Night Games

By DAVID GREEN

The first seven NASCAR all-star races were conventional daytime affairs. The 1992 event changed the course of major stock car racing history, and altered conventional wisdom about high-speed auto racing under artificial lights.

"One Hot Night" is how H.A. "Humpy" Wheeler and his Charlotte Motor Speedway staff billed The Winston that year. Indeed, what a hot night it turned out to be, with Davey Allison and Kyle Petty tangling at the finish line in a battle for the victory that could have been more fierce only if the two cars had carried military armament.

When the smoke and sparks cleared, Allison -- the winner -- went not to victory lane but to the hospital. His winning car, a Robert Yates Racing Ford Thunderbird with identification number and affectionate nickname 007, went to the scrap heap.

If the 1987 "Pass in the Grass" made The Winston a must-see event, "One Hot Night" cemented the notion that it just had to be held after dark.

Oh, of course, races of all types have been held at night for the better part of a century, if you count long-distance endurance races such as the 24 Hours of Le Mans (first held in 1923), and for more than a half-century if you count the local bullring ovals where the night time has, it seems, always been the right time.

But could they go back 15 years, to 1992, modern-day racing fans would be surprised by the skepticism about Wheeler's revolutionary plan to illuminate a 1.5-mile superspeedway and have drivers race on it at speeds approaching 180 mph.

Couldn't safety be done, the naysayers claimed. It was one thing to race on half-mile or quarter-mile ovals at speeds mostly below the 100-mph level; it was something else to expect drivers to be able to do their jobs under such conditions at the speeds of Winston Cup cars on major tracks.

Few were aware of it, not having been around when Major League Baseball staged its first night game May 24, 1935, at Crosley Field in Cincinnati, but the protests were not unlike those that had been raised by baseball pundits in the 1930s.

Sure, some minor league games had been staged at night ever since 1930, but this is baseball at the pinnacle, the doubters said. Seeing the ball, hitting the ball, fielding the ball -- you just couldn't do that at night at the ultimate level of the game. "High-class baseball cannot be played at night under artificial light," pronounced Washington Senators owner Clark Griffith.

After the Reds won an error-free game 2-1 over the Phillies, the skeptics were proved wrong, if not completely silenced. "The theory that the players cannot see the ball well under the lights was shot to pieces by the staging of some of the finest defensive plays seen here this season," wrote Jack Ryder of the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Just like night baseball, night racing on major speedways is pretty common stuff now. The Musco Lighting-inspired fixtures that project a blazing blue brightness in several layers that comes over the driver's left shoulder, combined with more conventional illumination shining down from overhead, are in place at a greater number of major speedways than those that remain restricted to sunlight.

Journalists, fans and competitors who talk about how night racing is more exciting sound remarkably like observers of that game in 1935 between Cincinnati and Philadelphia -- such as James T. Golden, who wrote in the Enquirer, "The field showed up in a more uniform light, green and tan, than it does in the daytime... What clouds there were were so thin that the ball, when it flew high, shone through them like a bald head in a steam room. And when there was no mist, the sphere stood out against the sky like a pearl against dark velvet."

Today's writers have their own style, but they wax poetic about the glories of night racing in much the same way Golden did in his time.

Golden was correct then, and the colorful descriptions of night racing today are accurate.

Formula One majordomo Bernie Ecclestone plans to stage one or more F1 races at night next season, his purpose being to bring events in Asia into a better time frame for television audiences in Europe. Just like baseball skeptics in 1935 and NASCAR skeptics in 1992, F1 skeptics are saying this cannot be done.

Anybody want to bet on that one?

(NOTE: The quotations about the 1935 game between the Reds and Phillies were taken from the www.crosley-field.com Web site.)