Post by Bozur on Jul 4, 2005 1:54:21 GMT -5
BOOK REVIEW DESK
Nascar Nation
By JONATHAN MILES
Published: May 22, 2005, Sunday
SUNDAY MONEY
Speed! Lust! Madness! Death!
A Hot Lap Around America
With Nascar.
By Jeff MacGregor.
Photographs by
Olya Evanitsky.
370 pp. HarperCollins
Publishers. $25.95.
FULL THROTTLE
The Life and Fast Times
of Nascar Legend
Curtis Turner.
By Robert Edelstein.
Illustrated. 334 pp.
The Overlook Press. $24.95.
For a certain segment of the population, Nascar's raid on American culture -- its logo festoons everything from cellphones to honey jars to post office walls to panties; race coverage, it can seem, has bumped everything else off television; and, most piercingly, Nascar dads now get to pick our presidents -- triggers the kind of fearful trembling the citizens of Gaul felt as the Huns came thundering over the hills. To these people, stock-car racing represents all that's unsavory about red-state America: fossil-fuel bingeing; lust for violence; racial segregation; run-away Republicanism; anti-intellectualism (how much brain matter is required to go fast and turn left, ad infinitum?); the corn-pone memes of God and guns and guts; crass corporatization; Toby Keith anthems; and, of course, exquisitely bad fashion sense. What's more, they simply don't get it. What's the appeal of watching . . . traffic? It's as if ''Hee Haw'' reruns were dominating prime time, and the Republic was slapping its collective knee at Grandpa Jones's ''What's for supper?'' routine. With Nascar's recent purchase of a swath of real estate on Staten Island, where it intends to plop down an 80,000-seat racetrack and retail center for the untapped New York City market, the onslaught seems poised on the brink of full-out conquest. Cover your ears, blue America. The Huns are revving their engines.
Whether any of that distaste and criticism is justifiable is -- like the pros and cons of requiring engine restrictor plates to control speeds at Daytona Speedway -- open to debate. What's beyond debate, however, is Nascar's surging ascendancy in American sports, and thus, by extension, American culture. By Nascar's estimate, stock-car racing now counts 75 million fans -- more than a quarter of the United States population -- and, to put that in broader context, more than the entire populations of Britain, France and Iran. (It's also, coincidentally, the number of anthrax vaccine doses that President Bush ordered a few months ago.) Nascar's TV deals alone are worth $2.8 billion, its licensed-product sales worth another $2 billion annually. Since 1947, when an entrepreneurial racer named Bill France concluded there was money to be made by aligning all the loosely run, disjointed dirt-track races scattered across the South, Nascar -- the acronym for the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing -- has witnessed exponential growth, enough for journalists to regularly hail stock-car racing as ''the fastest-growing sport in America.'' (Others, more ebulliently, have called it the fastest-growing sport in American history, which could indeed be accurate. Or not: baseball was billed as the national pastime just 17 years after its supposed invention.) What was once a fringe sport, even in the South (you saw plenty of overalls in the old dirt-track grandstands, but no seersucker), has, in the course of 50-some years, upended the American sporting scene. The ''wild new thing'' that Tom Wolfe uncovered in his famous 1965 article for Esquire, ''The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!,'' has left nearly every other spectator sport choking on its exhaust.
But why? its detractors ask. No other sport is so captivating to so many yet so utterly uncaptivating to so many others. If the latter aren't repulsed by the deep-fried spectacle of a Nascar event, with its schizo mix of beery loutishness and Promise Keeper piety, then they're bored stiff by the racing itself. Stock-car racing is, it's true, a competitive variation on commuter traffic: it involves a bunch of sedans ferociously trying to get to the front of the line, making it no different, fundamentally, from Friday afternoons on the West Side Highway. This is what irks the detractors -- the only thing worse than being in traffic, they contend, is watching it -- yet, paradoxically, makes up a major chunk of its appeal. The cars the drivers pilot -- modified Chevy Monte Carlos, Ford Tauruses, Pontiac Grand Prix -- are not so different from the cars Nascar fans use daily to pick up their groceries, shuttle their kids and get themselves to work. Driving an automobile, as Wolfe wrote, doesn't ''require size, strength and all that,'' and driving one competitively demands only ''a taste for speed, and the guts'' -- qualities that every American might wishfully presume to possess. It's often said that Nascar fans identify with their heroes much more intensely than fans of other sports. Partly, this is because those fans understand, with sharp precision, what their heroes do. Every time they drive to the 7-Eleven to pick up a pack of smokes, they do the same thing.
