CUP: Jeff Gordon On Racing

Sprint Cup

CUP: Jeff Gordon On Racing - Part 1

The first of a three part series with NASCAR legend Jeff Gordon...

Rick Minter | http://www.RacinToday.com | Posted March 23, 2010 Charlotte, NC

Jeff Gordon is a four-time winner of the Brickyard 400. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Editor’s note: This is the first installment of a three-part series in which RacinToday.com’s Rick Minter talks with four-time Sprint Cup champion Jeff Gordon. During a sit-down interview conducted last weekend, Minter and Gordon had a wide-ranging talk about everything from having at it to rearing children. Parts two and three of the interview will appear Wednesday and Thursday.

A few weeks back in the media center at Atlanta Motor Speedway, Jeff Gordon’s publicist, Jon Edwards, and I were chatting about the state of media affairs in NASCAR.

NASCAR’s standard procedure of bringing the top 12 drivers in the point standings to meet the media for a brief, group session on race weekends, is OK.

But it’s not nearly as useful as an old-fashioned one-on-one interview.

Edwards pointed out that even with the demands on Gordon’s time, he still does as many one-on-ones as practical. So we agreed to meet last Friday morning at Bristol Motor Speedway.

After exchanging greetings, we sat on the sofa in the driver’s compartment of the No. 24 hauler. I pulled out two well-worn tape recorders (past bad experiences have proven that it’s always safe to have a back-up) and we got down to business.

I told Gordon that just a few minutes before, a colleague, Mike Hembree of SPEEDtv.com, had told me that I had now surpassed Larry Woody as the grumpiest columnist on the RacinToday.com staff.

Gordon laughed and said, “You’re not going to let him get away with that are you?”

I responded that I wanted to hear what he had to say about some of the bigger issues of the day before I decided how grumpy I really was.

I told him that I had reservations about whether it was in the best long-term interest of the sport for NASCAR officials to tell the boys to “Have at it.”

Gordon responded with a history lesson.

“Everything’s so different these days because there’s so much more access to information from the fans, the media, the teams,” he said. “We scan everybody’s radio and listen to everything every other team is saying and doing. And it’s the same thing with the media. You go back 15 or 20 years ago, and if all this had happened nobody would be saying anything about it.”

Gordon said that around 1990, the sport went through a major transition.

“The numbers are growing, and we’re going to be professional,” he said of the thinking at the time. “We’re one of the elite sports out there, and we’re going to be compared to the NBA, the NFL and Major League Baseball and hockey. We’ve got to be professional. We’ve got to do things a little bit different and expect things out of people at a higher level professionally.”

But, he said, the pendulum swung too far.

“Along the way, that professionalism made the sport a little more corporate and less appealing to the core fans,” Gordon said. “Now they’re going. ‘Wait a minute. Now we need to step back a little bit and go back to the way things used to be where guys took care of things on their own on the track.’

“I’m fine with that. I have no issue with that.”

Gordon went on to explain that in the big picture, there are players more important than NASCAR officials and the drivers.

“None of what they’re doing is affecting me at all, because my sponsors are what dictate my actions, not NASCAR,” he said. “The sport has gotten so expensive, and we’ve now gone to these major companies. Their expectations of us and who we’re representing and how we’re representing their company is what drives how I act out there and what I do.

“I want to win races for them and be competitive, but I also want to represent them well. If NASCAR says, ‘Have at it boys, go out there and tear one another up, matter of a fact, come back in the garage area and have a fight,’ it doesn’t matter to me because I don’t want to lose my sponsors. But if it’s something that is going to be good for them and help them sell more of their product, then I’m all for it.”

Gordon said “Have at it” might work in some situations.

“For some guys out there, that is going to work and for some fans out there it’s going to work, but that’s not who my fan is, so I’m not going to do anything different than I have in the past.”

About that time one of my two old tape recorders ground to a halt, so I reached in my jacket pocket and pulled out a third and pressed “Record.”

“My goodness,” Gordon said. “How many of those things do you have?”

I told him that I have several, but none that are really reliable.

“I can see that,” he said, laughing.

Coming Wednesday: Gordon discusses rivalries, his Hendrick Motorsports teammate Jimmie Johnson, NASCAR’s fan base and the “Southern” influence on the sport.

Rick Minter is a veteran, award-winning sports journalist who joined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1991 covering motorsports as well as serving as a bureau chief. From 2000-2008 Minter focused on racing exclusively, traveling the NASCAR circuit as the paper’s motorsports writer. Rick can be reached at rminter@racintoday.com

Play! SPEED Fantasy Racing Cup Edition - Spring Series

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rick Minter

RacinToday.com

MORE BY THIS AUTHOR

NNS: Independent Action - RAB Takes Big Step Forward
The presence of Kenny Wallace should bring more stability to RAB…
CUP: Slow Lane Suited This Wood Brother Just Fine
Ray Lee Wood, one of the original Wood Brothers, retired from racing…
CUP: Cool Weather Evokes Warm Memories
It seems like Dale Earnhardt Jr. did better when he had a father-figure…