Montanan Featured Prominently in New Dale Earnhardt Doc

Montana's own David Allen is featured prominently in the new Dale Earnhardt documentary.

David Allen is the former CEO of the Rocky Mountain Elk foundation. He now heads up the NILE Rodeo in Billings and the NILE Stock Show and so much more. But back in the NASCAR glory days, David Allen was the right hand man to the legendary Dale Earnhardt, Sr.

Before we talk about the Dale Earnhardt documentary, let's talk about the comeback of outdoor rodeo in Billings later this summer. 

Allen says the new arena construction is going very well. They're already building pieces for the grandstand and the infrastructure will really start to move up. By mid to late July, he says they're going to have everything up- the arena, and the grandstands. "Everything will be ready to go and and then we rodeo in August."

Allen joined us on the Montana Talks statewide radio show with Aaron Flint (full audio below).

David Allen: "It'll be a 3500 seat grandstand that'll be facing basically the south and facing the interstate. It'll be a 150 by 300 arena. We got brand new Priefert, which is the best made panels, and chutes and pens. And Hank Franzen from Powder River Rodeo is going to supervise the construction and the putting together of the arena. He was the winning bid on that, and he designed the layout for it, so it's going to be state of the art. And then, like you said, the stock we're going to have. Between Sparky Dreesen's J Bar J out of Circle, and then his son in law, Cullen Pickett, from Texas, we're going to have over 50 NFR horses here, and a number of bulls as well with the NFR of Cullin's and Sparky. So we're going to be back in the rodeo game in a big way, and we're on the same weekend as Baker, by design, so that they can work Baker and Billings in the same sometimes the same day. And it makes it a very lucrative weekend between the two events."

What about the new Dale Earnhardt documentary now available on Amazon Prime? 

David Allen says he went to the premier in Charlotte, and then had lunch with Richard Childress.

Allen: "The documentary is the best that's ever been done on Dale, and it's very authentic. The Imagine crew, which is Ron Howard's company- the most first class people I've ever worked with. The amount of research and stuff was tremendous. Some of it was hard to watch. In number two, where they touched a lot on Neil Bonnett's death, because Neil and Dale were very close, that was hard to watch. Now, I know number four is obviously going to be on, you know, Dale's death, and so that'll be tough, but a lot of it's been great to watch. It just brought it all back, all those times. I mean, I started late 1980 and all the way till, well even after his death, I was involved with Junior and Childress and those guys for a number of years, but, yeah, it brought back a lot of emotion."

What was it like working for a guy known as the Intimidator? 

David Allen: "Yeah, working for Dale, you're not for the faint of heart, for sure, and you better be able to take it. He was blunt, he was tough, he was demanding, but he never demanded more of you than he was willing to give. So, you know, he was fair about it. But I took a lot of butt chewings, maybe next to Junior I took the second most. But you had to do it. You had to stand up to him, because he would not respect you if you didn't."

Full audio of our chat with David Allen, and the trailer for the documentary, is below.