May 22, 2008
By Brian Watkins
Brian Watkins
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I’ve not always been the fine upstanding citizen I am today, or at least think I am today. After finishing my third year of college, I was invited to return the next school year under the auspices of a special program the university liked to call “academic probation”. There was no way to spin that then, and there’s no way to spin it now. While I thoroughly enjoyed the social aspects of college, I was a bit less inspired to apply myself as whole heartedly into the educational side of higher learning.
So I decided I needed to take a semester off and figure out just what I was going to do with my life. While the decision to take some time off from school made sense at that point in my life, it came with some unintended consequences.
First of all, leaving school also meant I was on my own. Without the rent-free dorm, meal plan at the cafeteria and other parent paid for perks that I was given to encourage me to actually learn something, I suddenly found myself on my own. I had to find an apartment, fund my car, pay utilities… all the fun exciting stuff the real world brings with it. On top of all that reality, another arrived in my mail box about a week into what would have been my 4th year of college. It was a payment book from the friendly folks at my student loan company. Now that I was no longer enrolled in school, my last three years of tuition and books came knocking. To pay for my past and my present, I needed a job -- which was another problem. I lacked marketable skills.
I’d been working since I was 15, so I knew how -- but there was nothing I was especially good at that would generate any more of an income than one would expect to make when their not especially good at anything. In short, I was broke. I had worked in restaurants most of my life, so getting a job waiting tables wasn’t too difficult. Taking the paycheck and tips and adding them together and getting a number larger than the sum of my bills however, was often a challenge.
Making the situation all the more difficult was the fact that I was young, stupid, and fiscally irresponsible; three traits I have gradually improved upon but have yet to completely overcome.
When I had to choose between a night out and paying a bill, the bill always lost. When I had to decide which was more important; the newest game for my Sega Genesis (hey, Sega’s were cool back then) or my car insurance it doesn’t take long to figure out whose premium went up for slow payment.
I played this “more month than money” game for a surprising amount of time before it all became a little too real for me. In the end I walked downtown to the recruiter’s office and became one of the easiest enlistments ever.
During those “lean” months however, there was one bill that always got paid and always got paid on time. It was the cable bill. In some communities (at least back then) you could go 3 or 4 months without paying before they’d shut off your cable service. Not the town I lived in. You had just about a week and a half to two weeks before they took care of you. They didn’t turn off your service or hound you with collections calls. No, sir. They simply deactivated every channel except one: C-SPAN.
You’ve read this entire piece so far, and I’m sure you’re wondering just what does my pathetically managed past have to do with NASCAR. Well, let me jump right (almost) to the point.
I wrote all of that so that I could write this:
There is nothing worse than watching C-SPAN at 2 am when you can’t get to sleep. I imagine that their tactic for getting dead-beats and dipsy-do’s to cough up the cash had to be the most effective method in the country. That is until now.
Today, cable and satellite providers can replay the 2008 NASCAR Sprint All-Star “race” continuously on their non-paying subscribers TV sets and get even faster payments. Heck, just the thought of having to sit through that race again makes me want to write the cable company a check and I don’t even have cable!
I think watching an 80 car field qualify at Talladega would have been more exciting. Heck, watching ANYTHING else would have been a bigger thrill. As boring as it was at home, I can only imagine how thrilled the folks who spent hundreds and thousands of dollars to see the over-hyped-under-delivered race unfold ever so slowly and ever so painfully before their eyes.
It was the third Saturday in a row that short tracks across the country had to do battle with NASCAR for butts in the bleachers. This past Saturday there was a lot of the butts in the bleachers at Lowe’s who wished they were at a local short track. At least then they would have gotten some racing for their money.
One might think that a points free race would mean a “damn the torpedoes” kind of event. You’ve got a million to gain and nothing to lose. There should have been more fender banging and safer-barrier testing than during any other race all season. Instead what we got was a single-file-no-cautions-ho-hum exhibition.
While it was nice to see that somebody could put a red Budweiser car up front when it counted, that was the only reward for tuning in.
The race even seems unimportant to teams- so unimportant that the Gibbs team decided to turn the event into a 100 lap test session, trying out Gibbs-built engines and saving the Toyota motors for more important events.
Many of the teams used the race to continue to experiment (to an extreme) with offsetting the wheels to improve handling.
For as much as NASCAR hypes the race and the events surrounding it, one now wonders why they even run it at all -- especially considering the top 35 rule ensures that EVERY race is an “All-Star” race.
There are plenty of tracks that would love a first or second Cup race -- why not expand the NASCAR domain a bit further and add a new race to the schedule. Heck you could even cancel the race and make it an off weekend for Sprint Cup teams. I’d rather watch no race than that thing again.
Let’s just hope the All-Star “race” wasn’t a preview of what to expect at the Coca-Cola 600 this weekend. If it is, LMS might have to add bottomless cups of coffee to their all-you-can-eat grandstand package.
The thoughts and ideas expressed by this writer or any other writer on Insider Racing News, are not necessarily the views of the staff and/or management of IRN.
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