Racing in the Bluegrass

By DAVID GREEN

Some 41 years ago, when my career as a motorsports journalist got off the ground, racing -- of automobiles, that is -- was not a very big deal in my home state of Kentucky.

Kentucky, in the 1960s, had been the site of one NASCAR Grand National race. It was at Corbin Speedway, on Aug. 29, 1954. Lee Petty won, with Hershel McGriff second. Buck Baker and brothers Herb and Donald Thomas rounded out the top five.

The Commonwealth had made one other contribution of note to stock car racing -- Owensboro native G.C. Spencer, who had relocated to Inman, S.C., in northern Spartanburg County, and raced full-time for a good many years at NASCAR's top level.

In 1968, Darrell Waltrip -- another Owensboro product -- had yet to be discovered.

But there was stock car racing to be enjoyed in my neck of the woods, at the old Keeling Raceway and the Purchase District Fairgrounds in Mayfield. Before I was able to get out there with the boys in a car of my own, I contributed reports to a weekly newspaper in Paducah.

My, how things have changed. Now, none other than O. Bruton Smith himself is trying to bring days of Cup Series thunder to Kentucky Speedway. Dale Earnhardt and Dale Earnhardt Jr. bumper stickers abound. Finally, we have had some Kentuckians who didn't change the listing of their hometown (one again, you guessed it -- Owensboro) who enjoyed a measure of success in NASCAR.

Keeling is gone and the only "races" in Mayfield are tractor pulls and demolition derbies. But Junior, Ken Schrader and Tony Stewart are part owners of Paducah International Raceway, and there's another high-profile (but curiously managed) dirt oval, Kentucky Lake Motor Speedway, near Gilbertsville.

Even such things as a recent ceremony at the new Marshall County Hospital in Benton had a NASCAR connection. Scott Lathram, in whose name a new helipad was dedicated, was one of the victims of the October 2004 plane crash near Martinsville and was Stewart's helicopter pilot. 

I'm sort of ambivalent about Bruton's tiff with the former owners of Kentucky Speedway, who seem bent on getting some satisfaction out of NASCAR via litigation for not adding their track to the Cup Series schedule. I've come full circle and am now much more focused on the local racing scene.

Perhaps NASCAR mania in Kentucky has completed a lap in its own right. News coverage here -- even in Lexington, a lot closer to Kentucky Speedway than those of us down here west of the Tennessee River -- focused on Patrick Patterson's decision to remain at the University of Kentucky for one more basketball season. Even former Wildcat coach Rick Pitino (now at UK mortal enemy Louisville) and a Cincinnati-St. Louis baseball game story got higher play than Smith's admonition of the former Kentucky Speedway owners.

And of course, there's that horse race at Churchill Downs the first Saturday every May.

Still, auto racing is a much bigger deal in Kentucky now than it was four decades ago.