Posted on 09/06/2004 4:46:19 AM PDT by aomagrat
THIS IS NOT the column I was supposed to write.
My newspaper was expecting something about the Chase for the Nextel Cup, a few hundred words about how eight guys are separated by 50 points as they claw for three spots in the group that in two weeks will start a 10-race playoff for this year's title.
I spent part of Friday trying to put a column like that together, asking the four Dodge drivers among those eight if the chance their manufacturer could be shut out of the title chase put added pressure on them in Sunday's Pop Secret 500.
The truth? I really didn't try very hard. Somehow, it just didn't seem important.
I've been walking around the garage at California Speedway wearing a cap I got at last year's Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway. I dug it out of my office Thursday morning before heading for the airport, figuring it might help to take a little piece of NASCAR's most historic race with me.
It hasn't been enough.
There are good fans here, just like there are true fans in South Carolina. And there were more people at Sunday's race than there would have been at Darlington — despite the fact that there was something considerably less than a clamor for tickets.
California Speedway should have two Cup races each season. Los Angeles is the country's second-biggest market, and it's important for NASCAR to bring its show here.
But not on Labor Day weekend.
If they hold a Nextel Cup race in Southern California on this weekend for the next 100 years, it will never mean as much here as the Southern 500 meant to Darlington, where it had been every year since 1950 — until this year.
People who might come to a second race here would just as soon come next week or last week or on some other weekend in the final 10 races. Labor Day has traditions of its own here, and I won't pretend to tell you what they are.
I don't know what this holiday weekend means to Southern Californians. But I do know what it means to NASCAR fans — the real fans whose dollars and desires have helped build the sport to where it is. Labor Day weekend means the Southern 500 at Darlington, and that's where we should be.
Until a couple of months ago, that's precisely where I'd planned to be today.
My plan was to spend the weekend at the Red Bone Alley restaurant, or the Traces golf course, or at the row of hotels and restaurants in Florence, that would have been filled with media, teams, officials and fans this weekend, or all of the other places I've grown accustomed to being on this weekend.
But I decided someone else could handle that part of the story. I'd be better off coming here to help cover this championship race, which some people still hate but which has worked out, at least so far, as well as NASCAR could have possibly hoped.
The tight battle for spots eight through 10 is an excellent story, and it will be compelling to see where that battle stands after this evening's competition.
There will be a Southern 500 this year, as Darlington hosts the next-to-last race in the Chase for the Nextel Cup. If the playoff chase builds toward a dramatic finish, that means the Nov. 14 race will at least be meaningful.
What happened here Sunday will help shape what happens at Darlington. So I don't think it's completely wrong for me to be where the racing was Sunday.
What is dead wrong, though, is where the racing is. Or, more precisely, where it isn't.
California's second date could be part of the 10-race playoff and everybody here would be satisfied. Racing here on this particular weekend had no particular meaning, and it stinks that so much meaning for Darlington was traded in for such a big, fat nothing.
Will NASCAR and its sister company, International Speedway Corp., kill off Darlington Raceway after it hosts one race, a night race in early May, in 2005?
The optimistic answer is perhaps. The realistic one is probably, and there might not be anything that can change that.
But I don't have to like it.
And as long as my newspaper allows me these few hundred words to say what I think, there's no way I could in good conscience write about anything else today.
Two words: Johnnie Cochran.
Greed runs Nascar.
What was the real deal with NASCAR and Jesse Jackson's rainbow coalition? I've heard that NASCAR caved from some, and from others that they didn't.
But yes, in the pursuit of being more 'mainstream' NASCAR will probably lose its soul and alienate the people who made it successful in the first place.
Aetius,
Cochran was the attorney in Ferko v. ISC, which took the Southern 500 off the calendar and moved it to Fort Worth to settle a lawsuit. Mike Joy told me in an e-mail there were more documents ISC didn't want to expose in court. To me, that's evidence a the NAACP attorneys would plead the Jackpot Jury in a Judicial Hellhole to pounce on Florence-Myrtle Beach and take NASCAR out of South Carolina. Of course, we know how Judicial Hellholes in Texas were ready to kill South Carolina in a nutshell.
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