The most dangerous job in Vegas? Forget the vice squad or wrangling Siberian tigers. Try being Colton Borchardt at midnight as he stares into a bubbling sewer, nervously praying that a triangle of pylons will keep his crew safe from the drunken drivers speeding by.

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Borchardt runs the graveyard shift for the Las Vegas Valley Water District. The work can only be done when the city sleeps and huge mains like the one he's repairing can be shut off. His men work beneath this city of towering neon, jackhammering under gas mains, live electric lines and dark vaults. It takes nerves of steel; one wrong move and—kaboom! "The day shift goes into the safe jobs," he says. "Not us. We handle the heavy artillery."

Three years ago, this was Kurt Busch's world. Says Borchardt: "I once told him, 'It's either this or car racing, and you're not going to make any money car racing. This job is your future, kid.'"

And the hottest racer in Winston Cup might still be working on Borchardt's crew if not for a story so strange it has helped change the way NASCAR searches for stars.

Ask Busch about his meteoric rise from water company to Winston Cup, and the whiskerless 24-year-old driver of the 97 car looks befuddled, arching his eyebrows in innocent incredulity. Maybe, just maybe, it's no act. This is a kid, after all, who wrote a high school paper about his career ambition to be … a pharmacist. This is a kid who still smacks his lips at the thought of visiting his favorite fast-food joint and still tools around town in his dad's tricked-out '80 pickup truck. In some ways, he's still the same kid who dug ditches so he could race in his spare time.

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Busch is blasé as he walks unnoticed past the pricey shops and ringing slot machines at Caesars Palace. "We used to come here to hang out after high school basketball games," he says. "There was a '50s diner. We'd slide M&Ms on the floor trying to get the waitresses on skates to crash."

It's weird to be a kid in Las Vegas, having the world's most famous casino as your shopping mall. But it's weirder still to be from one of only a half-dozen families in town who live for racing. The Busches spent weekends traveling deep into the desert to places like the Pahrump Valley Speedway, a tiny oval at the gates of Death Valley. Kurt Busch was so small-time that one of the track announcers was also his math teacher; so small-time that he could afford to race only Dwarf cars.

Still, for a young racer whose horizon ended at the edge of the Mojave, it was basic training at its best. With his dad's knack for building fast cars on the cheap, Kurt racked up a hundred small-track wins while keeping a handsome 3.5 GPA in school. After graduating, he headed off to the U. of Arizona in Tucson, figuring that if he spent six years studying to be a pharmacist—"maybe open my own chain"—he could buy better wheels.

On weekends, Busch closely followed one of NASCAR's starter tours, the Southwest Series. Its brightest star, Chris Trickle, was the only Vegas racer with a shot at the big time. Sitting in the stands to watch Trickle race in Phoenix on Feb. 3, 1997, Busch couldn't know how his life was about to intertwine with that of his favorite local driver.

Six days later, Trickle, a nephew of NASCAR stalwart Dick Trickle, was driving his white Chrysler convertible on a two-lane bridge. A shot rang out and the convertible spun wildly off the road. When the police arrived, Trickle was found unconscious, with a bullet in his brain. In the year he clung to life in a coma, Trickle's family kept the team going, hoping for a miracle. But medical bills finally forced them to sell to a local millionaire who auditioned a couple of drivers before hiring Kurt on his 18th birthday.

Trickle's death on March 25, 1998—ten days before the Southwest Series reached Las Vegas—created a morose star turn for Kurt. Climbing behind the wheel of a race car that looked eerily like the one that had just carried Trickle's coffin, Busch raced into Victory Lane. "It was hard because Chris' mother never warmed up to me driving the car," Busch says, still haunted by the unsolved shooting. "Plus, I was feeling like I was in way over my head."

Kurt Busch comes from a cautious family—his father is a tool salesman, his mother a high school administrator—and the buzz Kurt got from winning rookie honors that year, not to mention the Southwest Series title in 1999, changed his master plan only slightly. He quit school in Tucson and shelved the pharmacy idea. Instead, he enrolled in night school at UNLV, hoping microbiology classes would get him off the graveyard shift and into a lab job at the water treatment plant. And that's where things would have likely ended had Roush Racing not decided to launch an unusual audition in October 1999.

A dozen minor leaguers who were leading their respective series were invited to Toledo, Ohio, to try out for an opening on Roush's NASCAR truck team. The unorthodox contest was summed up by three words stenciled on the oil filter of the test truck: The Gong Show. Busch was the youngest racer from the least prestigious series, and his lap times reflected it. But he was also cramped-up and scared. A Roush engineer played a hunch, though, and invited him to a follow-up audition in Phoenix. It had been 2 1/2 years since he'd bought a ticket to see Trickle race there—and his slowest lap beat everyone else's fastest. A week later, after he'd come home from the graveyard shift and was falling asleep, his mom knocked on his door and said, "I think you want to take this call."

When Kurt groggily grabbed the receiver, he heard someone say, "How do you like Michigan weather?" The someone was Roush president Geoff Smith, who then said, "That's where you're going to have to move if you're going to race our truck."

