Today I want to talk a little about a sport that was on top of the world just a few years ago but now seems to have fallen on hard times. NASCAR was a sport centered in the US Southeast which featured larger than life drivers and fierce competition. Who could ever forget Dale Earnhart Sr. finally winning the Daytona 500? Or DW (Darrell Waltrip) shooting off about anything and everything? Or Rusty Wallace telling NASCAR fans to vote for Bob Dole in a post-race interview? Or Ward Burton speaking in a Southern drawl so rich you wished for subtitles? I LOVED that stuff!
Well, as it grew larger, it turned its back on its core fans. Drivers were so well paid they learned to keep their mouth shut no matter what. And point racing (trying to accumulate points instead of winning races) made a lot of the races boring. This vanilla racing put the TV ratings in the toilet. Now racetracks are actually REMOVING seats, seats that were full less than 10 years ago. Only NASCAR has managed to kill live attendance AND TV ratings at the same time.
My other complaint about NASCAR is the lack of any kind of critical reporting about the sport. The TV announcers constantly tell us how great it is, but our eyes and ears tell us differently. You have to dig long and hard online to find any honest discussion of NASCAR. The racing press is wined and dined by NASCAR, so they are sure not going to rock the boat. Much more to come on this topic!
Photo by Caitlyn Wilson on Unsplash
Today’s classic rock song is “Tales of Brave Ulysses” by Cream.