THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, August 4, 1994 TAG: 9408040722
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C01 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MARK MOBLEY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 72 lines
You may watch the Brickyard 400 to see a favorite driver. I'll be watching the pace car for my dad.
For 23 years, Dozier Mobley has traveled the NASCAR circuit as the dean of Winston Cup photographers. No one can predict who'll win a race, but my father is always in Victory Lane to take his picture. Saturday, as at so many races in the past, he'll be in the pace car shooting the start.
Dad was a newspaper and wire-service photojournalist in the '60s. He covered civil rights marches, the integration of the University of Georgia and a Beatles concert in Pittsburgh. In 1960 or so he free-lanced his first race, at the new Atlanta Motor Speedway. I have a photo of him at Darlington in 1968 with a camera to his face and the number of laps scrawled on his hand. The pace car is a station wagon.
Within a few years he was making the Winston Cup rounds. Other kids' dads traveled during the week but were home on the weekends. Mine was away every weekend from February to October, leaving my mom to feed, drive and discipline me and my younger sister Allison.
This made my childhood unusual in other respects. We took our summer vacations at Daytona over the Fourth of July. We got Christmas cards from Dale Earnhardt. While other children played house, Tracey Bay from down the street would pretend to be Lynda Petty and I'd be King Richard.
But I never fell for racing the way my father did. I was always amused by how well he knew the tracks. Whenever a TV action show did a racing episode, it was invariably cobbled together from stock footage. Dad would watch and say, ``That's Talledega . . . Riverside . . . Daytona, turn 3 . . . Atlanta,'' because he'd held a camera in every one of those turns.
In grade school I wore racing jackets, but mostly because there were always at least a dozen in the closet. I came to wonder what it was about racing, about a bunch of guys turning left for hours on end, that could keep fans enthralled. I didn't understand that with the noise and speed and heroes, it was some people's rock 'n' roll.
I drove up to Richmond not long ago to hang with my dad. I waited while Dad and the cigarette marketing guys reached a break in their floating, low-stakes poker game. Miss Winston read a paperback. They were all extremely friendly - I'm ol' Dozier's boy. Leaving him at the hotel, I felt a little like he must have felt leaving me at college years ago.
I met Bobby Allison recently and I was struck by how much he reminded me of my father - the quiet, Southern politeness backed with forceful truth-telling. Bobby's driving career ended in a life-threatening wreck. Though my father has lost a bit of his hearing, the thing he and my mom worry about most is a federal ban on cigarette advertising in sports. Though he doesn't smoke and I never have, Winston put food on our table.
As Dad turns 61 in December, he may retire before the sport changes much more. He's around .500 in his business ventures. A magazine with the unwieldy name of Racing Super Speedway Style tanked a while back, and he's had trouble selling his calendar of pit-crew hunks.
He seems tired of the waiting, the walking, the photo-ops, the driver mug shots. His two best friends in the business are gone already, but Dozier keeps on sending his stuff out to racing papers, trading-card companies and book publishers.
Unless the governor of Indiana or some other VIP takes his spot, my dad will be in the pace car Saturday. Because it's NASCAR's first visit to this hallowed track, sports history will be made. But racing history will ride at the front of the line. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos Courtesy of Dozier Mobley
Dozier Mobley, the dean of Winston Cup photographers, has been
making the rounds for 23 years. This week he'll be in the lead car,
and Victory Lane, at Indianapolis.
by CNB