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Another Bigtime Sellout

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Written by Thom Ring

I'm warning you. I'm about to write on a subject important to me that you might dismiss as not only entirely uninteresting but as having nothing to do with Mom N' Pop Culture. But please bear with me, because I believe this subject serves as a perfect microcosm of the larger subject this blog was created to discuss.

I'm into auto racing. Have been since as far back as I can remember. I liked racing before the sport hit the major leagues. I didn't realize the niche it occupied back then, mostly because back then I was occupying a pretty small niche myself. I was a kid. My interests were about what interested me, the concepts of niches, mainstreams and every other measures of popularity foreign to a self-absorbed child.

My interest in racing remains, and I don't make a secret of it. And almost every time somebody learns of my interest in the sport, they seem to consider racing from their own point of view and question how I could ever (being an apparently intelligent, interesting adult human-being) stand to sit and watch "cars going around in circles for hours."

"It's boring," they'll declare.

"I agree," I'll agree.

And they'll look at me funny.

This interaction has occurred often enough that I can tell it's about to again with the first words out of someone's mouth. I know what they're thinking when they think of racing, and I understand how their perception has been colored by our modern "Let's-jam-this-idea-down-everyone's-throats-until-they-gag-on-it-and-then-jam-it-deeper-so-they-don't-forget," media. You see, when they think of racing they're thinking of the stuff they most often see on TV, the Sprint Cup "stock" cars of the National Association of Stock Car Racing. A typical NASCAR race involves more than 40 cars racing on simple oval tracks for anywhere from a few hundred miles to 500 miles; in other words, cars going around in circles for hours.

What they don't understand is that racing is not football. It is not a sport. It is many sports. In football, no matter whether you're watching 12-year-old kids or adult professionals, you're likely watching two teams of 11 players, each facing off on a field that extends 100 yards between scores. There is not anything close to that level of uniformity in racing. An auto race can be on a half-mile oval, or a two-mile oval, or a quarter-mile oval. It even can be in a straight line, or conversely on a circuit that winds itself all over town. There might be 40 cars - or six. They might be behemoths with fire-breathing engines that could power a small town, or tiny pumpkin-seeds with buzzy little motors that might on a another day have mowed your lawn. It's all racing.

So what is the point that relates to our general subject here? Well, my point is that many of the choices that have led racing to the big time were made for precisely that reason, to drive it there. Why are races so long? Well, it might be because a few years ago NASCAR racing got so popular on TV that TV producers didn't have enough time in a race to show all the commercials they could sell. A couple of races always went for 500 miles, but those events tended to be season-highlight events and also ran on big, high-speed tracks, where the cars  - and the races - went by more quickly. Now we get routine four-hour events after an hour of pre-race talking about the event - an hour that allows for even more ads.

But this hardly is the half of it. We also get announcers continually acting goofy pumping up the action because of the now-obsolete assumption that viewers don't know what they're watching because theirs is a "growing" sport, even as attendance and TV-viewership in this "growing" sport has been trending down for years. We also get racecars that insult the knowledgeble "gearheads" who for decades were the backbone of racing. New and apparently ignorant fans of NASCAR will root for the brand of car they drive, not realizing that beyond engines that are not used in any street-vehicles Sprint Cup cars all are identical right down to their bodies cleverly disguised to look like specific street-models, even though the racecars have virtually nothing in common with the models they're dressed up as.

The irony to me is that NASCAR has so gotten into the habit of responding to what markets tell them that they've lost sight of why NASCAR was created in the first place. They've neglected diehard fans in their pursuit of the casual ones. Now they're finding they can't overcome the short attention-spans of those fickle fans after developing their form of the sport into something the diehards aren't very interested in either. They've lost their way, even in the midst of their own success  - or because of it.

When I was heavily involved in racing as a journalist, I made it a mission to get people interested in the forms of racing I preferred. I'd tell them to check out the local Friday or Saturday night "bullring" close to their home. There, they could spend maybe 10 to 15 bucks for a ticket. They'd be able to easily see all the way around the little track and follow the action from start to finish, as a typical race might be over in 15 to 30 minutes. Instead of seeing one big finish, they might see a half-dozen. Racing toward the finishes would be regular Mom N' Pop Joes and Janes, with day-jobs and mortgages, often driving cars that really are ones you could drive on the street.

There would be no TV choices because there'd be no TV. Decisions would be made with the racer in mind, because racers - not advertisers - would be the focus of management, management that as likely as not would form Mon-N'Pop operations themselves.

After a one Saturday evening spent that way, folks might just understand what's to like about racing.

Oh - hey - I just remembered arena football. It was football played indoors in the space of a hockey rink, with, I think, six players on a side. I think they still do that. Oh, and there's Canadian football, with 12 players on a side playing on a 110-yard field. Plus Australian-rules football, played on some kind of oval field. Of course, anywhere else in the world, soccer actually is what they mean when they say football.

There may be even more forms of football, too, but these are the ones I've seen on TV. I guess we both need to get out more. You get to the races. I think I know where they play Gaelic football.