Somewhere in a box, Aaron Goforth’s NASCAR memories are stored on VHS tapes, antique reminders of trips from Riverside, Calif., to Daytona, to North Wilksboro and a blur of map specks that were not Mount Holly.

He was a tire specialist for important people – Cale Yarborough, Buddy Baker, Bobby and Davey Allison – but the other important people, his wife and kids, were home in Gaston County while his job whizzed by at 190 miles per hour.

“I’d miss so much of Little Aaron’s baseball games, and in the summers on those weekends, I was gone,” he says, of his oldest son’s youth leagues. “And I didn’t want that with (younger son) Billy. And the NASCAR work was getting physically harder, so I gave that up and was here for Billy.”

Instead of deciding what race car tires to switch, he decided what baseball fields needed fixing. Instead of making new tires in sets, he made new roofs for dugouts. And instead of telling race teams about circumference and air pressure, he told Little League players how to swing, how to run and how to have good sportsmanship.

For all he’s done for sports in Mount Holly, Goforth is the recipient of the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame 2016 Community Spirit Award.

 “I still feel like there’re a lot more folks more deserving than I am. All I did was work on the fields and batting cages and the dugouts,” he says. “It was for the kids. Not only my kids but for all the boys and girls that came after them. I enjoyed it. I look around now and see some of the kids I coached who have grown up to be very successful, and I’m very proud of them.”

Goforth served in the Army from 1968 to 1970, at Fort Bragg and Fort Jackson, S.C. He received his orders for Vietnam, but was kept stateside. In addition to NASCAR, he worked as a mechanic for Duke Power at several of its locations – South Boulevard, Little Rock Road, Wilkinson Boulevard and the Toddville garage. He had a shop at his home, where he worked on cars and trucks.

Goforth met Debbie, his wife of 40 years, in Sunday School at Thrift Baptist Church in Paw Creek, just over the river in Mecklenburg County, where his family had a farm. They’ve been soulmates since.

“The people who did a lot of work were the ones like Debbie. When we had a ballplayer who needed a glove or needed shoes and couldn’t pay, or needed their hat or their socks, she would come up with the money to do that,” he says. “I don’t know how she did it, but she always came up with it. And one time, we were building the batting cage down at Mount Holly Middle School and we needed a tool, and she came up with the money for it. I couldn’t have done any of it without her.”

Goforth began coaching T-ball in 1990, then in the East Gaston Babe Ruth Association in 1991-92. He was the Gaston County Parks and Recreation volunteer of the year in 1993. “That was the year we went to all the fields in Gaston County and put roofs on all the dugouts. In the summertime, it was pretty hot on the kids, so we did that,” he says. “I saw things that needed doing, and wanted to help, so we did it.”

As a member of the Mount Holly Optimist Club, he took on several projects – raising money to build the gym at Tuckaseegee Park, put lights on Costner Field across from Mount Holly Middle School, put in irrigation for sprinklers.

“My cousins all played football and baseball there in the 1950s and ‘60s, and the only lights they had on the field were where they had cords across the field with bulbs,” he says, “till a storm blew it down. So we decided it would be better to have lights on the field.”

Today, the Goforths can be found with folding chairs in their minivan, travelling to see their grandsons’ soccer games. You learn, from years of coaching and working on ballfields, how to be a fan, too. “It used to break my heart, when after practice there would be little kids waiting … practice would be over, and it would get dark, and some parents who’d dropped their kids off, we’d wait an hour, hour and a half for them to show up,” he says. “Those were the kids who needed the discipline of sports.”

So, he and Debbie watch from the sidelines. And when the games are over, they go home.

Or to McDonald’s with the boys – because grandparents are like that, and the discipline of sports has its rewards.