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Saturday, April 10, 1999 By Lori Shontz. Post-Gazette Sports Writer
Finally, baseball gets it.
With Wednesday night's groundbreaking ceremony for PNC Park, Pittsburgh became the latest city to begin work on a baseball stadium that has character and personality, like the stadiums of yesteryear. What with the laser shows and the fireworks and the silver shovels with Louisville Slugger handles, it was almost possible to forget the bitter battles fought over funding for the new ballpark.
To do so, however, would be wrong, especially for people who are about to make the same mistake baseball did. People like the leaders of NASCAR, who are charging ahead and expanding the sport without regard for what the new growth may be killing.
Stock car racing is revisiting its roots for two weeks. Tomorrow, the Winston Cup race is in tiny Bristol, Tenn., on the .533-mile track that has confounded more than its share of drivers. Next week, the circuit moves to miniature Martinsville, Va., on the half-mile track that always provides tight, down-to-the-wire racing.
Such stops are becoming less frequent. As stock car racing expands beyond its Southern roots - which is a good thing - it is leaving behind too much of the South and too many of the quirky characteristics that make the sport so much fun. Which is bad and which may, ultimately, harm the sport.
Superspeedways like Daytona and Talladega provide plenty of thrills. Ovals like Dover Downs are fun, too, but not every week.
NASCAR needs places like Bristol and Martinsville, where it's not hard to imagine what the sport was like in the days when it was populated by bootleggers and nary a corporate sponsor in sight.
"A Winston Cup season without short tracks would be like Christmas without candy canes," driver Ward Burton said. "It'd still be Christmas, but it just wouldn't be quite the same. It just wouldn't feel right."
The NASCAR hierarchy, however, is giving less weight to tradition and more weight to cold, hard cash. Consequently, its drivers are now racing at places like Texas Motor Speedway, California Speedway and Las Vegas Motor Speedway, all 1.5-mile ovals. Consider them the Riverfront, Veterans and Three Rivers stadiums of racing. Cookie-cutter facilities, all.
Those tracks are far less challenging to drive and less fun to visit than say, North Wilkesboro Speedway. The .625-mile track in Wilkes County, N.C., opened the year before NASCAR was formed and hosted two Winston Cup races every year from 1951 to 1996, when it was unceremoniously dumped from the circuit's schedule.
After North Wilkesboro's founder, Enoch Staley, died in 1995, the track was bought by two of NASCAR's new movers and shakers, Bruton Smith and Bob Bahre. Smith took one of North Wilkesboro's race dates for his Texas track, and Bahre took the other date for his New Hampshire International Speedway.
The newer tracks are nice - just as Three Rivers was when it opened - but they are not must-see, wow-is-this-cool places to visit.
Bristol's turns are banked at 36 degrees, making them the steepest on the circuit. There are more cautions at Bristol than anywhere else because the steepness and the track's small size leave little room to maneuver. Darrell Waltrip once said racing at Bristol is like "flying an airplane in your basement."
Kind of like playing left field at Fenway Park.
At Martinsville, tickets still go on sale each race-day morning for concrete bleacher seats behind the backstretch. It's the place to sit.
Kind of like outfield bleachers at Wrigley Field.
With the opening of Oriole Park at Camden Yards in 1992, baseball finally figured out that the ballpark and the entire experience was part of the entertainment, part of the reason to attend a game. Given a choice between seeing a game at Jacobs Field in Cleveland and Three Rivers Stadium, only the most die-hard Pirates fans would choose Three Rivers. With PNC Park, people should have a tougher choice.
Eventually stock car racing, like baseball, will peak in popularity. When that happens, the sport will need other ways to attract fans. Perhaps the people and government of Las Vegas will be fighting over a Plan B of their own, trying to find a way to improve their unexciting track and keep the NASCAR circuit, with all of its attendant publicity and money, in town.
Maybe tracks like Bristol, Martinsville and North Wilkesboro aren't the best places for two races a year anymore, not with fans all over the country and all over the world. But at the very least, NASCAR needs to make sure that as it thinks about moving into major markets like Chicago and New York, the new tracks will have personality.
And if anyone's really serious about building a NASCAR track near Pittsburgh International Airport - and it would be great if someone is - please keep an eye on the future. Don't build a flat 1.5-mile oval. Build something short. Build something quirky.
That way, 25 years from now, we won't be fighting over Plan D.
Lori Shontz can be reached at lshontz@post-gazette.com.
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