Rowdy People

Butterball No More...Now What?

As a longtime follower of Rowdy, I've been stuck with the moniker "Butterball" for the past few years, owing to the fact that I worked for Butterball. See, I would email the guys at Rowdy HQ or even some of my fellow listeners and for whatever reason my emails would just say "Butterball"...an IT thing I guess. Anyway, today was my last official day of employment with Butterball as I am transitioning over to what I hope is an even better job with Coleman (the outdoor camping/tailgating folks) come Monday. So...I guess that means no more Butterball or Cold Turkey (another alias). What should I be called going forward...any printable ideas?

Rowdy Book Review: 2 for 1

Read a couple of NASCAR-related books a few weeks back and have been a little too preoccupied to write a review on either until now. “Real NASCAR: White Lightning, Red Clay, and Big Bill France” by Daniel S. Pierce and “Racing While Black: How an African-American Stock Car Team Made Its Mark on NASCAR” by Leonard T. Miller offer a couple of widely divergent reads. Rather than compare the two I’ll just describe each individually.

“Real NASCAR” details the rise of NASCAR through its bootlegger roots on up until the dawn of what is generally considered the modern era of the sport. Mr. Pierce does a pretty good job of getting to truth and debunking what is patently untrue. He spends significant time on the bootlegger aspect of early NASCAR. Unbeknownst to me, a great number of our early track owners built their tracks with bootlegger money. All in all, a pretty well-researched book that I thoroughly enjoyed reading but mainly as a companion piece to another book, “Driving with the Devil”. For me, “Driving with the Devil” is still a notch or two better if you want to be both entertained and educated about the early days of NASCAR.

“Racing While Black” goes in an altogether different direction. Took up the book during Black History Month as an effort to learn more about a part of racing that I quite frankly knew little about. It chronicles the author’s attempts to start up and finance a fledgling race team with a black driver at the wheel. Throughout the book you are taken on a roller coaster of highs and lows, mostly lows as sponsorships and leads seem to appear and evaporate almost as quickly as a morning fog. Appreciated the unusual perspective provided, that of the team owner’s point of view. Few books that I’ve ever read on NASCAR delve too deeply into this part of the sport. Still, much of the time I found the author to be a little too confident of his own sponsorship-finding skills and a little too abrasive towards those who passed on his team.

His team was often better funded than those they raced against and still they failed to win with regularity. Furthermore, they often missed races due to various reasons. Even though he wrote a book about the subject, it almost felt as though he wasn’t really 100% committed to the race team. He lived far away and would occasionally fly in for races. How was that supposed to work? Honestly, if I were looking to sponsor a team, I don’t know that I would have been okay with the lack of results. However, I still found myself hoping that somehow they would do better than they did and yet I knew the end result long before the last page. NASCAR has an acute shortage of representation of minorities. Hopefully, some day this will change and the sport (both on the track and in the stands) will be more representative of our nation’s vast melting pot of ethnicities.

"Madhouse" on the History Channel

Was searching the overwhelming selection of programs available late on a Friday night and came across "Madhouse" on the History Channel. I guess I knew this show was out there but had somehow overlooked it. "Madhouse" takes a look at the racers doing battle at historic Bowman Gray in Winston-Salem, NC.

Believe it or not, but I lived in Winston-Salem for awhile and never did attend a race. I know, an unpardonable offense on my part. However, in my defense it was only while living there that I became a fan and actually attend my first NASCAR race. Boy did I miss a lot though...

The drama that plays out during an episode had me hooked immediately. Loved seeing how deeply personal each driver took each incident. It was like the Carl/Brad rivalry X10. Great stuff. Can't wait to watch another episode tonight at 11E/10C.

Rowdy Book Review: "The Driver"

“The Driver” proved to be an eye-opening book to me. Little did I know that there existed a sub-culture of race enthusiasts who run illegal cross-country races. Sure, I’ve seen the movie “Cannonball Run”, but figured that surely nothing so crazy like that exists in real life. Well, reality proved to be even wilder than my imagination.

“The Driver” chronicles the transition of car enthusiast, Alex Roy, into illegal race professional. Ultimately Roy becomes obsessed with breaking the supposed world record time of 32:07 between New York and L.A. His first attempt comes up short by 2 ½ hours and a subsequent try ends in mechanical issues in Oklahoma. Roy’s third try shatters the record by an hour, but at what price? He has alienated all but the smallest circle of friends that would stop at nothing to help him.

As I read this book, I alternated between rooting for him to succeed and shaking my head at his incredible recklessness. Either way, it was fascinating to learn about this type of racing as well as the people who populate it…strange characters indeed. I just hope I don’t ever encounter them on the highway some day.

The Real Start to the Season Begins This Weekend

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Daytona 500 and consider my attendance in 2006 one of the truly special sporting events I’ll ever witness. Winning that race makes a driver’s career. He will forever be known as a former winner of the biggest race in NASCAR and fans will remember him always. However, it is this weekend in my mind that truly signifies the beginning of the long slog that is the Cup schedule.

Why do I say that? Well, for starters I believe that success in plate track racing often does not correlate to success on the short tracks and cookie cutters that litter the remainder of the schedule. I find plate track races fun to watch but maddeningly ruled by luck and chance all too often (no disrespect to those that have won as you are never given a victory). Plus, this weekend means a return to the weekly grind that is Cup racing. There’s no more Speedweeks, with the prodigious testing and publicity that surround it. From here on out…just racing and seeing who wants it more.

