Does stock car racing need to replace Dale Earnhardt?

The New York Times published this NASCAR story, I thought you should see it.

A well-born Southern lady of a certain age, rich and accomplished, leaned across the dinner table last week and said: "My country is Virginia. I'm also a citizen of the United States, but it's a distant second. I am still furious that the South was not allowed to recover until after the Second World War. There was no good reason to scorch our earth. It was just vengeance."

She was trying to explain why Dale Earnhardt was such a hero in her country. Of course, she had never been to a NASCAR race, although people who worked for her went all the time. First, that courtly Confederate gentleman, Richard Petty, then the more rambunctious Earnhardt, was the hood ornament of stock car racing, the only major American sport that did not originate in the Northeast before radiating south and west. Stock car racing is as deeply woven into the fabric of the South as hockey is to Canada.

This was NASCAR's breakout year, and perhaps the most important sports story of 2001. Certainly mine.

In recent weeks, people in and around the sport have been asking me, the bedazzled Yankee guest on a one-year visa about to expire, if I thought NASCAR would start to run out of gas next year. When I stalled for time and asked what that meant and why anyone would think it, the question was broken down.

One, did I think NASCAR needed a major Northeastern site to succeed? The dream of a NASCAR track in the Meadowlands was put on hold with a lot of American dreams after 9-11. It seems impossible right now to get the state of New Jersey to focus on the issue, much less commit resources and tax money. A track in the New York area would seem like the final piece in the national puzzle; at the least it would ensure a skybox party site for the money, style and media people who would translate the red-clay car culture into a mainstream bonanza.

Two, is there a hero - a face - to replace Earnhardt? Of course not, or to replace Richard Petty either. Who ever replaced Babe Ruth? For most of the last century, just the quest to fill his spikes was heroic romance enough for baseball. While most major sports are still based on regional competition and regional heroes - almost incredible in this time of free agency - NASCAR has the opportunity of creating national heroes. But NASCAR's founding family, the Frances, has always seemed fearful of promoting characters that might become bigger than the sport and thus have the power to get a better deal from management by threatening to create a rival league.

Earnhardt was safe; for all his outlaw image he never confronted the system itself. Drivers now privately discount the notion that Earnhardt was a backchannel between the garage and the front office. Money and safety have always been the drivers' biggest concerns, and he was no lobbyist for revenue-sharing or head-and-neck restraints, much less soft walls or less rigid front ends. The current younger crop, Jeff Gordon, Dale Jr., even the volatile Tony Stewart, do not seem likely to challenge the status quo for some abstract cause so long as they get theirs. Those three are to the Intimidator as DiMaggio, Mantle, Mays were to the Bambino.

Three, is NASCAR risking losing its hardcore fan base by romancing the "demographics" - those yupster men who might turn out to be fickle? It's the "slicks vs. hicks" question. Yes, at midnight in the infield of a speedway, you will find some of that so-called hardcore, the stereotypical stringy, tattooed, dentally challenged rednecks grilling their roadkill alongside Confederate flags hanging limply from rusty pickups. But the real hardcore are solid working people, multigenerational families in handsome motor homes, groups of middle-aged pals from the shop and college kids partying through a race week.

The question that was never asked is whether we really need this particular form of sporting entertainment at all. It's a question that is never asked inside a sport, not in boxing, murderous and exploitive, not in big-time college football, dangerous and corruptive of higher education. Certainly, it's not asked inside this restrictively white Christian male preserve that pollutes the environment, wastes natural resources and traditionally sacrifices safety for speed.

Ah, speed. Last year at this time, I thought there could be nothing more boring than watching 43 cars circle a track. This year, after an 180-mile-an-hour ride in Mark Martin's Viagra car and then a 130-mile-an-hour solo drive in one of Petty's fantasy experience cars, a three- or four-hour NASCAR race goes by in a sweaty flash. Sports fandom is not arrived at rationally. It's about dad, mom, beer and the remembered feel of an oiled leather glove, a taped hockey stick, a vibrating steering wheel.

The Southern Lady asked none of the above questions because she had no interest in my shallow observations. She knew her own mind too well. She was comfortable with her anger, her loyalty, and a concern that is probably NASCAR's as well: How can you grow and prosper as a national business without Northern carpetbaggers once again taking over your institutions?

We'll keep a random eye on that as we turn our interest toward college sports and a coming Year at School. May the New Year be a happy one for NASCAR, the Southern Lady and you.