Stewart retreats, but skepticism remains

By DAVID GREEN

Last night at Paducah International Raceway, the dirt track in western Kentucky in which three Nextel Cup drivers share ownership, there was a sequence of spins and crashes as drivers attempted to get one of the division features started. "Let's not have too many debris caution flags, now," the track announcer intoned.

The reference was obvious. Tony Stewart is one of the partners in the PIR ownership, and Stewart, earlier in the day, had been called on the carpet because of his criticism of NASCAR.

The summation of what Stewart said, how NASCAR responded to it, and Stewart's retreat from his strident remarks leaves one thing unchanged -- there is a healthy skepticism about NASCAR and its conduct of racing.

Basically, NASCAR's leadership believes there's no place in their sport anymore for subtleties. Everything has to be over-the-top. NASCAR is hardly alone in that attitude. It is pervasive in our society today. It may seem ironic that sanctioning body officials have stomped hard on their least-subtle, most over-the-top competitor, but of course they squashed him because he wasn't singing the company tune, not because he didn't sing loudly enough.

Recently, I wrote in a response to another blogger's post that sagging attendance and TV ratings for NASCAR events is due to rising costs of attending races and overexposure of the product. I think there's another factor, not that it has not been invisible to observers of the sport -- namely, that NASCAR's policies are turning off many long-time fans, who feel racing ought to be conducted with more consistency and common sense than we often see in stock car racing's major league.

It's fairly well accepted, if not officially acknowledged, that modifications such as the green-white-checker rule were adopted as a sop to the noisy segment of the fan population who screamed they had been cheated any time a race reached its conclusion under yellow-flag conditions.

This notion and NASCAR's pandering to it are unprecedented in legitimate sport. It is tantamount to adjusting the score in a football, baseball or basketball game in order to prevent a blowout and instead set the stage for a hail-Mary pass, walk-off home run, or buzzer-beating shot in every game.

And anyone is honestly surprised when the organization that conducts itself by such guiding policies is compared to professional wrestling?

If NASCAR believes this is the way it should go, I just wish it would stop being coy and half-hearted about it. Let's just take it to the "X-treme" -- call a halt to every race with 10 or so laps to go, allow everybody to pit and make any modifications they may wish to make to their cars. Let's make it a 30-minute intermission, to give the TV networks time to hammer viewers with commercials.

Then, let's line the field up in double-file order, based on the positions in which they were running when we reached the 10-to-go mark; give out five or six Lucky Dog awards to fan favorites who may have fallen from contention; and have a sprint to the finish.

To keep things interesting, we could do this at intervals throughout the race, setting up a sequence of adrenalin-stimulating "battles" that would be riveting even to attention-deficit-disorder-afflicted "fans" who find nothing entertaining in old-fashioned duels of opportunity and varied strategic approaches to a long-distance auto race, who cannot accept that one guy sometimes gets it just right and whips the field soundly. That, they will assure you in no uncertain terms, is NOT what they pay good money to see.

If you think we are all that far from just such a scenario right now, you're not paying attention very well.

If that is pleasing to the masses, it will be a rousing success. Few traditional race fans will know about it, and most of them won't care any more than NASCAR will miss them.

We'll find ourselves more and more immersed in local short-track action, where the officiating is more consistent and makes better sense, and where even the track announcer shuns political correctness.