NASCAR is hockey, and NASCAR fans are Boof

Full disclosure: I don’t follow the NHL. I didn’t even know that the Carolina Hurricanes were in the Stanley Cup Finals this spring until I found myself fighting through traffic on the way to my youngest sister’s graduation from N.C. State at the same time as a finals match the night before. (Although I have to give major kudos to the staff of the RBC Center for turning an ice skating rink into a chair-filled floor in roughly six hours.)

So I never really thought to make the comparison between the NHL and NASCAR until I read the second part of Bill Simmons’ e-mail exchange with Malcolm Gladwell:

"The league had 24 teams when [Gary] Bettman took over, including eight in Canada. Now they have a whopping 30 teams, including more warm-weather American teams (L.A., Phoenix, Nashville, Carolina, Tampa, Florida, Atlanta, Anaheim) than Canadian teams (only six). Here's Canada, the country that loves hockey more than anyone loves anything … and it only represents 20 percent of the National Hockey League. This is the single dumbest true fact in sports right now. And it happened on Bettman's watch."

Gosh, that sounded familiar. A lot of long-time NASCAR fans feel that the sanctioning body has moved from its loyal base in the same way. Since I started really following NASCAR in 2002, The Body has removed all top-series races from N.C. Speedway in Rockingham and shuffled other parts of the schedule around, such as moving the traditional Labor Day weekend race away from Darlington.

The schedule doesn’t really reflect the extent to which NASCAR has moved away from its base in the rural South, though. For instance, remember the first year that Nextel (now Sprint) signed on as title sponsor, and the pre-season fan day was moved from Winston-Salem to Daytona? (And got, what, roughly 10 percent of the attendance that our fan day drew?) More than that, there’s a perception problem among long-time fans in what had always been NASCAR’s core geographic area. When I interviewed fans at a local track for my undergrad thesis back in 2004, I found a very real belief that NASCAR as an institution was abandoning the very people who made the sport the multi-billion-dollar force that it is. The complaints ranged from ditching Rockingham and North Wilkesboro to competition changes (such as the “lucky dog” rule) to a suspicion of younger, unproven drivers who were better corporate spokesmen than the Ward Burtons of the world.

Why? Let’s be very, brutally realistic: it’s true that, as the auto racing critics say, watching 40-some cars go around an oval for four hours is not, in and of itself, terribly compelling. What made stock car racing interesting was two things: the spectacle of raw machinery and ingenuity – who is clever enough to build the best car, and bold enough to push it to its limits? – and personal identification with the sports’ participants.

And that, more than dumping Rockingham, is what has sapped NASCAR of its intrigue in the last few years. Jimmie Johnson just won his fourth championship in a row. And I yawned. Nothing against Johnson – he’s a talented driver on an incredibly well-managed team, and I’m sure he’s a lovely person. He’s not the first driver to win multiple championships, even successive championships. Hell, Richard Petty and David Pearson used to regularly win races by multiple laps. But NASCAR fans still cared then, where they don’t so much now.

Why? Part of it is a failure to personally identify with the drivers who currently dominate the cup series, for whatever reason. I for one don’t think it’s as simple as geography (Johnson being from California). I think it’s a shift from drivers from a blue collar background to drivers who came up racing from childhood. Not horrible… but it does mean that fans who felt a kinship with Dale Earnhardt (age 28 in his 1979 “rookie” season) won’t relate as closely with drivers who come up through development programs and land their first full-time rides in their teens.

Can you imagine the media obsession that we’d get if, say, the Patriots won four Super Bowls in a row? None of that happened with Johnson. Which, to me, says that the national sporting collective consciousness doesn’t really care that much about NASCAR or who wins its championship. Which further suggests to me that, if NASCAR wants to keep the fans who a Sports Illustrated survey found had close to a 90 percent loyalty to sponsors, they should forget trying to catch the general ESPN audience and go back to what made them.

I could be wrong… People who are far more in-the-know than me obvs don’t feel the same way. But I can’t help but think that, if this were a romantic comedy/sports flick, we’d now be at the point where our hero NASCAR has all the money and success he always dreamed of, but felt strangely unfulfilled and found himself dreaming of the sorta rednecky gal next door who loved him when.