Word: nascars
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...reach a wider audience, he needed television, and he went a-courtin'. CBS bit, big time, in 1979 when it agreed to televise the Daytona 500 flag to flag. That race couldn't have gone better for NASCAR: the superstar Richard Petty won when leaders Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough crashed into each other in the final lap, then leapt from their cars and got into a fistfight. It was marvelous theater, and ratings were high, which they've remained since. The last TV deal France signed before bequeathing NASCAR to his son in 2003 was for six years...
...1980s and '90s, as NASCAR marched through the North like Sherman through Georgia, France slowly altered NASCAR's image to make it more mainstream. He asked his drivers to sign more autographs and forced them to behave on the track as well. When two of his stars, Dale Earnhardt and Geoff Bodine, were engaging in weekly sparring matches, France told them to cut it out or find another line of work. NASCAR, whose rank and file once included criminals, was coming to stand for integrity...
...faces of NASCAR began to change. Even if some of the sport's beer-bellied fans didn't take to pretty boy Jeff Gordon, France thought Jeff was fine, as did lots of moms, daughters and little kids with poster-bedecked bedrooms. More interesting than Gordon's looks was his heritage. Born in California, he was a teen in Indiana. In an earlier time, such a kid would have dreamed of racing in the Indianapolis 500, maybe, but wouldn't have given NASCAR a thought. Now NASCAR was the big leagues, recruiting coast to coast, and everyone wanted...
...while France built NASCAR into a huge business and the country's biggest spectator sport, he built it into something else too. Something perhaps even more important...
...critic Jacques Barzun once famously (well, famously among sports fans) observed, "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better know baseball." The citizens of NASCAR Nation would, today, reasonably argue with that. Please quote me no Yankee Stadium attendance figures; baseball at present is a disgrace--the subject of government inquiries, an industry as rife with known and suspected cheaters as Wall Street circa 2000. Is this the heart and mind of America? Maybe it is, but not as we'd like...