Almost every other sport, on the other hand, is based upon abstraction (the sole exceptions, if you trust Ernest Hemingway's formulation, being mountaineering, bullfighting and motor racing). Putting a ball into a hole, whether in golf or basketball or soccer, is not an intrinsic act, and while you can spin football-as-war metaphors until the bartender cuts you off, carrying a leather ball across a line is an abstract concept, too. In these sports, which Hemingway derided as ''merely games,'' nothing is truly at stake. The consequence of the ball missing the hole, or a batter missing the ball, is purely mathematical. Admittedly, it's math that can incite riots, but math nonetheless. In stock-car racing, however, there is no abstraction. A critical mistake on the racetrack can do more than spell defeat -- it can kill you. Nascar's foes sometimes scorn its fans as Ballardian ghouls, packing the stands in the hopes of seeing someone in a wreck, and there's a kernel of truth to this: crashes are exciting. Nothing rivets the human animal -- or any animal -- like the threat of death. Yet the manner of death that haunts Nascar (32 drivers have died in crashes since it was founded) has a profound and intimate resonance in the lives of its fans. Rural Americans -- still Nascar's base audience, despite its forays into the burbs and urbs -- are far more familiar with roadway carnage than their city counterparts are. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, rural crashes account for 60 percent of traffic fatalities, though rural roads get just 39 percent of the total miles traveled in the United States, and only 21 percent of the population lives in rural areas. If Nascar fans see their lives mirrored down on the track -- the swift back-road driving, the jostling for position on the Interstate, the liberating sensation of a rumbling V-8 engine -- then they also see their potential deaths. The echoes of a ball swishing through a net seem puny in comparison.
WITH such visceral themes, outsize characters and giant national interest, you might expect Nascar to have attracted a glut of literary attention. You would be wrong. Wolfe lighted the torch with his Esquire piece, but in the 40 years since . . . well, poor Wolfe has been holding that torch aloft for a long time. It's not that Nascar lit is wanting for quantity -- the shelves of your local mall bookstore all but bulge with titles like ''Chicken Soup for the Nascar Soul,'' ''Nascar for Dummies,'' ''Nascar Cooks With Tabasco Brand Pepper Sauce'' and a wide, gaudy array of record and statistic compendiums. But, with rare, small-press exceptions, the Nascar canon is made up of books aimed at hard-core fans: driver bios with all the depth of slapdash celebrity profiles; reverential track histories; jargon-filled ''insider'' accounts; and service-y guidebooks. Perhaps this is owing to the perceived reading habits of Nascar fans, acidly implied in Steve Rushin's description of them, in his Sports Illustrated column, as ''tattooed, shirtless, sewer-mouthed drunks; and their husbands.'' Or maybe the knotty complexities of the cars -- the fractional shadings of gear ratios and tire pressures and suspension adjustments -- along with the aw-shucks plain-spokenness of their drivers, have steered away all but the most motorheaded of writers. Whatever the reason, a sport ''set suddenly and squarely at the confluence of popular culture and politics and commerce and mythology,'' as Jeff MacGregor puts it in ''Sunday Money,'' has seen itself largely ignored by writers outside the automotive press.
