Posted on 03/22/2006 11:54:47 AM PST by colonel mosby
There's no disputing NASCAR's phenomenal growth in recent years. The sport sprouted from it's Southeastern roots and opened tracks in Kansas City, Chicago, and California. Fortune 500 companies lined up to sponsor cars and drivers. Networks paid $4.5 billion for a TV contract. Officials say the fan base is 75 million.
But, in its race to claim a place beside other professional sports in a world of glitz and glitter, NASCAR is jeopardizing the grass roots fan base that helped build it.
(Excerpt) Read more at ajc.com ...
ISC bought Penske.
And I thought I was the only one bothered by that. It just begs the question: "How much more commercial crap can you plaster all over yourself?"
I have to confess, I really could care less about NASCAR and never watch it, but it seems like everybody else is really into it as some days that's all I'd hear about.
*(This has to be confidential because it just might get me kicked out of the south if it ever leaked out. If Sen. Leahy is lurking on this forum, I'm already doomed.)
Maybe if I just went to one race, saw it all in person and caught the excitement that you've got to be there to enjoy, that would all change. After all, it only took one double-header at the old Comiskey Park, my first and only major league game, to make a lifetime White Sox baseball fan out of a person (me) who had never realloy followed it before.
Brian France is just plain goofy. He's trying his best to alienate as many of the hard-core fans as he can.
I'll bet his grand-daddy, Big Bill France, would like to jump out of his grave and give the boy a good spanking.
Although I am not a NASCAR fan, this article touches on some things I have dicussed with friends who are NASCAR fans. The folks that brought this sport along, can no longer afford to pay the ticket prices. They have left the ones who brought them to the dance.
The US postal bicycle team and the US Olympic teams of various sports discuss strategy all the time.
Bicycle racing ceased to be a competitive sport in my mind when I started reading stories during the last Tour de France about how a group of the top "competitors" were arranging to have certain racers lead or win certain stages of the event. Oh, please.
One of the key characteristics that makes NASCAR something less than a competitive sport is the way the league is owned in its entirety by a single entity (the France family) instead of operating as a group of individual franchise owners. When you have a league like this changing rules in the middle of a season (like the yellow-flag rule for the ends of races last year), I think you're dealing with something less than a truly competitive environment.
I see. Thanks for clearing that up for me. That probably explains how he ended up on the company's board of directors, too.
Instead of wanting to keep the foreigners out, you should invite them to race, so you can beat them, and prove we're the best.
Yeah that worked for international baseball. The Canadians are still crowing about beating us at our "national pass time".
I think you may have hit on one of the real sources of the problem.
Depends on how you cater to them. The NFL does the best job of turning casual fans into serious fans while grabbing new casual fans and repeating, thus the psychotic increases to the revenue picture.
Of course some of that new city process doesn't apply to NASCAR, because no city "belongs" to one team, you hold the race and the fans watch or don't, still get some of that newness factor but you don't have to worry about trying to keep or build fans during lean expansion years when the home team sucks, there is no home team to suck. In NASCAR you just need them to decide on a favorite driver to buy some merch for and go to one race a year (except in the rare city with multiple races), maybe watch a couple on TV to keep the ratings up so the next contract is tasty and then you're fine.
This is precisely why I can only afford to go to the two Texas races each year. You have to save for months just to afford decent seats, hotels, meals, beer, etc... But Texas is cool, you can BYOB ;)
That all revolves on whether the growth is a fad or not. The business office can't worry about that, they're job is to keep getting new fans and hoping they turn into permanent fans. If it turns out the growth was a fad you're in trouble whether or not you've lost some traditional fans because it means you probably over expanded.
Brian France has ZERO personal skills. He inherited a family business, built on strong interpersonal relationships, and he's completely lost. That's why Mike Helton is the front man for NASCAR with drivers, sponsors, and the media.
But, Helton is spouting the new NASCAR company line, and a lot of the grassroots fans just aren't buying it.
"3N not so rabid fans is better for the bottom line than N rabid fans."
In the short term, that may be true. But not-so-rabid fans are also not quite the panacea to brand marketers, and they're going to be far more fickle. That there will be problems down the road, in both attendance and with sponsorships, is a near-certainty.
Kasey Kayne grew up dirt track racing in Northern California. Just because you, nor I, can stand his pretty boy looks doesn't mean he doesn't know how to push a car around a track.
