When Jeff Gordon made a pit stop at Deanna Merryman's cosmetics counter at a Florida department store in 2000, she didn't recognize the famous Nascar driver. "All my friends at work were freaking out," she remembers. "I said. 'What's going on? He's this little short dude!'" Deanna, who had a boyfriend at the time, initially declined Gordon's invitations to lunch, but when he asked again a year later, she was free. Soon began an 11 -month affair that would ultimately rock the close-knit Nascar world.
Though Gordon's squeaky-clean media image had long alienated as many Nascar fans as it attracted, it helped him amass a fortune from lucrative product endorsements. It was an image enhanced by his wholesomely glamorous wife, Brooke. All that changed when the tabloids picked up on his relationship with Deanna. Brooke quickly filed for divorce. The disgraced multimillionaire moved out of his stately home and even crashed on a friend's couch some nights. Deanna thinks she knows why Gordon took as big a risk with his personal life as he does on the track. "Jeff became a wild man," she says. "He got married when he was 23 and has been on the racetrack since he was a kid. He used to tell me all the time that he never had a chance to have fun."
Deanna appeared on the cover of Ironman, a muscle and fitness magazine, and had small parts on the TV shows Bay-watch and Veronica's Closet before meeting Gordon, and also worked for a couple of years as an exotic dancer in Texas--a fact the press pounced on as the story of the affair gathered speed. "One article said Jeff had to end things with me because I'm from the wrong side of the tracks," says Deanna, the daughter of a Virginia preacher. "Look, we all have things in our past, but that's not who I am or where I am now. But your past likes to follow you. One thing I loved about Jeff is that we said we would always be there for each other. We used to talk on the phone for four or five hours a night." So was it the ensuing media maelstrom that caused their relationship to hit the wall? "No. Jeff cheated on me with another model," Deanna sighs. "Right before my birthday, I found out he was meeting her at the beach. And you know what? It's going to happen to her, too. It's a pattern that he started."
Now Deanna plans to return to school to pursue pharmaceutical sales and devote more time to charities fighting cystic fibrosis, a disease her brother has. "I want people to know that I didn't pose for PLAYBOY to portray Jeff in any negative light," she says. "This is for me and no one else. My past shouldn't have to follow me just because he is who he is. But I have learned an important lesson: I'll never get involved with a married man again. Or a race car driver."
