The NASCAR world is turning into quite the little “Peyton Place,” isn’t it?
You have compelling story lines: young man leaves home, away from wicked stepmother, signs big deal with best “company” and lives happily ever after; older team owner falls for young lady driver; and so on and so forth.
Remember when it used to be about the racing? Well, maybe it never was just about the racing. There was always something percolating, whether it was manufacturer politics, intra-team sniping or blood feuds that threatened to blow the lid off the next race and the sport itself.
But it always came back to the racing, in the end. Now, I’m not so sure it does.
Sure, there are real-life aspects to NASCAR; after all, the sport is populated by humans, and humans make mistakes every day, all day long. But it’s sort of taking on an O.J. cast to it lately that has, frankly, turned some people off.
Of course, back in the day we didn’t have 24/7 information sources, cable TV shows and the Internet. We went to sleep at night knowing what we knew, and when we got up the next morning, we found out what was going on.
Now, you can set your combination PDA/phone/alarm clock/computer/inflatable life raft to monitor any one of a dozen sites and news feeds, and let’s not even start on blogs (Web logs, for those of you who choose to remain on the outside of the information age).
It’s all very exhausting, but I suppose it’s a sign of the times.
Case in point, is the recent announcement in Dallas that Dale Earnhardt, Jr. would be sponsored by Mountain Dew, its energy drink cousin Amp and the National Guard. We knew what was going to be announced a couple weeks before it actually was, and still, there were 25 journalists on a charter flight to Dallas to be on hand for it.
Yours truly was on that plane, with a computer, a camera and instructions on how to blog. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am no longer a virgin blogger.
Having already written about what was going to be announced, it became more about the chance to talk to Junior, Rick Hendrick and the principals than any real news angle.
Do I long for the days when you had to buy National Speed Sport News to find out what was happening in motorsports? Sure I do, and NSSN is still your best bet to find out what’s happening in every major series and discipline in the world of racing.
But at the same time, there’s a lot to be said for being able, should the mood strike you, to wake up in the middle of the night, log on in your jammies and find out who won the B main at Tri-State Speedway or the feature at Seekonk.
You know you’re getting older when your cell phone is smaller than your wallet. Keith Waltz, associate editor of NSSN back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, had the first cell phone it was ever my pleasure to observe, and he had to carry it around in a briefcase.
Of course, the first computer-filed story I ever wrote was on a TRS-80 brick that had less combined computing power and memory than my daughter’s first GameBoy.
As for NASCAR, maybe all the ancillary happenings — non-race stuff — is good for the sport. People sure tune into the gossip/news shows and talk about it around the water cooler the next day, and maybe NASCAR is just mirroring the way all of our lives are heading.
The racing, the stuff we all fell in love with back when, is simply something extra, behind the politics and the salaciousness and the random corporate happenings.
It would be a bit boring, I guess, to just write about the racing any more. Guess I’ll have to bone up on my soap-opera plot lines before the season ends, huh?