Marine sponsorship pays dividends for car owner

Thursday, March 2, 2000 | 10:45 a.m.

It certainly is one of the most unique sponsorships in all of auto racing, but the story behind Rick Rathbun's Team Marines Racing in the NASCAR Busch Series is even more fascinating.

Driver Hank Parker Jr. will carry the colors of Rathbun's Team Marines Racing on his Chevrolet Monte Carlo in Saturday's Sam's Town 300 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway -- and it is Rathbun, not the U.S. Marine Corps, who is footing most of the bill.

Rathbun, 46, credits the Marine Corps for turning around his life when he was 17, and is using the sponsorship as a way to pay back the Marines.

As a teenager growing up in Southern California, Rathbun was involved in gang activity and on a fast track to a life of trouble when he was approached by a Marine recruiter.

"I was very fortunate, because a Marine recruiter actually came to me," Rathbun said. "I had no intentions of joining any branch of the military. A friend of the recruiter knew me, and the path I was on, and told him, 'Why don't you approach this guy?'

"When (the recruiter) approached me, he told me, 'This is gonna be tough, but not any tougher than what you're going through right now. This may be a good opportunity for you to straighten your life out.' At that particular time, I really did want to straighten my life out. I knew I was going nowhere at a very young age."

Although the United States still was heavily involved in Vietnam at the time (1971), Rathbun said he had no qualms about joining the service.

"The war that I was involved in -- in the streets with the gangs -- could not be any more difficult than the war in Vietnam, for me," Rathbun said.

"I grew up not being afraid of too much because of my environment in the streets. It didn't bother me at all about having to go anywhere."

Instead of shipping off to Southeast Asia, Rathbun was assigned to the U.S. Marine Air Corps Station in El Toro, Calif., where he was among the highest-scoring recruits in his class and wound up serving as a jet-engine and structural mechanic.

Three years after enlisting, Rathbun was honorably discharged from the Marines after undergoing surgery to remove a tumor. He returned to school in Southern California and eventually went to work for an engineering firm in San Diego.

After stints with the Federal Aviation Administration and a commercial helicopter outfit, Rathbun started DEC Technologies, Inc. -- a company that designs and manufactures commercial and military jet-engine parts -- in Piney Flats, Tenn.

"The Marine Corps saved my life," Rathbun said. "I knew that someday, some way, I was going to pay them back. I didn't know how, but the past 15 years have been good for me, financially.

"I've always had a passion for racing and about two years ago, I decided it was time to pay the Marine Corps back. I was involved in NASCAR in a very small way ... and I thought that maybe this was the way to do it, and brought the (Team Marines) program forth."

The government's General Ethics Code prohibits the armed forces from ownership of a team, forbids sponsorship of an individual team and prohibits endorsement of a product or company, so Rathbun owns the sponsorship program and the Marine Corps purchases advertising space on the car. The Marines also hire Parker and the show car for recruitment purposes.

"The Marine Corps was completely blown away by it," Rathbun said of his idea to sponsor Parker's Busch car. "You have to remember, this was not a plan to make money. We met with the Marine Corps at Quantico, Virginia, and they were completely blown away by the concept of advertising on a race car."

Still, the powers that be in the government elected not to buy into Rathbun's plan.

"There's a lot of politics involved in the U.S. government." Rathbun said. "After six or seven weeks of them thinking about it, they decided it was not a direction they wanted to go in.

"At that time, I thought the idea was such a home run -- that it would get the message out to the young men and women -- that I was not going to take 'no' for an answer, and funded the program myself. When I did that, it impressed them, and it renewed the Marines' interest in the program. Today, they are extremely happy."