"There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games."
Ernest Hemingway is usually cited for the above quote. I don't know if he said that or not. Probably not. Hemingway, like Mark Twain and Yogi Berra, is often credited for any quote that sounds like he might have said it. As Yogi once put it, "I really didn't say everything I said."
I don't think much of bullfighting and don't much see the point of mountaineering, but I agree with Hemingway (or whomever) about auto racing. I love all forms of auto racing. I was in a state of panic for about a week recently when my cable provider (rhymes with Bombast) did a little lineup musical chairs and the Speed Channel disappeared. It turns out that they had just moved it to another channel, but they really had me worried there for a while. When I'm channel surfing, I'll always stop at Speed to watch a race. I might not watch past the next commercial, but I'll always stop to check out what kind of cars or motorcycles they're racing, see who's winning, see if I've heard of anybody.
Auto racing is high drama -- man versus man, man versus machine, life and death. Auto racing seems to be an individual sport, but it's really the ultimate team sport. The driver is the individual with his reputation (and life) on the line, but he is just the most visible part of a race team. To bring the checkered flag and the big trophy home, everyone on the team has to do their part.
Compare and Contrast
Back in the Dark Ages, back when the average television set could only receive three or four channels, you couldn't see much auto racing on television. You would see the Indy 500 every year, of course, and you might see the occasional race highlighted on Wide World of Sports, but that was about it.
The United States Auto Club (USAC) ran the show at Indy when I was kid, but split up into rival factions, the Indy Racing League (IRL, or Indy Cars) and Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART, or Champ Cars).
CART was the more dominant of the two leagues in the beginning, but has since declared bankruptcy. Champ Car lives on under another sanctioning body. The last Champ Car race I saw last year was a fairly sad affair with just over a dozen competitors.
Both leagues race technologically advanced open-wheeled racers. The wheels are not covered by fenders. The tires jut out. The cars fly and turn on a dime, but there's no bumping and grinding here. IRL racing is very team oriented with teammates expected to work together.
Formula One (F1) is king in much of the world. Their cars are technological marvels, the creme de la creme of racing. Their cars are also open-wheeled. F1 races take place all around the world, from the United States to Japan to Bahrain, and the races sometimes come on TV here at very odd hours. F1 is the ultimate team racing, with a lot of politics and a little corporate espionage...a little too much for me.
As a son of the South, NASCAR (an acronym: the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) suits me just fine. It too has its roots in the South, starting with moonshiners who honed their skills by outrunning revenuers going to the dirt track to test their luck. I watched a fair amount of NASCAR growing up. Back in those aforementioned Dark Ages, they provided a lot of those Wide World of Sports highlights, but in February of 1979, CBS tried something new: a wire-to-wire broadcast of the Daytona 500. They had cameras right there at track level where you could almost feel the cars zooming by. They had in-car cameras. And CBS got lucky. Almost the entire Eastern United States was snowed and iced in on that February afternoon. There weren't any other major sporting events on the telly that day. A record audience (a captive audience) saw one of the greatest finishes in NASCAR history...
A lot of NASCAR fans were born that day and the regional sport began moving out of the South. NASCAR now holds Sprint Cup races from Fontana, California to Dover, Delaware to Homestead, Florida. The cars are not so technologically advanced. Juan Pablo Montoya won the NASCAR Sprint Cup Raybestos (everything has a sponsor) Rookie of the Year award last year. He found the biggest adjustment to NASCAR to be the racecar...
"When I first came here, they told me I was running for Raybestos Rookie of the Year, and I was like, 'you've got to be kidding me,'" said Montoya, the 1999 Indianapolis 500 winner and a seven-time winner in Formula One. "I thought I would be an exception or something. In a lot of ways, I really was a rookie. Do I have a lot of experience as a racing driver? Yes, but I've never been in a stock car before, so coming here and getting into it was a big deal. We had a lot of fun...
At Daytona, first race of the year, I thought we had a good car, and we did, but after Lap 5, it was so tight I was just about to get lapped every time it went yellow," Montoya said. "It's just knowing how far off I was when I thought the car was good. When you think you have a good car, you're still miles away, and other times when you're so loose you're about to kill yourself, you're competitive.
"To get that into your system is pretty hard."
But other drivers, including Dario Franchitti, last year's IRL champion, and Jacques Villeneuve, one of only three drivers to win the Indy 500, the CART championship, and a F1 championship, are following Montoya to NASCAR.
NASCAR is a lot easier for the average fan to follow. Almost every Sunday (except for when they race on Saturday nights), the race is going to be on. The schedule is pretty full. They take Mother's Day and a couple of other weekends off, but otherwise they race from February to November, making NASCAR the sport with the longest season. It's especially welcome in February and March, the dead zone for sports when basketball is the only game in town.
In that 1979 Daytona 500, the drivers drove cars that looked a lot like those you could buy from your local Chevy or Oldsmobile dealer. They weren't very safe and occasionally a driver would die.
Life in the pits was rough too. There was no pit road speed limit. Cars zoomed in at 100 mph, past crewmen clad in short-sleeved shirts and work pants. When you had to change right side tires, the crewman had to turn their backs to pit road. Crew members didn't wear helmets -- the better to feel the hair stand up on the back of their necks.
And like all professional and some college sports, the money hadn't mucked up the sport yet. The teams had sponsors, but the cars weren't traveling billboards like they are now. Excepting Richard Petty's #43 STP car, you usually had to look hard to figure out who the sponsors were. The sponsor might even be some local diner or a mom-and-pop hardware store.
To see how much things have changed, tune into this year's Daytona 500 on Sunday, February 17.
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