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A pal and I were waiting out a rainstorm in a shelter while fishing a while back and started talking racin'.

"Who is the toughest, bravest driver you've seen and known in all your years of covering NASCAR?" he asked.

I replied that there have been plenty of super-tough, daredevil drivers.

I named some examples:

Seven-time champions Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt drove several time while suffering a variety of broken bones that were excruciatingly painful.

Bobby Allison competed through a stretch of one season with so many multiple injuries that he had to be lifted in and out of his race car by special handles sewn onto his uniform.

Buddy Baker and Sterling Marlin both ran events while recovering from painful burns.

"But overall," I said, "I've got to rank Cale Yarborough as both the toughest and most courageous."

Both in his youth near Timmonsville, S.C., and then as a race driver, Cale experienced a number of life-threatening incidents that would have cowed a lesser person. But they never caused him to shy away from danger.  At least not that I know of.

Yarborough once flew over the railing and out of Darlington Raceway, a track where he crawled under the fence to watch the inaugural Southern 500 in 1950.

He was swept into the midst of a grinding, horrific 23-car crash at Alabama's Talladega Superspeedway, an accident in which he saw cars sailing over his head "high as a telephone pole."

He rode through a stunning flip in the midst of a run that made him the first driver to qualify at more than 200 miles per hour at Daytona International Speedway.

However, Cale, a three-time Cup champion, winner of 83 races, including four Daytona 500s and five events at Darlington Raceway, his home track, where the Cup teams race once again this weekend as the Southern 500 returns to the place of its birth.  Yarborough won the Labor Day classic four times before it was moved to California for 10 years.

I can tell tales that make a lot of peoples' hair stand on end," recalled Cale, a member of NASCAR’s Hall of Fame in Charlotte. "Tales that make driving a race car seem like riding a merry-go-round."

Yarborough then reflected on these terrors.

"Personally," said Cale, "I feel the closest I ever came to you-know-what was in my late teens down at Jacksonville, North Carolina.

"It was 1958 and I was woking with an air show as one of the skydivers. I jumped out of the plane at about 5,000 feet and did my diving number down to about 2,000, the altitude where I always deployed the parachute. I tugged the ripcord and nothing happened. For some reason, the dadgum 'chute had become fouled.

"I told myself, 'Don't look down.'"

Cale kept pulling on the ripcord, but nothing happened. Finally, at about 200 feet above the ground, his parachute billowed. But by now he was going so fast the force of the wind blew half the canopy away!

"Even so," continued Cale, "there was enough of the 'chute left to slow me down a little bit. Luckily, I landed in a patch of high grass in a muddy field, which provided some cushion. I came out of it with only a chipped bone in my elbow."

Cale went on to jump 214 times, but the failure of his 'chute that day at Jacksonville was in no way his first encounter with the Grim Reaper. He'd already escaped the swipe of the scythe.

When Cale was a kid, one night he was walking barefoot through the yard at his family's home when he suddenly encountered a snake coiled before him.

"I tried to jump away," recalled Cale. "But the snake struck and hit me right behind my big right toe. My stepfather opened the wound up, put a tourniquet on my ankle and rushed me to the hospital."

For the next week Cale was "about the sickest" of anytime in his life.

A few days later, they found the snake, dead in the hedges near the house. "It was a rattler," said Cale. "We figured we ran over it heading to the hospital and it crawled into the shrubbery and died."

A summer or so later Cale watched as a storm built over the farm.

"I was standing at a window, looking out as the wind and rain swept across our fields. Suddenly, a bolt of lightning hit at the edge of the yard and what looked like a fireball bounced up, broke the panes out of the window and hit me in the chest. It threw me backwards across the room and knocked me out. I'm not sure for how long. When I came to, I smelled smoke. But there was no fire."

A year or two later Cale went raccoon hunting one night with his uncles and some friends. Their hounds treed a 'coon and Cale volunteered to shinny up the tall tree and try to shake the critter out. But when he shook too hard, it was Cale that fell.

Back to the hospital, where several days and nights of recovery were necessary for the concussion Cale suffered.

Ironically, despite the hundreds of thousands of miles he drove in a career stretching from 1957-1988, Yarborough never spent a night in a hospital bed because of a racing injury.

"It they hospitalized you for being shook up, it would have been a different matter," he said with a laugh. "I've been shaken a lot by racing accidents, especially that big pileup at Talladega."

Yarborough surviving so many escapades is testimony to his toughness.

But Cale, 76, said he feels there's another reason he has come through so many close calls on the race track and off.

"The Man Upstairs intervened on my behalf," he said. "I really believe that. Otherwise, about any of the incidents I was involved in could have gone the other way."