INDIANAPOLIS — Three calendar pages and a handful of races into the season, this much is obvious: We are not yet out of NASCAR’s Age of Schadenfreude — a strange and troubling period that, if things don’t turn around soon, may end up defining the sanctioning body in this century.
The modern history of NASCAR Cup Series racing can be broken up neatly, conveniently, into decades. The 1960s was about superspeedways, David Pearson and Richard Petty; the ’70s, boosted by Winston’s huge marketing push, belonged to Pearson, Petty, Bobby Allison and Cale Yarborough; the ’80s brought TV coverage, Darrell Waltrip, Bill Elliott and Dale Earnhardt; the ’90s saw Earnhardt and Jeff Gordon surfing and steering the sport’s biggest wave; and the first decade of the 2000s, the “noughties,” was dominated by Jimmie Johnson and a national financial crisis that arrived like a cold front, catching us all outdoors in short-sleeved shirts.
When Wall Street sneezed, NASCAR — the most dollar-driven form of American racing — caught a flu that still lingers.
Which brings us to the current decade and this weird schadenfreude, a psychological term for “taking delight in the misfortune of others.”
These days, it’s difficult to have a racing discussion without some bozo sounding joyful about the state of the Cup Series. Even when the Daytona 500 was announced as a sellout, the doomsayers muttered, “Wait until Atlanta next week. There’ll be plenty of empty seats.” Sure enough, as the Atlanta broadcast revealed that the crowd was down, every form of communication available to me — phone, text message, social media — rang and buzzed and beeped. Each alert amounted to a single word: “See?”
I’ll confess, this makes me nuts. Rooting against any form of racing strikes me as crazy.
Look, across the years I’ve gotten mad at NASCAR and I’ve had my scrapes with the organization over matters of policy, rules enforcement, scheduling and bad calls by officials. But never did I root for them to stumble; that made no sense. Yet now it is routine.
There are certainly explanations for this.
First, some people simply like to rail against authority and blasting NASCAR feels like mouthing off about the government, or the IRS, or your 9-to-5 boss.
Second, many short-trackers felt left out during the NASCAR boom. That’s a legitimate gripe; I’m old enough to remember when Bill France Jr. would bounce around the country, hitting races and banquets in Maine, Tennessee or New York, taking the pulse of the sport at the grassroots level.
Those glad-handing trips made weekend racers and their fans feel like they were part of something big, something special. That outreach faded as TV revenue outpaced anything NASCAR could pull in from selling licenses to late model mechanics and modified drivers and I know short-trackers who resented that.
The sanctioning body could have put more money and effort into hyping its various tours and its weekly racing series, and a little less into importing the music-star-of-the-month to sing the national anthem for the cameras on Sundays. You could make the argument that in the ’90s, France and company did a nice job looking after the family business, but not such a stellar job as stewards of the sport. The goodwill they squandered back then would sure come in handy today.
Third, it’s clear that blue-collar Cup Series fans were dumped at the side of the road as NASCAR sped toward the bright lights 20 years ago. Ticket prices rose, and rose some more, because no matter what they went for, there were outstretched hands grabbing for them. If the Smiths could no longer afford to come, that was OK, because the Joneses would take those tickets.
Then came the money crunch of 2008-’09 and the Joneses stopped coming, too. It was then that NASCAR faced a hard truth: Once fans realized they could survive missing their favorite events, they soon learned they could also survive not watching those races on television. All that adds up to weak crowds and dismal Nielson ratings.
There’s a lot on the line for NASCAR. I’m not sure the folks in Daytona Beach understand they aren’t just dealing with a fan base that has temporarily drifted away.
Thousands of those fans — if you want to say millions, I won’t argue — have turned their backs and stomped off. They still enjoy racing, but they no longer bleed for it. That shows in the way they joke about having seen another giant advertising banner covering the section of grandstands where they used to stand and shout.
Myself, I can’t get to that point. This schadenfreude is not my game. When a race team folds, when a track trims its staff, when NASCAR lays off employees, there are real people out of jobs, real people worried about mortgages and college funds and tomorrow. Sure, cheering when a powerful outfit takes a punch — when the baseball Yankees or the football Patriots blow a game — can be great fun; as the old saying goes, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
But it stops being funny when they fall on you and NASCAR’s slide isn’t good for anybody in this sport.
I don’t know what comes next, but we are on the cusp of a new decade. Against the grain, against so many voices, I am hoping that maybe it turns into the Roaring ’20s.