American Zoom
Golenbock, Peter
S porting traditions in the old South center on golf, college football, and basketball, with professional baseball and football only late arrivals. But outside that tight circle of socially approved...
...11 AMERICAN ZOOM: STOCK CAR RACING—FROM DIRT TRACKS TO DAYTONA Peter Golenbock Macmillan /493 pages /$21.95 reviewed by BROCK Y ATES The American Spectator February 1994 97...
...Dale Earnhardt, a simple fellow once known as "Iron Head," has won $20 million in prize money alone...
...The sport, after all, had arisen to showcase the driving skills learned by young redneck rum-runners eluding the dreaded "revenuers" in the post-Prohibition thirties and forties...
...Every major paper in the South has at least one reporter assigned exclusively to the NASCAR beat...
...The largest crowds ever assembled in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas—each exceeding 150,000—have attended events organized not by the NFL or the NCAA but by NASCAR, the Daytona Beach–based stock-car association...
...Petty (Richard's son), Jeff Gordon, etc...
...Unfortunately, these characters have been replaced by a seamless, highly organized world of megadollar commercial sponsors, major Detroit car manufacturers, and New York television producers...
...When Wolfe ventured south in 1963, stock car racing was a bawdy, brawling world populated by ex-bootleggers, hustlers, shade-tree mechanics, and preposterous Boss Hawg promoters...
...Golenbock did manage to collar Johnson and Petty, but both contributed only standard spiels burnished over the span of a thousand earlier interviews...
...When star drivers Davey Allison and Alan Kulwicki died in aircraft accidents in 1993, the South was plunged into an orgy of sorrow...
...Young studs like Rusty Wallace, Ricky Rudd, Kyle Brock Yates is editor-at-large for Car and Driver...
...Golenbock leaves the impression that he drifted around Charlotte, North Carolina (where most of the racing teams are headquartered), poking into various race shops and stuffing his tape recorder into the face of anyone who would stand still...
...R. J. Reynolds, the sponsor of the Winston Cup, artfully uses the NASCAR races as a valuable means of bypassing the FTC ban on television cigarette advertising...
...Petty, now retired, has occasionally hosted "picnics" for his fans at his Randalman, North Carolina headquarters that have drawn over 50,000 people...
...But even if the spirit of the prehustlebuck sixties is long lost, there are still big stories here, and Golenbock has missed them...
...The underlying Southern jingoism of the sport, which demands that teams, drivers, and sponsors somehow act "Southern," is also ignored...
...Richard Petty, the greatest of the country-boy celebrities to emerge from this woolly sport, is the most popular personality in the entire South—and that includes all the Atlanta Braves and the Atlanta Falcons, and the hoop stars at Duke and North Carolina...
...Perhaps Earnhardt, Wallace, and the other major players who don't appear in the book were able to slip out the back door of the garage when they saw Golenbock coming...
...He might have probed into the shadowy world of sponsorships, the megabuck involvement of the car companies and tire-makers, the enormous television deals, the agents, the merchandising arrangements, the track financing, and the millions spent on luring star drivers from team to team with financial packages that rival the most egregious generated by baseball free agentry...
...But outside that tight circle of socially approved ball-and-stick enthusiasms lies the unsung world of booming, acrid-smelling, 200-mile-an-hour stock-car racing...
...While the Brahmins still embrace the old games, the nouveaux of the region—the entrepreneurs who built the fast food joints, motel chains, and high-tech businesses that blossom along the interstates like concrete kudzu—have made stock-car racing the sport of the New South...
...Upon winning a race a driver spews out an automated litany of commercial garble "My Gumbo Fried Chicken, Slick-Streak Oil, Zoom-0 Spark Plug, Shiny-Bottom Car Wash, Goodyear Chevrolet Lumina ran perfect today . . ." (In the hard-shell Bible Belt, the Almighty will occasionally also be credited...
...He might also have treated the byzantine political world of NASCAR, which is capable of jiggering its rules to favor one brand of automobile over another (Fords tend to win for a season, then General Motors...
...demand fees of more than a million dollars a year just to plant their fire-suited rumps into the bucket seat of a race car...
...That's too bad for veteran sportswriter Peter Golenbock, whose 500-page homage to the sport adds very little new insight...
...The reader is offered little beyond dreary banal recollections of a few crew chiefs, car owners, officials, and several second-tier drivers...
...M any writers have trekked south to seek the essence of this quintessentially American sport at its grassroots...
...The masterpiece was Tom Wolfe's 1963 Esquire essay, "The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson...
...Legendary drivers like Curtis Turner and Junior Johnson began their careers racing souped-up whiskey-hauling 1940 Ford coupes at local bull-ring dirt tracks...
...Numerous lesser talents (including mine) attempted to sniff along the trail blazed by Wolfe, but thirty years later, his story remains the final word on this uniquely Southern pastime...
...The Daytona 500 and the Charlotte World 600 attract international attention and hundreds of millions of dollars...
...This requires northern and western natives like the Wallace brothers, Rusty and Kenny, who are from Missouri, or New Yorkers like the Bodines, Geoff, Brett and Todd, to take up residence in the South and learn to talk with a drawl...
...Johnson, who spent two years in the federal pen for his moonshine transporting, proudly notes he was never caught on the road...
...The drivers and cars are now plastered with logos, each worth thousands, if not millions, in promotion dollars...
Vol. 27 • February 1994 • No. 2
