ThreeStrikesandOut

The following is the first in a three-part special guest series that is one man’s view of the live spectacle of NASCAR racing and the Bristol race in particular. A thank you to Shane for undertaking this mission; and to all of you out there reading it, be nice, I’d like to take more days of in the future, lol. Be warned, TSAO is in no way, shape, or form to be held responsible if you are offended. In fact, we will smile if you are. Peace.

Sincerely, Rock

Before I get started, I’d like to thank the TSAO High Command for allowing me the space and time to spew-off about how I spent my weekend. Here’s a big “whoo-hoo” to my pals and fellow sports vandals who believe that “rubbin’s racin’” and believe that Richard Petty should be considered a national treasure.

Part One: The Arrival

We arrived in the mid-afternoon which made us tourists, lightweights, posers to what we were about to witness. If we were truly devout , we would have been here a week ago, or at least earlier in the week. I’d heard rumors of people “going native” up here and never returning to their normal lives, running through the fields and screaming “JUNIOR!!” into the night like a wild dog, but I digress. It reminded me of Marlon Brando’s Col. Kurtz in ” Apocalypse Now”, and indeed we were “errand boys sent here by grocery clerks”. We decided to park away from the track and take the last part of our journey on foot. We ended up parking in a field that was owned by a local church. I could see them, shaking their heads, all the while praying for our mortal souls., because they too, knew what debauchery lay just over the hillside. We started on foot down the shoulder of the already clogged state route bordering the track. There was already evidence of what had already came to pass: empty 12-pack cartons along with the cans, liquor bottles and even the occasional shoe. One of my companions was reminded of some piece of information he had heard that when you see a shoe along the shoulder of the road, there may be a body nearby. I really didn’t want to test this theory, due to the fact that he could be right, only it would be a passed out race fan instead of a dead body. Oh well, better to sleep it off in the bushes early in the day to prepare for round 2 (or 200) once the race starts later that night. We eventually made our way into the outer circle of campers around the track. These tailgaters on steroids had already been here most of the week in preparation for the motorsport mayhem we were preparing to witness. You could see folding chairs, kiddie pools, inflatable palm trees, and the occasional satellite dish. You also saw, in the middle of all this mayhem, true evidence that this was an American event: People had turned their homes into small convenience stores offering everything from Italian Ice to Hot Showers (Remember, there ARE actually people that live here the other 50 weeks of the year). I’ve heard urban legend-type stories that people actually make enough money during the 2 weeks of the year that there are races to be able to pay their house payments for a year either by renting out their field to park cars or their back yards for RV parking. There are even people that rent out their houses for the race week while they head for greener, more peaceful pastures. Face it, Trying to live anything resembling normalcy during race week is an exercise in futility, resulting in 2 options: embrace it or get the hell out of there. If you choose the latter you may as well make some cash from it.

This place is normally a quiet, rural community that just happens to have a speedway built in the middle of its pastures, but this week it resembles a city in a better-off third-world country. I hesitate to use the term third-world, just due to the fact that the cost of most of the “pleasure vehicles” found here is more than the gross national product of most of those countries. There is a large cross section of people to be found here: rich, poor, middle class, blue collar and white collar, all coming together to worship at this altar of horsepower and steel. For some of these people, this is the highlight of the year: the family vacation, sweating it out during the dog days of summer here at BMS. A lot of these folks don’t even have tickets, they just show up, park the camper and get a front row seat for the festivities, while they watch the race on the satellite TV they’ve got hooked up inside.

Imagine tailgating at your local college football game. Now split the crowd up among 43 drivers, stretch it out to a week, add alcohol, heat and stir vigorously. Then multiply that by 100. Then you have some idea of the level of madness found out here in this recreational DMZ. Most of the people are her to let their hair down and have a good time away from their normal lives. And in these conditions, that can mean a lot of things. As we made our way closer to the speedway, the mass of people became more concentrated and singular of purpose. There were people like us, who were there for the day mixed in with the entrenched who were out in the daylight scrounging up provisions for the coming race (more beer.)

The final circle we encountered before being in the shadow of the track was the ad-hoc flea market selling everything from ear plugs(a lucrative market here) to tons of licensed and not-so-licensed t-shirts and merchandise. Then, there it was: The Track. Looming large over the countryside like the monolith in 2001: a space odyssey. And there we were: Three monkeys ready to enter this massive monolith of motor sport. We put or heads down and headed up the slope to enter, awaiting the spectacle that lay in wait for us inside that hallowed half mile….