''Sunday Money,'' which chronicles a frenzied year on the Nascar circuit, is MacGregor's attempt to grab the torch from Wolfe (his subtitle -- ''Speed! Lust! Madness! Death!'' -- clues you in early). In that regard, he triumphs. If Wolfe had expanded his profile of the early Nascar star Junior Johnson into a book, it would read a lot like ''Sunday Money.'' Even Wolfe's stylistic trademarks are all present and accounted for: the printed sound effects (''lubdublubdublubdub''), the hyperdetail (MacGregor devotes some 340 words to describing someone's hair color), the Benzedrine prose (''hottest show on the continent, the Great Inescapable, the 200-mile-an-hour platinum-plated V-8-powered Stars and Stripes hero machine'') and the strenuous grasping at Big Themes (racing, he writes, ''has to do with the life-and-death stakes . . . and with the haunted history of the South and its cult of personality and our yearning for simplicity and our insatiable craving for celebrity and our ache for fable and our need to live vicariously in the glamour and accomplishment of others and our persistent American itch to create heroes''). Call it mimicry, if you will, but say it with a smile, because MacGregor's rollicking energy and manic smarts more than balance out the weight of Wolfe's influence.
''Sunday Money'' is, for my money, the first (and maybe only) book that nonfans or casual fans or just the mildly curious should crack in order to understand the ''noise and speed and glory and death'' that is Nascar. (Staten Islanders, take note.) In 2002, inspired by the outpouring of grief that greeted the death of Dale Earnhardt Sr. at Daytona one year earlier, MacGregor, a writer for Sports Illustrated, and his wife, the photographer Olya Evanitsky, bought a motor home and drove 47,649 miles in search of Nascar's grease-stained soul. They followed the 36-week racing circuit from Daytona to Bristol to Talladega to Indianapolis to Phoenix and to every paved oval in between, exploring the raucous infields and hivelike garages while sizing up the fans, drivers, owners and crewmen alike. MacGregor is neither fan nor antifan -- he views Nascar through the semi-jaundiced, media-savvy lens of a New York writer, though without undue snark -- but he's never dispassionate about what he calls, unequivocally, America's new national pastime. As for that other national pastime, the one with gloves and bats and balls? That one, he writes, has ''crawled up under the house to die.''
YET the two national pastimes, Nascar and baseball, do share turf in one regard: they're both steeped, to differing degrees, in nostalgia. The original Nascar drivers, like baseball's earliest players, were part-time heroes, men who worked roughneck jobs during the week -- Junior Johnson was a chicken farmer -- and raced on the weekends, partly for the money and partly for the rawboned thrills. If they had sons, the sons also raced, when they got old enough. When conflicts arose, as they inevitably do in any traffic situation, the drivers hashed them out on the track. (''You'd drive 30 minutes and fight 30 minutes,'' one old-timer recalled.) Aside from being heroes, many of the drivers were bona fide outlaws: Junior Johnson did 11 months of hard time for his moonshine running, and his fellow shine-runner Bob Flock once contended with other racers and police cars when lawmen staked out an Atlanta speedway and, in medias res, pursued him on the racetrack. To magnify the challenge, the early drivers might race with a live monkey in the cockpit, as Flock's brother Tim did in the 50's, or race while drunk, as Curtis Turner used to do throughout his long and bumpy career. If Nascar's newer fans don't necessarily want to spin the clock back to what are commonly called ''the Rebel days,'' they're glad those days are back there, like ropy farm muscle buried beneath layers of corporate flab.
