SEATTLE — As a professional football player, Randy Moss has enjoyed an undefeated regular season and endured years of seemingly endless losses.
Those competitive highs and lows have prepared him well for life as the co-owner of a NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race team, Randy Moss Motorsports.
“In all sports you win and lose, and that’s something you can relate (racing and football) with,” said Moss on Wednesday during an open house for RMM rookie driver Tayler Malsam. “Going out to compete on the field or with the truck … I think it goes hand-in-hand, going out there and competing.”
The open house for Malsam, who was born in Sammamish but makes his home in Mill Creek, was intended to thank his local sponsors, including One-Eighty, a Seattle-based hospitality services provider.
“I look for great things to come out of him,” Moss said of Malsam, who is second in the truck series rookie of the year standings after four races. “I have fun watching him.”
In RMM’s first full season of competing in NASCAR’s truck series, both Malsam and his teammate, Mike Skinner, have found early success. Former series champion Skinner is fourth in points and Malsam is the top rookie in the standings at No. 15.
The scoring system used to determine the series rookie of the year is different from NASCAR’S point system for the series, which is why Malsam trails J.R. Fitzpatrick in the rookie standings but is ahead of Fitzpatrick in the series standings.
Malsam said he has benefited from having 11-year veteran Skinner on the team, and Moss said his football experience has helped him deal with both of his drivers as team co-owner.
“I can relate to Skinner because he’s a veteran in his sport, and I’m a veteran in mine,” Moss said. “By Tayler being a rookie — I was a rookie once, and not too long ago, so I can relate to both of them.”
Moss, who had sponsored a dirt-track team in his native West Virginia, bought a 50-percent stake in Morgan-Dollar Motorsports, a longtime truck series team co-owned by David Dollar, in July 2008.
The renamed Randy Moss Motorsports finished last season with a series of guest drivers, including three-time Cup series champion Jimmie Johnson making his truck series debut at Bristol Motor Speedway in August.
NASCAR’s history is filled with smart people with money buying into the sport, then finding out there are few easier ways to lose a fortune. Sports figures are no exception, as former Dallas Cowboys quarterbacks Roger Staubach and Troy Aikman found when they launched Hall of Fame Racing in 2003. Staubach and Aikman sold their stake in the winless NASCAR Cup team near the end of the 2007 season.
Moss said he was aware of the potential for failure, but his competitive name and love of racing won out.
“I do try to keep to what’s real in life, and you can’t succeed at everything in life but I try to,” Moss said. “When I go out there doing things people think I can’t do, I just want to prove them wrong. So I put this NASCAR thing together to be successful at it.”
As a first-round draft pick of the Minnesota Vikings in 1998, Moss was just one win short of playing in the Super Bowl as a rookie. After seven seasons with the Vikings, during which Minnesota slipped from the top of the division to hovering near the bottom, Moss was traded to the Oakland Raiders in 2005.
Oakland was a combined 6-26 in Moss’ two seasons with the Raiders, so he jumped at the chance to be traded to the New England Patriots, who were 16-0 during the 2007 regular season, Moss’ first with the team, and advanced to the Super Bowl.
Although he didn’t rule out a move up to NASCAR’s Nationwide or Cup series in the future, Moss said his focus as RMM co-owner is on the here-and-now.
“At this level, the sky’s the limit, so I just want to concentrate on getting the truck series down and getting some victories,” Moss said. “But this is not a one-race thing — it’s the whole season.”
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