on the track you use it,” Earnhardt Jr. said, getting a bit worked up. “I texted a few drivers and asked them if I was on the right track, and I thought this way when I was racing: do not use the tire dragon in the groove! The race teams and the drivers will rubber that in for you. Wherever they’re going to run, don’t even use it there. They’ll do that. Put the dragon where you want them to be, where you want them to go, where they are not going to go unless you use the dragon, whether that’s the second groove or the top groove or wherever. Applying it where they’re going to run defeats the purpose.”

The topic of age limits took a bit of time, as well, on this version of the Dale Jr. Download. For all this and more, log on to www.dalejr.com and hit the Dirty Mo Radio button, or download it from Apple Podcasts or SoundCloud.