What We've Lost ~ What I Miss
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I
attended my first NASCAR Grand National (Monster/Cup) race 55 years ago. I’m
far from the oldest fan in that regard (although I might be getting
uncomfortably close).
Here’s Richmond in 1965, a couple of years
after I started my race fan career in that section of the bleachers you can see
in this photo.
I’ve
attended a few more than 100 “premier series” races in the half-century since
then, which makes me far from the most experienced fan. I’ve watched a lot of
races on TV (although none for the past two or three years), listened to many
more on radio (going back to Hank Schoolfield’s
Universal Racing Network) and - more recently - followed a good number online.
I’ve
eaten a lot of track food (and survived, so far), bought a lot of programs
(even wrote articles for a couple of them), covered races for newspapers,
worked with a track’s public relations staff on race weekends, interviewed
drivers, taken a train to a race, been rained and snowed out, met awesome and
awful people (and probably been identified by others as being in both those
groups), hoarded racing materials at home, and felt really odd when I was
somewhere without news media access on a Monday and couldn’t find out who won.
Undeniably, progress took Cup racing from the
top photo to the bottom one, but something was lost along the way that is
really costing NASCAR today.
Monster/Cup
racing (and NASCAR in general) today is carefully packaged, nearly antiseptic
entertainment, surrounded by lots of money (albeit much less than 10 years
ago).
I
haven’t been to a Monster/Xfinity/Camping World race in person in nearly five
years, and I miss going, but not as much as I feel I should. Here’s why.
I miss drivers having other occupations.
Everybody knew that Tiny Lund ran a fish camp, Harry Gant was in construction,
Curtis Turner bought and sold timber. My early favorite, J.T. Putney, was a
pilot. Mark Thompson got lots of publicity back in February for starting the
Daytona 500 at age 66, but he also was a great story because he had a life
outside of racing.
If Tiny Lund was your favorite driver a little
over half a century ago and you didn’t see enough of him at the track, you
could go down to Cross, S.C., and rent a boat from him to catch some cats or
stripers.
I miss the chatter about who was
entered in an upcoming race, because it wasn’t the same drivers every week. It
seldom affected who won, but it was interesting.
I miss seeing a racer drive his own
hauler to the track. I miss open haulers where you could see the car, too.
I really miss local track standouts
getting a chance to race against the NASCAR travelers. They might have had no
chance of winning, but you followed their place in the race and considered a
Top 10 finish a moral victory, even in your guy was 16 laps behind the winner.
Local hero Sonny Hutchins put Emanuel Zervakis’ Chevy on the outside pole at Martinsville and
raced ahead of Richard Petty for the early lead.
I miss the NASCAR travelers running
at the local short track the night before the GN/Cup race.
I miss the heartbreak of your
underdog hero racing his way into the Top 5, only to lose six laps while his
volunteer pit crew was changing a tire.
I miss frontrunners having to battle
their way through lapped traffic constantly. When did that become something to
avoid, as drivers seem to see it today? Traffic made for more passing, even
without 20 cars on the lead lap.
I miss the parade of visiting pace
cars being the highlight of pre-race.
I miss high school bands playing the
National Anthem (and I remember the time Universal Network’s Bob Montgomery’s
mic was left on during a particularly slow rendition, and he could be heard
muttering, “sounds like a funeral dirge.”)
I miss characters, like Billy Woods,
who would accept tips from some drivers to put “hexes” on others, or drivers
like Joe Weatherly and Jabe Thomas, who clowned around.
No idea of the context of this photo, but it
looks like the Southern 500 parade in Darlington with Joe Weatherly
representing South of the Border. Whatever it is, it
shows a driver who knew how to have fun.
I won’t name any names here, but I
miss drivers who weren’t good looking and who regularly mangled the English
language.
I miss cheating being a game where,
if you got caught - you got disqualified but could come back next week with
things hidden a little better and try again. I miss the fans enjoying that
game, not making it sound like moral turpitude.
I miss the cars being cars, although
if someone wants to see the sport reflect current reality and begin an SUV
racing series, I’m game to see how it goes.
I asked Google for “SUV racing,” and it gave me
this. Can you kind of use your imagination a little?
I miss teams being able to fix a
race car by borrowing parts from somebody’s sedan in the parking lot or making
a quick trip to the junkyard.
OK,
I could go on (and on and on), and you could leave for something more pleasant,
like mowing the lawn, but here’s my point. I won’t deny that these are the
ramblings of an old guy who just wants things back like they were when he was
(and felt) young, but they’re more than that - they’re a reflection of how
racing has lost its personality, replacing it with something that - based on
attendance and TV ratings - isn’t going over all that great.
But
I also understand this conundrum: When all these things that are my fond
memories were the norm, NASCAR was a much smaller world, with fewer fans and
much less money - and a lot less television exposure. Am I willing to trade all
the neat stuff that came with its growth for what I consider to be the “golden”
elements of racing?
In
a word, yes.
Disclosure: I make that choice easily, because I have no pony in the race, I
would in no way be financially harmed if NASCAR’s size reverted to what it was
50 years ago (when EVERY NASCAR
employee was listed by name in the race program, and 90% of those were people
getting paid $10 or $20 a race for some specific race-day job). No, my
preferred outcome would cost a lot of people their jobs. I hate the thought of
causing anyone else pain, but I don’t see those jobs surviving, anyway, if the
status quo continues too much longer.
Don’t
want to see it; don’t know how to avoid it.
Another
societal change that would affect how my “retro” world would work is the internet.
Here there’s a glimmer of the positive.
I
love music, but my musical taste runs decidedly counter to what’s most popular.
I don’t listen to radio, and even Sirius/XM doesn’t customize musical choice
enough for me. But I still have plenty of access, via Pandora (and its
counterparts) and most of all YouTube. One member of a fairly obscure group I
kind of like recently left to try her luck as a solo act, and now she’s
released an EP of a few songs, all recorded in one go, while a video crew was
also recording everything. The first music video from that effort was available
on YouTube well in advance of the EP’s release. Not long ago, we went to a
small club to see an obscure band I like, and I noticed a camera set up in the
back of the room. The next week, not only were a couple of that band’s songs
available as videos on YouTube (admittedly with poor sound quality), but so was
a song by the even more obscure opening act. That’s how much things have
changed FOR THE BETTER to give us
more choice.
All
that is or could be available to racing, too, and with fewer commercials. We
just might need to get used to seeking the stuff out in odd places online and
having a Roku to play it on the TV. I can do that.
It
might not bring back the parade of visiting pace cars or put Joey Logano behind
the wheel of his hauler, but for racing that feels like racing, that has
personality, and that plays to my sports soul, I’m willing to see big changes
take place.
Frank’s
Loose Lug Nuts
One
of the things you hear a lot when people suggest changes for NASCAR is that the
season be shortened, but I think that’s baloney. The problem is that the
product needs to be fixed, not how many times we have to endure it. Sears and Kmart
keep closing stores, hoping that more people will shop in the ones that are
left, but I don’t see that producing a miracle turnaround. No, if you create
racing that people can’t wait to see, they’ll watch it as often as you allow.
Up here in South
Central Pennsylvania and
nearby, the streak of lousy weekend weather continues, and I think some tracks
have lost more than half their race dates so far this year. I hear we’re
entertaining some rules changes to make sure people can watch a race next
Saturday:
Inspectors will be responsible for bringing
their own scuba gear.