The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (7 page)

On pit road, I inched up to the No. 48, the Lowe's-sponsored Chevy driven by the vanilla superstar Jimmie Johnson. Despite fans' numerous frustrations with NASCAR and with Johnson's dominance, everyone I spoke to about the recent decline in popularity firmly believed that the actual racing on the track was better now than it had ever been. In the past, races were won by laps; now they are won by seconds, with each contest including dozens of lead changes and at least as many different possible winners. In the era everyone now romanticized, five, maybe at most ten drivers had a real chance of entering Victory Lane. Like Southern identity itself, NASCAR was overrun with nostalgia: its fans and participants pined for bygone days that—at least in recollection—now seemed so much more alive and fulfilling. So even while detailing the superiority of today's competitive races, the people I interviewed slipped into reveries for a truer time of Southern aggression and defining peril. After praising Jimmie Johnson, Darrell Waltrip couldn't help but compare the present crop of drivers with his cohort. "We were just tough guys," he said, suddenly solemn. "We could take it and dish it. There's no way we'd fit in today, with all the rules and restrictions. Back in the day, men were men."

I leaned in closer to Johnson's blue and white car and saw that a crew member was applying duct tape to the inside of the front bumper. As high-tech and pristine as Johnson's operation was, his team employed the sort of garden-variety solution I might use. I moved in for a better look. Suddenly the car burst to life, its 900-horsepower engine thundering so loud that the ground actually quaked.

 

Fifteen minutes before the start of the race, I saw drivers accosted by autograph- and photograph-seekers who had paid a bit extra for the freedom to wander about Bristol's crowded infield. No other big-league sport makes its stars available to the public in this way. Fans positioned themselves just behind pit crews, within arm's reach of the stacks of Goodyears, the hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment. Some fans lingered beside the vehicles lined up for their final inspection, while others simply cut between the queuing cars on their way to different infield sites. As 4 Troops, an a cappella group of former military personnel, sang the national anthem, drivers stood stoically beside their vehicles, their wives or girlfriends accompanying many of them in these final moments before they would don helmets and slide behind the wheel. I was on pit road as well, just three feet in front of a solitary Mark Martin, who leaned against his No. 5 Chevy, squinting nobly into the distance, his fifty-one-year-old face creased and weathered. He looked like a wizened jockey from a Hemingway story, a grayed hero unwilling or unable to quit, and all the more so because he was outfitted in a fluorescent lime-green jumpsuit with the name of his sponsor, GoDaddy.com, splashed across his abdomen.

At Bristol, drivers made their dramatic entrances by stepping out from a cupola of sparkling pyrotechnics and onto the flatbed of a Ford F-150 pickup truck that then slowly circled the track. With all the access afforded fans, I didn't think it too bizarre when I was given a seat in the bed of one of these F-150s. My sole companion back there, a young Wisconsin woman named Karen, had paid $1,900 in a charity auction for the privilege of riding in the truck with her favorite driver, Kasey Kahne. I asked what she liked about Kahne, who hailed from Washington State, and Karen explained that she had been a fan of the legendary driver Rusty Wallace, but when Wallace retired in 2005 she started looking for someone new. "I'm a Dodge person. And Kasey drove a Dodge then. He's also young and brash. And he looks a lot like a neighbor of mine. After I saw that he shares my birthday, that was it." When Kahne finally joined us in the Ford, waving beauty pageant–style to the grandstands above, Karen turned to me with a look of shock and said, "I'm going to shit."

We rounded the track, the fans lined up on the lowest steps of the bleachers, waving back, yelling, banging on the fencing. Viewed from the bottom of the bowl, the stands seemed to rise into the heavens, an arena of Babel echoing with the din of a hundred thousand screams. Karen handed over her camera, asking me to snap a few shots of her and Kahne. Side by side astride the ambling F-150, they were like the king and queen of the parade. Karen beamed, her two grand well spent.

