THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 30, 1995 TAG: 9507300198
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BOB ZELLER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
NASCAR finally has made it.
In the space of three weeks in July, NASCAR found its way onto the covers 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 it is so popular. In the competition among sports, NASCAR racing is blowing the doors off everything else.
Attendance is growing at a rate of 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, and Roger Penske is putting one up in Southern California. And NASCAR's most recent addition, the Brickyard 400 at hallowed Indianapolis Motor Speedway, is also 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 kind of odd. 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 as though 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 NASCAR 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 teenage race 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 suburban home into Washington 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 it broadcast, the more I watched. And so, it seems, did a lot of other people.
The impact of television is best illustrated in the celebrity of Bill Broderick, a public relations flack with a distinctive silver beard and golden hair who has his own cadre of fans, and his own line of T-shirts. Broderick's claim to fame is that 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 close, exciting racing. And the quality of the show has been just as big a key to NASCAR's growth as television. The race is often close and exciting, and always fast and noisy.
Forbes pointed out that one-third of the fans are women, and their interest has certainly 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 is hugely different.
The growing involvement of Fortune 500 sponsors is a big factor, if only because their presence adds a tone of respectability and exposes the sport to new strata of society.
In the 1960s, my middle-class parents were never 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 racetrack. Professional athletes, rock stars, country music singers and Hollywood actors all consider it a great place to be seen.
And some of them, including NFL standouts Joe Gibbs, Mark Rypien and Jerry Glanville, have become deeply involved in racing. In fact, Gibbs' decision to go racing in 1991 must be considered one of the three most significant benchmarks of NASCAR's coming of age.
The other two benchmarks are the instant sellout of the Brickyard 400 and, of course, the dual cover articles in July.
Now, if Hollywood could just make a decent stock-car movie. . . ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
If SI says NASCAR stock-car racing is ``America's Hottest Sport,''
that's just dandy with the millions of fans who reached that
conclusion years ago.
by CNB