Sunday, July 20, 2008
Sports, "Hunt's Grunts"

Slip Slidin’ Away

 

By Hunt Archbold

On a most splendid summer’s eve last week at Chastain Park Amphitheatre, I was fortunate enough to catch Al Green in all his soulfulness. Early in his performance, as he addressed the crowd about what concerns (including “grocery store prices out of control’’) might be bothering them, he responded by singing “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright.” And when he followed that with a sweet rendition of “Amazing Grace,” it was easy to believe Green’s words, if only we would all put a little bit of love in our hearts.

But is it going to be all right for a sport such as auto racing? Two weeks ago, the price of oil reached an all-time record high of $147 a barrel, and with TV ratings down and attendance off at tracks around the country, there are critics who have opined that NASCAR and its drivers should just keep turning right, straight for the garage and put it in park—forever.

Detractors of auto racing bemoan that week after week after week, the sacred cow of NASCAR burns hundreds and hundreds of gallons of gas and oil, all for the sake of entertainment. They say that in a time when gas is more than $4 per gallon, our economy is struggling and our environment is choking, this is a mind-boggling waste.

Racing enthusiasts counter with a host of bullet points. They demonstrate how the U.S. currently use an average of 386 million gallons of gasoline per day, while the amount used by all three of NASCAR’s top three series amounts to less than 200,000 gallons per year. They talk about the gas wasted by fans of other sports: Last year, the nearly 80 million fans of Major League Baseball and 22 million NFL fans far outpaced the less than 5 million fans who attended NASCAR events.

A few years ago, a NASCAR official defended his sport’s fuel usage by equating racing to a professional sports team jetting coast-to-coast in a jumbo airliner. Proponents of racing stress the economic impact the events have on the communities where they’re staged. They speak of the safety, suspension and engine improvements that racing brings, with the sport’s technology showing up in the cars and trucks we drive today.

But fewer and fewer are watching these cars go round and round. Racing is certainly best viewed in person; it’s been said that the sport on TV is more like NAPCAR, while one sleeps on the couch. The Sprint Cup Series stops at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway this coming weekend, but even at the world’s most famous track, ticket sales are down this year; it’s simply costing fans too much money to fill up their tanks and get to the track. Ticket revenue at Speedway Motorsports Inc.’s Las Vegas, Atlanta and Bristol, Tenn., tracks declined 5.1 percent in the first quarter, and Speedway Motorsports, based in Concord, N.C., has seen its shares fall by more than 34 percent this year.

The dramatic increase of crude prices has produced a trickle-down affect that is hitting us all in the pocket, and that includes the race fan. Even with last week’s sell-off, the price of oil remains 80 percent above where it was a year ago, and up about 40 percent from the start of the year. The Labor Department said consumer prices shot up 1.1 percent last month, the second fastest pace in 26 years. Rising energy prices accounted for two-thirds of that increase.

Two years ago, the U.S. spent about $260 billion on foreign crude oil and refined petroleum products. This year, the figure could top $500 billion, or the equivalent of our defense budget. Our nation’s leaders must rise above partisan differences and take action now to create sensible solutions for our energy crisis, or auto racing will be the least of our worries, as our national security and the prosperity of future generations fall by the wayside. It would appear that between John McCain and Barack Obama, whoever can convince the American public he can get this job done right will be our next president.

For a better part of the previous decade, I was the motorsports editor for a major daily newspaper in Alabama. From the tiniest backwoods dirt tracks to the world’s biggest super speedway in Talladega; from no-name drivers with dirt under their nails to the Alabama Gang, with their legion of adoring fans begging for autographs, I made racing my passion. But something happened along the way. I began not to care. The sport became boring. And the idea of a bunch of cars going around and around while fans waited with baited breath for a crash became rather creepy and morbid.

Today, considering the southward direction of both our economy and the environment, it wouldn’t bother me at all if auto racing went the way of, say, the once immensely popular sport of barrel jumping. But something tells me that car racing and our sporting culture will always be singing, as the Rev. Al Green belted last week, “Let’s Stay Together.”

Happy times … and OPEC, bite my arse.  SP