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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: Only Engines Should Whine In Daytona
At Media day in Daytona NASCAR drivers could talk about the cut in prize money...
Jim Pedley  | http://www.RacinToday.com  |  Posted February 03, 2010   Charlotte, NC

Let’s see what’s in the Morning Memo today:
NASCAR Sprint Cup Series drivers Mark Martin (Left) and Jeff Gordon (Right) hold ceremonial checks in Victory Lane at Brooklyn, Michigan. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Media Day for the Daytona 500 is just a couple of hours away. It will offer reporters their first chance to ask many of the scores of drivers who attend it their thoughts on the recent announcement by NASCAR that purses will be cut by 10 percent this year.

Here’s hoping that all drivers have the good sense to either endorse the move, or at the very least, say nothing because there is a lot more at stake here than just a zero or two on those giant ceremonial paychecks they hand out.

If you smell a personal anecdote coming, you have a very good nose.

Time was, I was a sports fan. All of the major sports in this country. As a newspaper sports reporter, I got pretty close to them and the athletes and, even after getting nauseatingly close to the warts of the leagues and the athletes, still loved sports.

But two events changed all that. Changed it to the point where I now follow a couple of select teams and players, but love? That stays home.

Both events came during player vs. management labor problems. Both inadvertently gave fans a wonderful look into the minds of the modern stick-and-ball athlete.

The first featured Detroit Tigers second baseman Lou Whitaker. It was during the early 1990s when a particular ugliness surfaced between players and their teams as baseball steamed toward a labor shutdown.

Reporters had gathered outside the place where a players union meeting was going to take place. Up pulls Whitaker in a stretch limousine. Gets out in a suit the cost of which would pay a year’s worth of electric bills for a real union man from Detroit and he glides into the meeting.

Asked afterward if it might have been in poor taste to stage such an imperial entrance at a union meeting, Whitaker defended himself and killed my love of baseball by simply saying, hey, I’m rich, what am I supposed to do?

The second incident cost me my love of the NBA. It involved New York Knicks center Patrick Ewing.

The players, virtually all of whom were millionaires many times over, wanted more. It was pointed out to Ewing that basketball players already were making obscene amounts of money for their “services”.

Ewing blurted out: Sure, NBA players make a lot of money, “but we spend a lot, too”.

Those two incidents performed a seemingly impossible task: They transformed blundering, greedy, monopolistic, wealthy sports franchise owners into sympathetic figures.

And they cut at least one lifelong bond between a fan and stick-and-ball athletes.

NASCAR and its stars are facing a similar situation these days. The best drivers and team owners, and even some crew chiefs, are amassing big wealth.

And, as Ewing would say, they are spending it. Often in very public ways. Big houses, jets, vineyards, exotic vacations, toys.

It may be natural or even inevitable that people who acquire large sums of money slip into lives of fine wines and gold toilets. It is certainly permissible in a society which stresses rights and ignores obligations.

Bit it also may be driving a platinum wedge between drivers and fans.

Stock-car racing was birthed in dirt – literally and figuratively. It was a rural sport. It not only didn’t apologize for that, it celebrated it. NASCAR even sold itself as that; up until recently, that is. And it was a seller’s market.

No longer. Like that pair of ostrich-skin cowboy boots that now finds itself buried in the back of a walk-in closet in a Manhattan loft, stock-car racing has been cast aside by the urban in-crowd.

NASCAR knows it and is attempting to return its sport to its roots and traditional fan base.

Whether this is all sincere or not, well, that is fodder for another rant by someone else.

Whether it will all be effective or not is dependent upon drivers, teams and NASCAR leadership itself at re-establishing itself with the ticket- and gear-buying public.

Standing up on Media Day at Daytona International Speedway on Thursday and whining to people who have virtually no money to spend that they should not take a 10-percent pay cut because, while they will still make millions, they will still spend millions, will not help the cause.

Memo to self: Cancel those plans to hold that bake sale for the NFL players union.


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Jim Pedley

RacinToday.com

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