As long as the numbers stay up it's OK. As long as you manage to get 10 million people to spend an average of $300 a year (or whatever the real numbers are) it doesn't matter if they're the same 10 million people. One of the things the NFL has proven in the last 10 years is the casual fan is where the big lie so long as you get them in droves. Probably over half the NFL fans are fair weather fans of some team that made the playoffs in the last 5 years, but with 12 playoff teams every year it's easy to get new fair weather fans to replace the ones whose team stank last year. Sure the core fans are good and you want to kep as many of them as you can, but as a sport you've got to love the initial investment that comes from a new fan, hard core fans don't buy a new coat with their favorite team's logo every year, to keep the merch selling you need new blood.
The world baseball classic is a joke. MLB is international baseball. The best in the world are playing in MLB for real money. MLB doesn't keep foreigners out. In fact, they're going to places like Korea and Australia for the best players.
One thing about pro sports - you'll never have a quota. Owners want to win, and they'll pay for the best players no matter what they look like or where they come from.
I wasn't in the South five minutes before people started making oaths, having visions, telling these hulking great stories, and so forth, all on the subject of Junior Johnson. At the Greensboro, North Carolina, Airport there was one good old boy who vowed he would have eaten "a bucket of it" if that would have kept Junior Johnson from switching from a Dodge racer to a Ford. Hell yes, and after that that—God-almighty, remember that 1963 Chevrolet of Junior's?
Whatever happened to that car? A couple more good old boys join in. . . . God! Junior Johnson was like Robin Hood or Jesse James or Little David or something. Every time that Chevrolet, No. 3, appeared on the track, these wild curdled yells, "Rebel" yells, they still have those, would rise up. At Daytona, at Atlanta, at Charlotte, at Darlington, South Carolina; Bristol, Tennessee; Martinsville, Virginia -- Junior Johnson!
And then the good old boys get to talking about whatever happened to that Chevrolet of Junior's, and then the cabdriver says he knows. He says Junior Johnson is using that car to run liquor out of Wilkes County. What does he mean? For Junior Johnson ever to go near another load of bootleg whiskey again -- he would have to be insane. He has this huge racing income. He has two other businesses, a whole automated chicken farm with 42,000 chickens, a road-grading business—but cabdriver says he has this dream Junior is still roaring down from Wilkes County, down through the clay cuts, with the Atlas Arc Lip jars full in the back of that Chevrolet. It is in Junior's blood -- and then at this point he puts his right hand up in front of him as if he is groping through fog, and his eyeballs glaze over and he looks out in the distance and he describes Junior Johnson roaring over the ridges of Wilkes County as if it is the ghost of Zapata he is describing, bounding over the Sierras on a white horse to rouse the peasants.
. . .
And all the while, standing by in full Shy, in Alumicron suits -- there is Detroit, hardly able to believe itself, what it has discovered, a breed of good old boys from the fastnesses of the Appalachian hills and flats—a handful from this rare breed -- who has given Detroit speed . . . and the industry can present it to a whole generation as yours. And the Detroit P.R. men themselves come to the tracks like folk worshipers and the millions go giddy with the thrill of speed. Only Junior Johnson goes about it as if it were . . . the usual. Junior goes down to Atlanta for the Dixie 400 and drops by the Federal penitentiary to see his Daddy. His Daddy is in on his fifth illegal-distillery conviction; in the whiskey business that's just part of it; an able craftsman, an able businessman, and the law kept hounding him, that was all. So Junior drops by and then goes on out to the track and gets in his new Ford and sets the qualifying speed record for the Atlanta Dixie 400, 146.301 mph; later on he tools on back up the road to Ingle Hollow to tend to the automatic chicken houses and the road-grading operation. Yes.
Yet how can you tell that to . . . anybody . . . out on the bottom of that bowl as the motor thunder begins to lift up through him like a sigh and his eyeballs glaze over and his hands reach up and there, riding the rim of the bowl, soaring over the ridges, is Junior's yellow Ford . . . which is his white Chevrolet . . . which is a White Ghost, forever rousing the good old boys . . . hard-charging! . . . up with the automobile into their America, and the hell with arteriosclerotic old boys trying to hold onto the whole pot with arms of cotton seersucker. Junior!
(excerpted from "Junior Johnson is the Last American Hero" by Tom Wolfe, Esquire, March 1965)
The Canadians are still crowing about beating us at our "national pass time".
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