Folks, can you believe it? It’s that wonderful time of year again. The Chase for the Championship! I can’t wait to get me a big block-number sticker for the back of my pickup. Oh, no! What if Dale, Jr. can’t be number 8 anymore? I just might die! Yep, I guess a love of racing has been in my blood ever since I was growing up in Redneck Heights, North Carolina. Heck, I remember when my daddy took me down to the track, lifted me up so I could see over the railing and pointed to a man, and said “Son, that’s gonna be you some day.” No, he wasn’t pointing to a driver, but to a man pumping gas . . .
Well, I think that story has gone on long enough. May heaven help you if you identified with any of the sentiments in the above paragraph. NASCAR, NASCAR, NASCAR. What have you done to me? Why is it that when I turn on my radio or television on a Sunday, and I get just as much NASCAR coverage as NFL news? What is happening in America that is causing the decay of our sporting society? If I wanted to watch objects go round and round in a circle, I’d park myself in front of the toilet and flush. At least then I’d get the added bonus of watching the water slowly change color from blue to green. Ahh, the sweet, swirling science of it all. But I digress.
Auto racing is not a sport. I hate that it gets coverage on sports-oriented television and radio networks. Competition? Yes. Sport, no. I could go over all of my criteria for categorization as a sport, but that’s a story for another time. But I will say that if a large, automated machine is involved, that should result in immediate loss of sport status. But that, in and of itself does not necessarily make NASCAR bad. There are lots of things that aren’t sports that I find to be quite entertaining - professional magicians, for example, or spending time cracking each and every joint in my body. Unfortunately, NASCAR does not qualify.
So, what is my problem with NASCAR, you ask? For one, there is very little variation. The tracks are almost all essentially ovals. Sure there are some longer tracks and some shorter tracks, and once in a while they’ll race a road course, but there is not a whole lot of strategy involved because they race the same tracks over and over again, and the goal is extremely simple - get into first place by the end of the race. In addition, the drivers are just individual people, racing for themselves and their crew/team, but they don’t represent a greater public like basketball, baseball and football teams do. In those sports, a city has its own team, and the residents of that city have civic pride in their teams which automatically makes people more interested. The same could be said for golf or tennis, but those are sports that virtually anybody can play, which makes the sport and its players more identifiable with the Average Joe. Joe can’t go out and start racing cars around the block. Well, let me clarify. He SHOULDN’T. On what criteria should I base which driver I’m going to root for - whichever one sounds the most educated? That might be tough.
There are no touchdowns. There are no home runs. There are no slam dunks or three-pointers. There are no holes-in-one. There are just a bunch of guys driving at extraordinarily dangerous speeds trying to win a race. But maybe that’s the appeal - the likelihood of a crash. I don’t know, watching people trying to cheat death (and sometimes, not succeeding [see Grant Adcox, Clifford Allison, Dale Earnhardt, Walt Faulkner, Friday Hassler, Kenny Irwin, Bruce Jacobi, Ricky Knotts, Tiny Lund, J.D. McDuffie, Adam Petty, Fireball Roberts, Terry Schoonover, Larry Smith, Joe Weatherly]) is not my idea of a good time. Man, that’s a lot of names, and that’s an incomplete list. Anyway, I think my point is proven. Unless you like boring things and dying, NASCAR sucks.