Watching Tony Pedregon bounce off the Auto Club Raceway at Pomona guardwalls in the center of a blazing ball in the Feb. 10 Winternationals was dreadful enough. What we saw once we knew the reigning National Hot Rod Ass’n Funny Car champion was relatively all right maybe was more shocking.  
Pedregon, who didn’t speak to the media at the race track, appeared Tuesday on NBC’s Today Show and CNN’s American Morning, complete with video of his wild ride. AOL titillated viewers with the headline: “Man’s car explodes at 300 mph.”
In case we reporters missed it, NHRA Communications e-mailed links of the coverage, along with the excited text about Pedregon discussing “the spectacular explosion and fireball that engulfed his Q Horsepower Chevy Impala.”
Sadly, publicity today focuses on quantity rather than quality.
Young sportswriters of my generation wanted to emulate the style of Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray. But any of us who loved motorsports should have tried more to pattern ourselves after George Moore or Shav Glick, writers with a passion for what we loved, for it was Murray who torpedoed racing with his still-famous wisecrack: “Gentlemen, start your coffins.”
Murray alluded to his distaste for auto racing by citing “its capacity for human destruction” and called the Indianapolis 500-Mile Race “the run for the lilies” and “America’s Earache.” Although I have no evidence or memory of such a remark, the late Clint Brawner once snarled to me that Murray had called the event “the USAC barbecue.”

For a son of a drag-racing pioneer nicknamed “Flamin’ Frank,” the incident might not have been as ghastly as it was for those of us who watched it.

The reason for dredging up these barbs is to point out that the average Joe Bag-O-Doughnuts without a clue about racing thinks the same. He’s the skunk at the garden party who collects petition signatures to shut down that noisy race track that was there 30 years before he built his house next door.
So how could trumpeting Tony Pedregon’s fiery accident at Pomona be helpful to the sport? 
Tony Pedregon’s decision to appear on these shows which treat him with the same respect as a circus sideshow act is, ironically, understandable.
For a son of a drag-racing pioneer nicknamed “Flamin’ Frank,” the incident might not have been as ghastly as it was for those of us who watched it.
Besides, Tony Pedregon is a businessman — and a smart one, at that. He didn’t want to pass up mentioning sponsors, giving them valuable exposure and free publicity. The new mantra is “Sheet time is bad, but face time is terrific.”
That doesn’t erase the fact that Pedregon was on The Today Show and CNN’s American Morning because something failed.
He was on those shows because he easily could have been incinerated.
He was on those shows because of the sensational nature of his crash.
That’s not promoting the sport. “Maybe we can entertain you with a big, nasty, flaming crash and if we’re all lucky, nobody will die?” C’mon. And if the sanctioning body uses that to sell tickets, its people should be horsewhipped.
Forgive me, NHRA, for regarding your “Spam in a can” — a term skeptics applied to the original Mercury astronauts — as human beings.
Why pimp these drivers but revere them when they don’t walk away? How hypocritical.
Forget for a minute the driver and focus on the informed media who attend drag races regularly. This kind of promotion couldn’t have done more damage to their efforts to elevate the level of NHRA coverage in metropolitan daily newspapers.
For historical perspective, consider industry insider and Arizona Republic contributor Michael Knight’s recollection of Murray’s sentiments following the 1973 carnage at Indianapolis. “In my opinion, the ‘Gentlemen, start your coffins’ column remains, to this day, the single most controversial column ever written about auto racing,” Knight said. “It carried great impact within the sport due to Jim’s own stature, and it was back in the days before cable and the Internet, when big-city columnists ruled the media universe.”
Knight said some reporters “felt it did terrible damage, others thought it brought much needed focus on safety issues…The writers who regularly covered racing (and liked it) were extremely critical of Jim’s column, because it made it more difficult to get their editors to assign them to cover racing as a ‘serious sport.’”
But evidently NHRA accepts the theory that any publicity is positive publicity — a point we have argued unsuccessfully with NHRA in the past.
So never mind the press releases about how safety is the No. 1 goal.
Never mind that John Force was in the other lane, making his return to competition for the first time since his September accident that left him hospitalized with serious multiple injuries. Or that he has dug deep into his pockets to try to make sure drivers don’t have crashes like Pedregon’s or worse.
Never mind that the drag-racing community has recently grieved recently the deaths of gifted drivers Eric Medlen, Darrell Russell and Blaine Johnson.
These accidents affect people. Racers accept the risk. But that doesn’t entitle The Man In The Carpeted Office to exploit them.