Turner, a handsome, whiskey-scented, baritone-voiced Virginian who blazed a dirt trail to stardom during Nascar's early years, was the antithesis of the modern-day racing idol. If he wasn't racing drunk, sometimes decked in a silk suit, then he was racing with a splitting hangover. He was fond of passing a mint julep-filled jug back and forth to other drivers, through the racecar window, while he was racing. The first thing he did, when dragging himself out of his car in the victory lane, was light up a Camel. He invited reporters to Led Zeppelin-worthy parties -- pre-race and post-race -- where a bevy of waitresses or a police car might end up in a motel pool, or, if the affair was held in Turner's self-designed ''party room,'' he might demonstrate how a fluorescent light could magically remove the few strips of clothing on the decorative images of beauty queens on the walls. ''You see a person, when they open the bottle, they throw the cap away? Well that's Curtis Turner's life, right there,'' a contemporary of Turner's told Robert Edelstein, a motor-sports writer for TV Guide. His impeccable biography of Turner (who died in a plane crash in 1970), ''Full Throttle,'' kicks up blissful dirt on Nascar's juiced-up early days. Turner's track record was dazzling -- he ''won more than 350 races, driving on any surface he could find,'' Edelstein writes, eventually earning the title of ''the Babe Ruth of Stock-Car Racing'' -- but his off-track record, especially in light of Nascar's efforts to remake their drivers as gassed-up Mouseketeers, was downright dizzying. (Allow me to lament here the great missed opportunity of magazine journalism: Hunter S. Thompson on Curtis Turner.) ''I've never seen in my life Curtis do anything halfway,'' Edelstein quotes one ex-racer. ''He partied like a wild man and he drove like a wild man.''
It's impossible to imagine Curtis Turner racing today in Nascar's Nextel Cup series. (For the record, old-time Nascar had troubles with him, too, ultimately banning him from the sport in 1961 for attempting to start a drivers' union.) Today drivers are expected to play the roles, as MacGregor writes, of ''a salesman and a matinee idol and a motivational speaker and a casino greeter and a role model and a stand-up comic and a humble, right-thinking crusader for the American Way,'' a few of which Turner might manage -- do post-race seductions count as motivational speaking? -- but another few of which might prove, if I may understate, a stretch.
In both books, a sense of something lost -- the Turner-era wildness, more or less, with all its corn-liquor fumes and hog-wallow anarchy -- permeates the text. ''The sport has . . . made incredible strides in the intentional pursuit of cleaning up an image sullied by its moonshining past,'' Edelstein writes. ''While Nascar's status as 'the fastest-growing sport in America' seems ingrained enough to be trademarked, and heroes such as Jeff Gordon represent a kinder, gentler, all-American age of stock-car racing, there's no way the sport could have thrived'' without the dark excitement that unhinged characters like Turner brought to it. As MacGregor laments: ''What happens on the track on Sundays is becoming a footnote to the marketing of what happens on the track on Sundays. The race itself is almost an afterthought, especially on television, where it's becoming a long-form infomercial, a delivery system for a syndicate of national sponsor brands.'' This isn't wearily hip record-store-clerk attitude at work -- neither author is sniffily advocating Nascar's ''early stuff'' -- but rather front-line commentary about a sport (and, in this case, an international franchise) on the cusp of both national conquest and identity crisis. It's not merely that Nascar has cleaned up its act in the last few decades. That was inevitable, since the South got ''New'' and went from producing Faulkner characters to Grisham's gingerbread men. Rather, it's that Nascar has broadened its appeal by diluting its appeal, shirking its red-state trappings -- hell, it even let Toyotas race last year -- in an orchestrated effort to entice the purplish middle. As it prepares to invade New York City -- along with other Nascar-foreign terrain like Mexico and Canada -- Nascar finds itself at an Elvis-comes-out-of-the-Army moment, in which it must choose between what MacGregor calls its ''red-dirt past'' and its ''gold-lamé future.'' Elvis, after all, began his career as a danger-dripping Southerner, a loud and fast-living redneck who was scorned as much as he was idolized. Then he went national, made ''Clambake,'' absconded to Vegas, got bloated and died on the toilet. Perhaps there's a lesson there for Nascar. At the very least: watch what you eat.
Jonathan Miles is a contributing editor for Men's Journal.
BOOK REVIEW DESK | May 22, 2005, Sunday
Nascar Nation
By Jonathan Miles (NYT) Review 2919 words