Good-bye, wrasslin’, racin’, and rednecks, I told myself as I headed North, and hello, America! Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jacks at the ol’—ball—g-a-a-a-m-e!
Which is why I am so proud to report that America’s fastest-growing and most popular spectator sport today is… NASCAR Winston Cup stock car racing! Aaaaggbhh!
Let me get something off my chest right now, my fellow redneck Americans: NASCAR is not a sport. It is a game, yes. It’s a contest, a competition of skill, of course. But it is not a sport!
A sport is an athletic competition. NASCAR is a skill competition, like bowling or lawn darts… except that in lawn darts there is little chance your opponent is going to slam into you at 200 mph and burst into a fireball. If he does, I suggest you forfeit the match.
In an athletic competition, all other factors being equal, athleticism will determine the outcome. Which is why, by the way, golf is not a sport. Put down the putter, Tiger, and calm down. I’m not saying golf is bad, or that it’s not a worthwhile game. I’m simply pointing out that any activity in which John Daly can be a champion is clearly not a competition among athletes.
A sport is fundamentally a contest of the flesh, and NASCAR is a contest of machines. The strongest driver is not significantly more likely to win than the weakest driver, but the strongest car always has the biggest edge.
Yes, NASCAR drivers need amazing skill and tremenclous concentration, and, yes, they get out of the cars hot, sweaty, and tired. But if we had the American Speed Typing championships in an un-air-conditioned warehouse in Georgia, the effects would be the same. Would that make typing a sport?
The fact that NASCAR isn’t a sport doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth watching. No, the fact that it is a redundant, repetitive, pointless spectacle completely unconnected in any way to our lives is the reason NASCAR is the biggest waste of time this side of the luge. And Americans cannot get enough of it.
More tickets were sold for NASCAR events in 2000 than for any other sportslike event in America. NASCAR has a six-year, $2.4-billion broadcasting deal with Fox, NBC, and TBS. During the economic downturn of 2000–2001, and despite an eighty-dollar average ticket price—higher than baseball, basketball, or football—NASCAR’s Winston Cup races typically put a minimum of 135,000 people into the stands. There are new tracks going up all the time, not in Charlotte or Talladega, but in Chicago, New Hampshire, and Kansas.
NASCAR is a contest in which a whole lot of nothing happens, much of it at 200 mph. The true vacuity of NASCAR is revealed by a typical broadcast of the Performance Radio Network, which covers Winston Cup and other racing events on its 450 affiliates in Deep South states like Wisconsin and Vermont. If you think it’s boring watching guys drive cars in circles for three hours, you ought to try listening to it sometime: “And they’re going in a circle, and it’s a circle, and another circle and another… and they’re turning left, and left, and another left and they’re turning left again…”
Of course, they’re turning left! They’re never going to turn right! Ever! It’s NASCAR—it’s the same guys doing the same thing over and over again for five hundred miles. NASCAR on the radio is as stupid as Olympic diving on the radio: “Oooh, look at that splash—oh wait, you can’t. It’s on the radio.” Who is listening to this? Who is watching it? Who cares?
You do. The reason NASCAR is America’s number one live spectator sport is that we are now an entire nation of people waiting for something to get “blowed up real good” and NASCAR is the only event that mixes hot metal, flammable liquids, and human flesh. When nothing goes wrong and everyone makes it home alive, NASCAR does well. When something goes wrong and a driver doesn’t make it home, NASCAR does even better.
The death of Dale Earnhardt in 2001 made NBC, Fox, and TBS rich and NASCAR’s owners, the France family of Daytona Beach, even richer. Ratings were up about 30 percent midway through the season, and revenues from ticket sales and merchandise were way up, too.
The wreck at Daytona that killed Earnhardt placed a death mask right on the face of NASCAR, and a clown mask on its biggest fans. Earnhardt’s death was a tragedy, as all such deaths are, but I was unswayed by those who breathed solemnly that Earnhardt “died doing what he loved best.” No, I bet if we could speak to him, he’d say that he loved going home to his family every Sunday even more.
Dale Earnhardt was out on that track specifically to satisfy the entertainment desires of his fans, who wanted to see him and the other drivers face death for their entertainment. That is the engine that drives NASCAR, the source of the excitement. Disagree? Ask yourself this question: If new radar, computer-controlled technology could be employed to take over the controls of a car in the event of an imminent collision, guaranteeing that there would never, ever be another wreck in a NASCAR event, what would that do to attendance at the next race?
Let’s put it this way: There would be bigger crowds for the Bob Jones University Theater’s touring production of Othello.
American NASCAR fans don’t want anyone to get hurt (with the possible exception of Jeff Gordon), but they do want to see people drive really fast and crash into each other. And since these fans know what a crash can mean at 200 mph, they are essentially waiting for someone to be hospitalized. Or worse.