The story could have ended here, too. Ditchdigger turns truck racer. Has a nice Cinderfella sound, right? But that still wouldn't tell you how fast fortunes are changing in the upper echelon of Winston Cup these days. Kurt had only been in Michigan for 10 months when Roush asked, "How do you feel about Winston Cup?" The sponsor of the No. 97 car, John Deere, was unhappy with driver Chad Little and wanted a young racer. Busch had not won a single truck race. He had met Roush all of three times. Yet he was being cast as the dice in a high-stakes crapshoot. All Busch could think to say was, "I'm ready if you're ready, Jack."

Looking back, he digs his hands into the pockets of his baggy jeans and says, "That was the first time I came up with a seriously political answer to anything."

Busch could have used a few more carefully chosen words as he tried to fit into Winston Cup. He inherited a team with a revolving-door staff that produced cellar-dwelling finishes and little respect, even in its own garage. One day, Busch approached the crew chief of another one of Roush's teams, hoping to get advice about shocks. The force of the reply blew him back: "Listen punk, just because you're some kind of wonder, don't think you can come around here."

The large ears that make him look even younger than he is turn red when he recounts the line, more out of embarrassment than anger. "I hate being the kind of guy who doesn't fit in," he says. Then, he adds sharply, "It was a business lesson to me."

Kurt doesn't ever put himself out on a limb. "You won't hear any stories about me staying out late and knocking up the chicks," he says. He clings to jobs, to people, to budgets, to security. He's been going out with his girlfriend, Melissa, since he was a high school senior. He still only dreams of getting a Porsche. His father, Tom, thinks long and hard when asked how Kurt has surprised him, finally saying, "Dishes. He got really nice dishes when he moved to an apartment in Michigan."

But all is not quite as Opie as the image might suggest. All that homespun normalcy spawned what Curtis Pilgreen, the teacher and track announcer, calls "the bratty side of Kurt." It's the side that makes him storm the NASCAR trailer when things don't go his way. It's the side that led to a five-alarm feud with Jimmy Spencer—and an object lesson in how not to fit in.

There's no better symbol of old-school stock car racing than Spencer, a 15-year vet who has set off so many wrecks he's known as Mr. Excitement. There's also no one more likely to mete out a rookie hazing, especially to a kid who's struggling to keep his own car off the wall. Trouble between the two began brewing in Phoenix at the end of 2001; Spencer was letting others pass in the late stages of the race, but not No. 97. When Busch tapped him and sped by, Spencer rammed Busch's black-and-blue back bumper, causing a spinout that left Busch in 22nd place.

This past spring, Busch wasn't such an easy mark. In the off-season, Roush had swapped the crews that serviced his youngest and oldest drivers, pairing Busch with 48-year-old Jimmy Fennig, who had been Mark Martin's crew chief. "He came in with a plan to educate me," says Busch. "When we went to Daytona I could feel the difference." By the sixth race of 2002, it had all jelled. But as Busch was leading in Bristol, he felt Spencer tap his bumper. Shuffled into second place, he bumped back and reclaimed the lead.

It was a bold, public declaration that he was no longer some slack-jawed rookie. And it was a spectacular way to win a first Winston Cup race.

But Busch still had much to learn. There was the day he was sent to a sponsor appearance, and realized when he rose to make a speech that he had no idea what the sponsor produced. And there was the all-star race in Charlotte, when he riled the usually unflappable Richard Childress by spinning out one of his drivers to get a caution. When Busch cheekily admitted that he wanted to make the race exciting, Childress, 56, threatened to tear him limb from limb. "And I can do it," he roared. "I'm that mad."

But that was nothing compared to the firestorm that followed in Indianapolis, when he found himself dueling Spencer side-by-side once again. As Busch passed his rival for position going into turn three, Spencer made contact, sending the No. 97 spinning wildly into the wall. Before one of the year's largest TV audiences, Busch climbed from his car and pointed to his butt. (Busch insists he was using a hand signal to call for Spencer to be sent to the rear of the field, not calling Spencer an ass.) When eager reporters surrounded him in the garage, he went even further, calling the 45-year-old, who hadn't won a race in nine years, a "decrepit old has-been."

If NASCAR wants new blood, it's going to have to let it boil every so often. And Busch closed out last season boiling hot. He won the Old Dominion 500 in Martinsville in October for his second Winston Cup victory, establishing himself as a credible short-track threat. When he gutted out a win the next week in Atlanta (where he'd failed to even qualify a year earlier) he became harder to pigeonhole. And when he won the season finale in Miami, no one needed to search for words. Kurt Busch had become the hottest driver in the sport. It's an ascent even he has a hard time believing.

"The last four years have been a blur," he says. "It's been difficult to know what's coming next. Every step up I've taken, the pressure has been squared. The pressure in the Southwest Series was fourfold what I'd felt in Dwarfs. The truck series was 16 times more. But I wasn't ready for Winston Cup to be 16 times that."

Yet as the ditchdigger enters his third season at the top, he shows signs of finally feeling like he's at home. As he waited for a flight out of Charlotte, he ran into three Cup racers he knew. "I had things that I could talk to them about," he says. "It's hard fitting in anywhere right away. But I think I'm getting a clue."

And the budding NASCAR superstar still feels at home in Las Vegas, even under the streets. "He never forgets us," says Borchardt. "The last time he was in town, he called ahead to find out where we'd be. Then he brought us a pizza and stayed for an hour. He always remembers."

This article appears in the February 17 issue of ESPN The Magazine.