When our trip around the track ended in the infield, the MC was already talking up the impending race. "Who thinks we're going to see some retaliation today? What do you think, guys? Are we going to see some retaliation?" He drew out the last word heavy-metal style, enunciating every syllable in a kind of lascivious battle cry.
Ree-tal-ee-ayyy-shun!
Ron Ramsey, the most conservative of the three Republicans then running for governor of Tennessee (during the campaign, he suggested that religious freedoms did not apply to Muslims living in the United States), delivered a plea to the "God-fearing, NASCAR-loving, red-blooded Americans" in attendance. He asked them to vote for him and to spend lots of money at the track. Kahne and the other drivers hopped out of the truck beds and headed to their cars, some of the classier ones stopping to shake hands with the drivers of the F-150s, all employees from nearby Ford dealerships. I went to help Karen down from the truck, reaching over to release the tailgate. She dropped a heavy hand on my shoulder, shunted me aside, and, with surprising nimbleness, swung her body out and over to the ground below, landing with a solid dismount. She walked off, pausing only to look partly over her shoulder and spit out, "I have a truck at home, buddy."

 

I watched some of the racing from one of Bristol's 179 skyboxes. At that height, the cars appeared to revolve in a single band of multicolored light. The effect was beautiful, a bit hypnotizing, and abstract. When I spoke to Freddie Hayter, a local who had been to every NASCAR race in Bristol's forty-nine-year history, he said he didn't like the skybox suites. "A race fan needs to be in the middle of the crowd. He needs the sound, the smell. The people in the suites are not true race fans; they're corporate people. That's not a place for someone who has been to ninety-nine races in a row." Hayter was certainly an authority, so I descended to the grandstand, to a spot midway up a section named for Darrell Waltrip, just above turn three.

Officially, Bristol announced that the speedway had fallen 22,000 tickets short of selling out. But that figure was likely far greater. Following the race, a headline in
Sporting News
would ask, "Empty Seats at Bristol a Sign of NASCAR's Apocalypse?" And in the ensuing weeks, almost every track experienced its lowest turnout in years. At the Dover race entire sections of the grandstand were closed off and covered in giant advertising banners. Although some 140,000 fans showed up for July's Brickyard 400, in Indianapolis, twice that number had attended the race three years ago.

The fans who sat in pairs and groups around me stirred a bit when a driver attempted a pass, or they lifted their beers together in a salute and drank each time a favorite driver rounded the track. But only when there was an accident of some sort would they stand up and cheer. While the race was under green, I could
feel
the rumble of the forty-three engines, even from my seat hundreds of feet from the track, and it was far too loud to carry on a conversation. Besides, almost everyone wore headphones, either listening to a radio call of the race or using a scanner to tune in to a team's transmissions. Others, like me, had stuffed foam plugs deep into their ears.

Sitting in the row in front of me, four guys in their late twenties were smoking cigarettes and drinking Bud tall boys, occasionally casting what seemed suspicious glances my way. The one closest to me, with a wispy goatee and greasy black hair, gave me a quick, un-smiling nod. Finally, during a caution—a car bounced off a wall and two other cars barreled into it—as the race slowed to a lighter roar, my neighbor turned to face me.

"Where'd you get that?" he demanded, pointing to the press pass that hung from a strap around my neck. I held up my credentials, dumbly inspected them, and explained that I was a reporter. He was interested not in the press pass but in the lanyard that held it.

"I'd trade ya'," he said. All fans wore their tickets necklace-style, but the lanyard issued to the general ticket buyer, I now saw, was a black and yellow band with the word
NASCAR
repeated along it. Mine was red and white and had
BRISTOL
running along its elastic material. I could think of no reason why I'd want to keep the artifact, why my children would prefer it to the
NASCAR
one, and I was nearly certain that it had no or little monetary value. So I swapped him. He rubbed his new strap between a thumb and two fingers, then passed it down the line to his admiring friends. "Man, you don't know how much this means to me," he told me. "Thank you."

