In 1975, a troop of NASCAR's biggest stars traveled to Nashville to record an album, NASCAR Goes Country. Richard Petty, David Pearson, Buddy Baker, Bobby Allison, Darrell Waltrip, and Cale Yarborough crooned a selection of country classics. It's a safe bet that most of today's "Young Guns" don't include Hank Williams-Senior or Junior-in their CD collections.
NASCAR is presenting a slick, modern new image, and its cadre of smooth, polished, well-mannered young racers meshes perfectly with it.
Colorful characters like Curtis Turner, Tim Flock, and Buck Baker ran as hard off the track as they did on it, and such a bawdy bunch probably would not last long in the new NASCAR. Today's drivers are discouraged from engaging in "inappropriate language," using sour-mash for mouthwash, or otherwise breaking NASCAR's First Commandment: Thou shall not engage in conduct detrimental to stock car racing.
Waltrip jokes about the change in conduct: "Today drivers drink wine with their dinner; used to be they drank wine for their dinner."
NASCAR was in its Good Ol'...
NASCAR was in its Good Ol' Boy heyday in the 1970s when Southern drivers Cale Yarborough, David Pearson, Darrell Waltrip, Buddy Baker, Richard Petty, and Bobby Allison recorded a country song.
Would a rascally racer like the afore-mentioned Curtis Turner, were he just starting out, find a niche in today's sanitized NASCAR? Or even a young Dale Earnhardt Sr., who was rough-edged and unpolished when he first battered his way into the sport?
"Yes, I think they would-I hope they would," Wheeler says. "I don't think we've moved that far away. All professional sports are about entertainment, and entertainment is drama. For drama, you need characters that fans can identify with. Not all sponsors want that perfectly-polished image. We still need colorful characters. We don't want to take all the sawdust out of the sport."
But Wheeler is aware of NASCAR's steady drift from its roots, and admits it is a concern. "We've got to have Southern drivers in this sport," he says. "This is still, at its heart, a blue-collar Southern sport, watched by working-class guys and their wives and girlfriends. I don't think we will ever go too far and lose that." He pauses, then adds wistfully: "At least I hope not."
Junior Johnson, the epitome of the early-day stock car driver, was plowing barefoot behind a mule one summer afternoon when his older brother came tearing up in his moonshine-hauling "likker" car. He skidded to a stop and asked Junior if he'd like to run a race for him that night. Junior tied up his mule, pulled on his shoes, hitched up his overalls, and headed off to launch one of the sport's most celebrated careers.
It's uncertain how the shining young stars of the sport will be discovered in the future, but it's a safe bet that they won't be found plowing barefoot behind a mule. Those days are gone forever, victims of a vanishing era, like the Good Ol' Boys who once were the spirit and the soul of the sport.
The original Good Ol' Boys of NASCAR may be a rapidly-vanishing breed, but there's at least one prominent standard-barer left: Dale Earnhardt Jr., a native North Carolinian and third-generation stock car racer.
"Junior is the new version of a Good Ol' Boy," says H.A. "Humpy" Wheeler, president of Lowe's Motor Speedway.
"He's not only a true Southerner, but he represents a lot of what we admired in the old-fashioned drivers. He's his own man, and absolutely without pretense. That's one of the things that made his father so popular-he didn't conform, and neither does Junior."
Dale Jr. is easily NASCAR's most popular driver, especially on the Southern tracks. Is it because of his Southern heritage?
"I think it's a big part of it," Wheeler says. "Southern race fans absolutely love him. They identify with him. They see him as one of their own."
Wheeler adds: "Of course his father was extremely popular with the fans, too, and I'm sure many of those fans shifted their allegiance to Dale Jr. when we lost his dad. Junior has that same rugged edge that his father possessed. He's a good, tough racer-you start with that-but he has the down-home personality and the natural charisma to go with it. You can't acquire it and you can't fake it. You're either born with it or you're not, and Junior has it."
Earnhardt has established himself among the sport's elite, a perennial championship contender, and at age 29 he has a lot of racing ahead of him. The ranks of the Good Ol' Boys may be thinning, but Southern fans figure to have at least one of their own to cheer for, for a lot more years.
"He may be the last one standing," Wheeler says, "but what a great one he is."