South has no monopoly on stock car racing

By DAVID GREEN

Fellow blogger Krista Voda's recent post and the discussion it triggered got me to thinking (something I don't often do, as it makes my head hurt and usually gets me into some kind of trouble). Is it really fair to suggest, based on random anecdotal evidence, something as sweeping as "New Yorkers don't get NASCAR"?

Well, in the South, you're not going to get much hate mail for suggesting such a thing. Fans from other parts of the country may not protest as long as it's New York that's being bashed. But substitute "yankees" (the generic version of the word, with lower-case "y"), and you just might get some negative reaction.

Fellow Southerners, you may not want to read this, but it's true: We don't have a monopoly on any form of auto racing, not even stock cars.

I know we like to think of it as "our" sport, and it is "our"sport in that so many of us embrace it so passionately. But it's not exclusively "ours." And we should know this by now.

Going back to Year One (1949) and every year since the inception of the Nextel Cup Series, drivers from all across the country have been prominent participants -- not merely token representatives, but race and championship winners.

Down at grassroots levels, the same thing is true -- obviously. Where do you suppose those Cup standouts cut their racing teeth?

Wisconsin race fans will be quick to claim their state has more oval tracks per capita than any other state in the Union. (I haven't done all the math, but I do know there are 43 such facilities in the Badger State, according to National Speedway Directory. North Carolina has 36, if you count Lowe's Motor Speedway, its dirt track and its Legends track as three separate items.) The sales manager at any NASCAR speedway would be horrified to learn that he or she could no longer accept ticket orders from fans in Pennsylvania. The mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire echo with V8 thunder, just like in North Carolina and Virginia.

And, since we started this item by questioning the veracity of a derogatory reference to New York, let's focus on the Empire State for a moment.

Hold onto your Moon Pies, boys, because Noo Yawk State is a veritable hotbed of racing, from big-block dirt modifieds to gleaming asphalt late models to well-seasoned street stocks. Some 47 oval tracks are listed. They may not eat grits, but they show plenty of grit in the way they race.

Several fans wrote to defend the honor of Long Island, home to Riverhead Raceway and Steve Park. Nobody has mentioned that six times between 1964 and 1971, a little one-fifth-mile paved oval named Islip Speedway was on the schedule of what is now the Nextel Cup Series tour. Winners of races there included Bobby Allison and Richard Petty.

Islip is in south central Long Island -- my guess, about 30 miles due east of Lower Manhattan.

Do New Yorkers "get" NASCAR? Sure, they do -- those who want to. Same as anywhere else.

NASCAR's expansion efforts are not so much causing (or attempting to cause) something to happen as they are a savvy acknowledgement of something that happened a long time ago.