Volume 6, Number 12  Friday, April 1, 2005

NASCAR Nation

This classic State of the Union column was originally published March 7, 2003.  If you were wondering how you were ever going to prepare for the Food City 500 at the Bristol Motor Speedway in Bristol, Tennessee, this weekend, here’s your answer.

In my weekly effort to gauge the State of the Union, I often turn to cereal.

Now, I'm not talking about turning to cereal to ease the pain -- the smack works fine for that -- or "reading" cereal the way others might read tea leaves, although I did once have a rather nasty philosophical argument with my Alpha-Bits (I said Rousseau's ideas on child development were bunk, they said high fructose corn syrup was a vegetable).  No, I mean that in assessing where we are as a people, in evaluating our progress as a society, in trying to understand what matters to us as a nation, I look closely at what sorts of prizes they're giving away in cereal boxes.

Thus my current state of anxiety -- I found a Petty Enterprises NASCAR die-cast car in my Cheerios.

As if that wasn't enough, I found another one in my Honey Nut Cheerios two days later.  It seems General Mills is now featuring one of five of these die-cast cars free inside specially-marked boxes of select cereals.

The significance of this development didn't hit home for me until I found myself stuck in traffic east of Nashville, Tennessee, last Friday.  I was driving from St. Louis to Atlanta, cruising down Interstate 24, when traffic inexplicably slowed to a crawl.  After nearly 20 minutes of inching along at five miles an hour, I finally discovered the cause of the delay -- the interstate went from four lanes to three lanes, so people had to merge.

Merging!  I will never understand what makes merging such a difficult concept for the American driver, but it was particularly baffling to me that on a highway in which every other car on the road was adorned with either a Dale Earnhardt sticker, a Dale Earnhardt Jr. sticker or both, people were having this much trouble with merging.  I mean, merging!  Maybe they needed a guy waving colored flags.

When I had gotten back up to cruising speed and I was just about over the whole merging thing, suddenly everything slowed down again.  We were merging from three lanes to two.

As I sat idling, completely stopped, I started to daydream.

Actually, it was more of a nightmare, but I was daydreaming.  What do you call that?  When you have a good dream at night, it's a dream, and when you have a bad dream at night, it's a nightmare, but there's no name for a bad dream during the day.  Would you call it a daymare?  I think I shall.

So in my daymare, I had been pulled over to the side of the road, and a state trooper approached my car.  My heart pounding, I rolled down the window.

OFFICER:  Son, do you know why I pulled you over?

ME:  I'm sorry, officer, I don't.  Was I speeding?

OFFICER:  No, son.  I pulled you over for failure to declare your NASCAR affiliation.

ME:  I'm sorry, did you say my NASCAR affiliation?

OFFICER:  Unless I've suddenly developed a vision problem, I see no NASCAR stickers on your back bumper, and none in the window.  That puts you in direct violation of Tennessee state statute 47-34a, section 18, article C.

ME:  I'm sorry, sir.  What if maybe I just declared my affiliation to you now?

OFFICER:  Are you trying to bribe a Tennessee State Patrolman?

ME:  No, no, no -- I was just saying, maybe I could declare my affiliation now, and I could get a sticker at the next exit.

OFFICER:  Well . . . who did you have in mind?

ME:  Who's your favorite?

OFFICER:  Oh, don't try that one on me.

ME:  Okay, okay.  Not Jeff Gordon, right?

OFFICER:  Boy, you say that name again and I'll have you naked and spread-eagled against the hood of this vehicle faster'n you can say "restrictor-plate racing."

Just as I was beginning to debate the virtues of different drivers -- you certainly can't go wrong with Dale or Dale Jr., I figured, and I've always thought Sterling Marlin had a cool name -- somebody behind me honked their horn.  Traffic was moving again.

As I applied my foot to the accelerator, I began to reflect on the sea of NASCAR that surrounded me, and the ramifications of the daymare I'd just had.  It wasn't like the state trooper had asked me to declare my NASCAR affiliation and I couldn't name a single driver.  I mean, not only could I name Jeff Gordon, the Earnhardts and Sterling Marlin, but if pressed, I could have named at least half a dozen other drivers, just off the top of my head -- Dale Jarrett, Matt Kenseth, Mark Martin, Rusty Wallace, Bobby Labonte and Dick Trickle, to name a few.  And on top of that, I knew, without having to think twice, what it meant when someone had a tilted number 3 sticker on their bumper, as opposed to a tilted number 8.

Of course, I wouldn't have found any of this disturbing if I considered myself a NASCAR fan.  But I don't.  In fact, I've never watched a NASCAR race in my life.  And yet here I was, rattling off the names of NASCAR drivers in my head.

I realized two things were responsible for this startling reality.  The first is that despite my complete lack of interest in the sport, I've learned the names of these drivers from SportsCenter, where they've managed to slip in NASCAR highlights between NBA replays and updates on NFL free-agent signings.  While this does confirm my theory that if SportsCenter featured more segments on market equilibrium and diminishing marginal returns, I never would have gotten that "C" in Microeconomics, it doesn't make the truth any less sobering.

The second is that NASCAR is taking over.  It used to be you could only catch NASCAR races on the more obscure cable channels. Now they're broadcast on Fox and NBC.  It used to be that Sports Illustrated didn't cover NASCAR.  Last month they had their first-ever NASCAR season preview.  It used to be that NASCAR was a sport for redneck southerners.  Now tilted number 8 stickers dot bumpers across the country.  It used to be you'd find a Garfield (or Odie) padlock as the prize in your cereal box.  Now they're giving away die-cast NASCAR cars.

And the thing of it is, I can't understand why.  I mean, if lacrosse suddenly took off in popularity, I could see it -- lacrosse demands tremendous athletic skill, the games are high scoring, and there's plenty of violence.  It's an exciting sport.

But NASCAR?  The only reason I even pay attention to the NASCAR highlights is that there might be a crash -- most of the time, the "highlights" just show a bunch of cars driving in a line.

And you think watching NASCAR is tedious?  On my way back through Tennessee on Sunday, I stumbled across a NASCAR broadcast on the radio.  It sounded like two guys reading from a phone book.

Look, I've been to the Indy 500 several times, and let me tell you, that's an exciting event -- the cars go incredibly fast, they make this totally cool zooming sound as they go by, you're in a stadium with half a million people, and pretty much all of them are drunk.  That's why they call it the greatest spectacle in racing.  But follow the race?

A friend of mine has this theory that NASCAR isn't even a sport -- it's a marketing scheme for a massive sticker manufacturer.  Based on what I witnessed along I-24, I'm beginning to think she's right.

Maybe someday I'll experience some sort of NASCAR epiphany, and the Winston Cup points standings will suddenly matter to me.  But until then, I'm going to remain skeptical and nervous about the ever-expanding reach of the NASCAR Nation.

And I can tell you this right now -- the day I see that first tilted number 8 sticker on the back of the Presidential limo, I'm moving to Canada.