Posted on 06/02/2002 7:08:09 AM PDT by 07055
Forgive me the vanity post, but as someone who knows little about auto racing, I was hoping to learn why NASCAR is (by far) the most popular form of auto racing today.
When I was growing up, the biggest racing event of the year was the Indianapolis 500. But, over the last thirty years, Indy car racing has plummeted in popularity compared to NASCAR---even though the Indy cars are significantly faster than "stock cars."
Could some of you NASCAR fans enlighten me about what NASCAR has done right and the other auto racing groups have done wrong?
dep
Just as David Stern has, through his marketing efforts, made the NBA as popular as it is (arguably more popular than the MLB), NASCAR officials have made that sport much more popular through their efforts.
IMHO...
There are a number of factors, but to put it simply, marketing.
But one main cause for it's big explosion during the 80's thru 90's was the fact that during a time when pro athelete's were getting more and more of a reputation as money driven, spoiled, and above us average people...
Nascar remained a sport whose participants had more in common with the fans than in other sports.
Or..
We all know how much money every baseball, football, basketball player out there...
But tell me how much Tony Stewart's deal is with Gibb's racing. Or tell me the last time you heard a driver publically threaten his owner with leaving the team for more money.
But why has NASCAR surpassed other forms of racing in popularity?
I'm a rabid cup fan, but I will admit it ain't the most exciting brand of racing to watch, especially for someone new to the sport.
Indy, F-1, Trans-am, are all very exciting forms of racing with very talented drivers. But they appeal more to the upscale crowd.
NASCAR appeals to everyone...from the average working guy, to the corporate big cheese partying in the luxury box.
You lost me there...
Henry Louis Mencken was a writer of enormous national influence who also played a leading role in southern intellectual life of the 1920s. A native of Baltimore, he became a contributor to the Smart Set and the American Mercury. As such, he was, Walter Lippmann wrote, "the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people." In particular, he conducted a crusade against American provincialism, puritanism, and prudery - all of which he believed he found, to a degree larger than elsewhere, in the states below the Potomac and Ohio. Mencken shocked southerners when he published a severe indictment of southern culture, "The Sahara of the Bozart," which first appeared in 1917 in the New York Evening Mail and was reprinted in his book, Prejudices, Second Series (1920). In his essay he charged that the South was "almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert." "In all that gargantuan paradise of the fourth-rate," he contended, "there is not a single picture gallery worth going into, or a single orchestra capable of playing the nine symphonies of Beethoven, or a single opera-house, or a single theater devoted to decent plays." Most southern poetry and prose was drivel, he charged, and "when you come to critics, musical composers, painters, sculptors, architects and the like, you will have to give it up, for there is not even a bad one between the Potomac mud-flats and the Gulf." Nor, Mencken added, a historian, sociologist, philosopher, theologian, or scientist.
The essay, written in characteristic Menckenian hyperbole, suggested that the condition of the modern South was especially lamentable because the antebellum South, particularly Virginia, had been the seat of American civilization. Mencken attributed the decline of southern culture to the "poor whites" who, he charged, had seized control of the South after the Civil War. Particularly to blame were the preachers and the politicians. What the South needed, he maintained, was a return to influence of a remnant of the old aristocracy.
Mencken's "Sahara" and other essays on the "godawful South" attracted widespread attention in Dixie in the decade that followed. Traditional southerners denounced him as a "modern Attila," a "miserable and uninformed wretch," a "bitter, prejudiced and ignorant critic of a great people." But other southerners such as James Branch Cabell, Howard W. Odum, Gerald W. Johnson, Paul Green, Thomas Wolfe, and Wilbur J. Cash declared their agreement with the substance of the indictment.
The Southern Literary Renaissance followed Mencken's "Sahara," and literary historians have suggested that Mencken shocked young southern writers into an awareness of southern literary poverty and thus played a seminal role in the revival of southern letters. But as important as Mencken's effect on southern literature was his effect on the general intellectual climate of the "progressive" South. Menckenism became, as the 1920s progressed, a cultural force, a school of thought for iconoclastic southerners. Not all young southerners accepted him: Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, and other southern Agrarians challenged him with particular vigor. In the mid-1930s Mencken lost interest in the South, as the South lost interest in him. Nevertheless, his impact on southern letters, even if indirect, was felt for many years.
Fred Hobson
University of Alabama
Carl Bode, Mencken (1969); Fred Hobson, Serpent in Eden: H. L. Mencken and the South (1974); William H. Nolte, H. L. Mencken, Literary Critic (1966).
Source: From ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOUTHERN CULTURE edited by Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris. Copyright (c) 1989 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher.
All of this being said, I'm sorry to see NASCAR losing touch with this. They are moving races from the South, where they belong, to up north and out west. Some of the drivers are tempermental crybabies who can't keep their whining out of the public eye. I also don't like the fact that the rules are situational according to who you are.
The Indy 500 shot itself in the foot a few years back when they decided to just allow drivers from their circuit compete. (They didn't allow CART in, which had most of the famous/popular drivers.)(I don't remember all of the details; I was always just a marginal fan. That just seemed like the beginning of the decline for Indy.) That was about the time I stopped paying attention to any auto racing, although I occasionally catch a NASCAR race because I have a few friends who are fanatics.
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