Race car driver Tommy Joe Martins, who answers to his double first name, is as down-home Mississippi as they come. He grew up in the tiny Panola County town of Como. He went to high school at Magnolia Heights Academy in nearby Senatobia, where he played football and basketball and where he says, chuckling, “I wasn’t any good at either one of them.”

He graduated from Ole Miss where he studied broadcast journalism. He says he is proud to be from Mississippi and loves his home state. And that’s why when he realized his dream of becoming a NASCAR race driver, he put the state flag on his car.

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