Kudos to Jamie McMurray. Glad to see the pure joy in your eyes as you celebrated a career-making achievement, but I’m ready to see what happens this weekend for what I consider to be a better gauge on who’ll be strong all season. Yeah, I know…Matt Kenseth won the first two races last year and missed the Chase. However, that was more aberration than correlation in my book. It’s no coincidence that Jimmie Johnson, searching for an obscene fifth consecutive title, has won here with great regularity. So, I’m eager to see if anybody has anything for him this weekend and therefore the rest of the season.

Join the Rowdy League on Stockcar Challenge

Well, it’s that time of year again…time to set up your fantasy racing team. Simply go to the ESPN Stockcar Challenge website (see link below), create your entry, select your team, and choose to join an existing league. The league name is “For Fans of Rowdy.com”. Looking forward to a fun season.

Stockcar Challenge

Rowdy Book Review: "He Crashed Me..."

It’s around this time every year that my excitement and energy levels for NASCAR get restored in anticipation of the resumption of racing. It’s also sort of been a habit of mine to peruse the new book offerings about NASCAR that inevitably come out around this time every year. While the past couple of years have been a little lean on offerings, there seems to be a bounty crop of tantalizing books coming out over the next couple of weeks. I’ve begun my NASCAR reading project this season with a Daytona appropriate book “He Crashed Me So I Crashed Him Back…” by Mark Bechtel. The book centers around the 1979 Cup season, and there was plenty to write about.

Many people incorrectly attribute the first live full-race coverage on TV to the 1979 Daytona 500 (the first one actually came several years before and was a disaster…hence no follow up telecasts). However, that Daytona race was the catalyst for the massive growth that NASCAR would see in coming years. TV options were limited then and viewers (many seeing Cup racing for the first time) were treated to an epic finish, Donnie and Cale colliding on the last lap and the King taking the victory. The ensuing fight between Cale and the Allison brothers afterwards was what generally stuck in the minds of viewers. Many would continue to watch in the hope that all races were like this.

1979 also saw the rise of a future Cup star, Dale Earnhardt, Sr. He wasn’t the Intimidator yet…no, he was a hard-charging rookie who was quickly capturing the attention of diehard fans for his blue collar work ethic. Dale won his first race that year…at Bristol, and ran well enough to serve notice that he was a rookie in title only.

The other main story from that season happened to be the points race. Cale was coming off of three straight championships, unheard of in Cup racing, and looking for a fourth. The King was winless the season before, and questions were being asked if he might not be washed up. Petty’s Daytona 500 victory ended the winless drought and became the springboard for a dramatic title run between Petty and DW. Waltrip seemingly had the Cup title wrapped up in the waning weeks, but some bad racing karma forced a showdown in the season’s final race with the title going to whichever driver finished ahead on the track.

All in all, it was a dramatic season in NASCAR from just about any angle one would want to view it from and this book does a great job of setting the scene for readers. The first portion (several chapters) is devoted to the Daytona 500, both the race and the lead up to it. Succeeding chapters take you through the season on an almost week by week basis. It even has an epilogue that helps wrap up all the loose ends and brings the story’s arc to present day.

So often I read books about NASCAR and they just seem so dry or, at worst, written in a very amateurish way that assumes race fans are so desperate for content that they will literally buy and read anything regardless of the quality. However, I have to say…this book was different. It was laid out well and, especially for a sports book, very well written. I would highly recommend this book to my Rowdy friends who tend towards the bookish side.

Anybody Read "He Crashed Me So..."?

Trying to get geared up for the 2010 season and the Daytona 500. Was interested in reading the book "He Crashed Me So I Crashed Him Back: The True Story of the Year the King, Jaws, Earnhardt, and the Rest of NASCAR's Feudin', Fightin' Good Ol' Boys Put Stock Car Racing on the Map" by Mark Bechtel. Anybody else read this yet? Looks like an interesting and appropriate book on the eve of another Daytona 500. There are a few other titles yet to be released (sometime in February) that I also want to read. Anybody else have any NASCAR book suggestions?

Stockcar Challenge is Back!

Well, it's that time again. Time to join your fantasy racing league! I just created a league on ESPN's site. Go to ESPN.com, choose the Fantasy tab, and then click on the Stockcar Challenge button. You'll have to create an entry. Once you do, you can join an existing league. The one that I've created is called "For Fans of Rowdy.com".

Is There a Lane Kiffin of NASCAR?

For those of you who don't follow football much, Lane Kiffin is the ultra-controversial coach who just left the University of Tennessee for the Southern Cal head coaching job. In his tumultuous and short career he has baffled observers by his continuous ability to land top jobs despite what one would consider the requisite experience or results to warrant the position coupled with an endless mountain of foot-in-mouth incidents that leave all but the most diehard fan of his current employer at a loss for words.

My question is this...does NASCAR have an equivalent villain/character in its midst? You know...a braggard who never, or at least...rarely, wins and brings nothing but drama wherever they go. Who fits that description? If we were just talking racing in general then I'd say Danica Patrick (1 lifetime win, bigtime sponsors and top team equipment, lots of drama and way too much hype) but I'm not sure which NASCAR personality most likely fits the bill.