He and his friends had driven in that morning from Georgia, about eight hours away, and they would head home after the race. The tickets belonged to his boss, who couldn't use them. He told me he was a Tony Stewart fan, big time, and so were his friends, except one of them, who pulled for Dale Jr. Then he asked me where I went to school for reporting, and whether he might have seen me on TV earlier in the race, and who my favorite driver was. I had actually anticipated being asked this last question, and so had tried to figure out the best response. Over the weekend I had heard each of the top drivers speak during their press conferences, spent half an hour with the veteran Jeff Burton in his trailer, spoken to Jack Roush about his Ford team, and seen the drivers practice and interact with their crews. But under the Georgian's gaze, I could think of no reply that would properly elevate me in his eyes. I told him Juan Pablo Montoya. At least the Colombian looked like a comic book supervillain in his red car and red jumpsuit adorned with the Target bull's-eye logo. My new friend stared at me, seeming to consider my choice. "Yeah, Montoya brings a little more color to the sport, a different flavor," he said.

When he inquired where I was from, because he could tell that it wasn't the South, I told him I was living in Nashville but was originally from Chicago. He used to party in downtown Chicago, he said. Then he offered up his review of northern cities: "Detroit—shitty city; Chicago—great city." He said his mother was from Dayton, Ohio. Which meant he was not like the other guys. He motioned toward his three Georgia buddies. "Yankees," he said, holding up his hands, palms out, in an expression of nonviolence. "They're okay with me."

 

Kurt Busch, from Las Vegas, led for 278 of the 500 laps of the race, but then with just seventeen remaining, a late caution gave Jimmie Johnson the opportunity to pit and take four new tires. On the restart, he somehow catapulted from sixth place to first in just three quick turns around the track and then nosed ahead of Tony Stewart to win the race by .89 seconds. (Montoya, for what it's worth, finished twenty-sixth.) It was Johnson's third victory of the young season, the fiftieth win in his career, and his first triumph at Bristol. I looked in the papers the next day, at all the write-ups of this stunning come-from-behind finish, both to understand how it could happen and to see what poetry it might inspire. There was none. Most accounts simply described the race as a failure, Johnson's victory coupled with the lackluster attendance a double loss for the sport.

At the race's conclusion, the track announcer tried to put a smile on things, saying to the crowd that this would be the last Sprint Cup event with the much-derided rear wing. "Fans, you do make a difference. And NASCAR hears you. You didn't like the wing, and we got rid of it." I tuned in to the drivers' post-race interviews.

Greg Biffle: "I'm just so proud of everything. I'm just so proud to have the U.S. Census on this car."

Tony Stewart: "I just want to thank Office Depot and Old Spice."

But Kurt Busch may have best captured the general mood among the fans at the track, and among those at home. When a mic was thrust in front of him just moments after his last-minute defeat, he said, "To lose to the 48 sucks. I'm sure everyone here wanted anyone but the 48."

By the middle of August, the Sprint Cup season would see a total of eleven different drivers claim victory, with Denny Hamlin, a twenty-nine-year-old Virginian, winning as many races as Jimmie Johnson, and Kevin Harvick leading in overall points with the most top-ten finishes. It was, however, a season that was doing little to reverse NASCAR's fortunes; restoring the devotion of fans would require something far more elusive than rear spoilers and revised start times. NASCAR hoped to inject into the sport not only more action but also a greater sense of authenticity. Gaining speed on such slippery ground would not be easy. The New NASCAR, like the New South, is less culturally distinct from the rest of America than its votaries would like to believe. The sport still delivers on horsepower, but as a costume drama set in some imaginary Dixie, it is no longer as pleasing, or convincing, as it used to be. Every performance leaves the audience longing for some golden era when
The Dukes of Hazzard
played on prime time and the stars of the track were better stand-ins for the stand-ins for Southern manhood who had come before them.

At Bristol, wandering about the grounds outside the track, I joined some tailgaters in a couple of rounds of cornhole, the beanbag-toss game. The rear window of the car they were tailgating behind displayed both the Red Sox insignia and the number of Jeff Gordon's race car. The owner, busy manning his portable grill, had moved from Boston to Charlotte years earlier, his accent still thick as a Kennedy's. He dropped his
r
's, broadened his
a
's. He went to about a dozen races a year, he told me, and had seen the steady declines in attendance everywhere. "The South built this sport," he said, pronouncing "sport" as two syllables and gazing wistfully at the giant billboards on the speedway's façade, one showing a snarling Dale Earnhardt Sr., another shoots of E-Z Seed grass sprouting from the center of a potted race tire. "It is regional. That's what it's all about. It started to go wrong with the races up North."