Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 30, 1995 TAG: 9507310138
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In the space of three weeks in July, NASCAR found its way onto the cover of two of the most prominent magazines in the United States - Forbes and Sports Illustrated.
Not because of some cataclysm or tragedy. Not even because of a race. Just because the sport is so popular. In the race for sports fans, NASCAR is blowing the doors off the competition.
Attendance is growing at 9 percent a year, as the July 3 Forbes cover article noted. Speedway magnate Bruton Smith is building a new stock car palace in Texas, Roger Penske is putting up another in Southern California. And NASCAR's newest race, the Brickyard 400 on Aug.5 at hallowed Indianapolis Motor Speedway, also is its richest, with a purse of more than $4.5 million.
Facts such as these finally caught the attention of insulated editors in New York skyscrapers, and down has come their stamp of certification.
The SI play was a bit strange, though. The July 24 edition featured a rare black-and-white cover and a black-and-white inside spread for the most gaudily colorful of sports. And the writer was a stranger to the whole business, which made his article come off like NASCAR racing was some new phenomenon, like snowboarding, even though the magazine has dabbled in covering the sport for years.
But who's complaining? If SI says stock car racing is ``America's Hottest Sport,'' that's just dandy with the millions of fans who reached that conclusion years ago.
It is not hard to pinpoint the reasons for the growth.
First and foremost is television.
As a teen-age fan starved for racing in the late 1960s, I subscribed to Autoweek and Stock Car Racing Magazine, yearned for the occasional race on ABC's ``Wide World of Sports'' and took the bus from my home in a Washington, D.C., suburb on Memorial Day to see the Indy 500 live at the Fox Theater on closed-circuit, black-and-white television.
In my book, ESPN gets the most credit for the explosive growth. In the 1980s, the more NASCAR races the cable network showed, the more I watched. And so, it seems, did a lot of others.
The impact of television is best illustrated in the celebrity of Bill Brodrick, a public relations flak with distinctive golden hair who has his own cadre of fans, and his own line of T-shirts. Brodrick's claim to fame is he happens to appear in the background of the Victory Lane television shots for a few seconds nearly every weekend.
When a few seconds of incidental exposure can make a man a celebrity, it doesn't take a vivid imagination to gauge the impact of three hours of racing. And the quality of the show has been just as big a key to NASCAR's growth as television. The game - the race - often is close and exciting and always is fast and noisy.
Forbes pointed out that one-third of the fans are women, and their interest certainly has played a role. But if you look at the old race films from the 1950s, you'll see plenty of women in those grandstands, too. I'm not convinced the proportion today is very different.
The growing involvement of Fortune 500 sponsors is a big factor, if only because their presence adds a stamp of respectability and exposes the sport to new strata of society.
In the 1960s, my middle-class parents never were quite sure Beltsville (Md.) Speedway was the proper place for me to go on a Saturday night. In the 1990s, it's cool for celebrities to be seen at the race track. Players from the NBA, NFL , PGA and major-league baseball, rock stars, country music stars and Hollywood stars all consider it great to be seen.
And some of them, including former NFL coaches Joe Gibbs and Jerry Glanville and St.Louis quarterback Mark Rypien, have become deeply involved in racing.
Gibbs' decision to leave the Washington Redskins to go stock car racing in 1991 must be considered one of the three most significant benchmarks of NASCAR's coming of age in the 1990s.
The other two benchmarks are the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway (more importantly, the instant sellout of the race) and, of course, the dual magazine cover articles in July.
Now, if Hollywood could just make a decent stock car movie.
by CNB