Which is what made the national outpouring of faux grief over the death of Dale Earnhardt so nauseating. Churches, chapels, and funeral homes across the nation held special services for NASCAR folks so the same people who leered over the wall at every spinout and wipeout could cry their eyes out surrounded by fellow gawkers. The maudlin sentimentality came in doses so strong even country music fans found it hard to stomach. One mourner in Goose Creek, South Carolina (approximately three hundred miles from any connection whatsoever to Dale Earnhardt), said that the rain falling on their ceremony was “the angels cryin’ for Dale,” and another said she thought she saw Dale’s number 3 in the clouds that night.
This is America’s fastest-growing pastime? The equivalent of “Hey, let’s get a bunch of guys, drive as fast as we can, and see who wrecks first, whattaya say? Maybe somethin’ will blow up!” What’s the substantive difference between this and my cousin Joey’s knife game, or Catch the Rattler or even “Betcha can’t shoot this offa my head”?
Watching NASCAR lap other sports in popularity wouldn’t be so hard if it were an aberration, but alas, no. Check out the ratings on cable TV for the past decade and you’ll see that in a typical week, five or more of the top ten shows were wrestling—a program where grown men dress up in costume, climb into a dog pen, and pretend to beat each other up with furniture. Wrestling is getting nervous, however, because it’s losing ratings to shows like Fox’s Tough Man competitions on their FX network, where grown men actually do beat each other up with furniture, or whatever they can get their hands on. In the lead up to the Super Bowl in 2002, FX broadcast a special edition of Tough Man called “The Tough Bowl,” featuring former NFL greats (Anthony Munoz), near greats (Ickey Woods), and great big fat losers (William “the Refrigerator” Perry). Here’s how sportswriter Jamey Codding described the action between Ickey Woods and Billy Sims:
The bell sounds, and these two fly out of their respective corners like two Tazmanian Devils, throwing wild punch after wild punch after wild punch. Uppercuts, roundhouses, jabs, haymakers… Ickey and Sims both unleashed their entire arsenal in a flash of uncoordinated ugliness, coming at each other like two off-target tornados of flailing fists. It all lasted about 30 seconds.
Who needs the NFL, or even the XFL? Let’s just skip all that “run, pass, and kick” and get straight to the business of kickin’ ass! Or to put it in the words of former NFLer Dexter Manley as he prepared to face off against Anthony Munoz: “I have a lot of respect for Munoz, I’m sure he’s a worthy opponent. But I promise you, as sure as I’m a Negro sitting here, he’s going down in two.”
In case you were wondering, “FX increased viewer numbers by more than 35 percent among its target audience of adults aged 18 to 49”
since it began broadcasting Tough Man, according to Fox officials. And, unlike NASCAR or wrestling, this event is actually a sport: human cockfighting.
In 1960, 34 percent of Americans surveyed said baseball was our national pastime—the most popular answer. Football and basketball were popular, too, and boxing was a much more important part of the American fabric than it is today. But it was baseball that we claimed as America’s sport. We followed it, we talked about it, we complained about it. It was ours. The idea that it would be inaccessible, or viewed as intellectual or elitist, was unimaginable. A ten-year-old boy and his eighty-year-old grandmother could follow the season together, and they often did.
Today, baseball is on the back page. Only 13 percent of Americans call it our national pastime, according to Gallup, behind basketball (15 percent) and football (33 percent), and many of those casting a vote for baseball do so out of nostalgia. Sure, there are more baseball fans today, because there are more Americans today. But football, not baseball, is the sport that (to borrow a phrase from Bill Clinton) “looks like America.” America is today where the South has been my entire life.
The difference between baseball and football is the difference between a book and a movie. You make baseball come to life by anticipating, plotting, investing yourself—what would I do? Pitch high and inside? Move up the infield? Walk Mo Vaughn and take a chance with Mike Piazza? In every baseball game, there are ten men on the field, the nine in uniform and the fan who’s throwing every pitch and taking every swing up in the stands.
Football is fully produced and presented to the fan, ready to serve. Football throws the action at you. It’s all John Woo and no John Irving. All the fan has to do is sit back and wait to see someone’s knee get blowed up real good. When the helmets (and, in Cleveland, the beer bottles) are flyin’, it’s a great game!
Forty years ago, families watched baseball, men watched football, and rough men indulging their baser instincts watched Sonny Liston, Cassius Clay, and the Friday night fights. Today, families watch football, men watch Tough Man, women love NASCAR, kids are watching other kids slam into mountains on snowboards, Mike Tyson is still allowed to box, and Southerners are trying to figure out how, in the age of political correctness, a bunch of toothless white men wearing masks, waving sticks, and beating the crap out of people suddenly regained its popularity.
Only in a Redneck Nation.
15
Hee Haw!
Call it “throwed up real good.”
On Thursday, February 21, 2002, Fox Television served up The Glutton Bowl: The World’s Greatest Eating Competition to a waiting, if slightly queasy, public. Dozens of “competitive eaters” chomped, choked, and gulped gallons of mayonnaise, tons of beef tongue, and fistfuls of other unpalatable foods for the chance to win a whopping $25,000—less than my local grocery store gives away each week in its bingo promotion. The folks at Fox promised a final-round surprise delicacy they described as “not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach.”
It turned out to be a fifty-five-gallon drum filled with cow brains.
Now, as a Southerner I am not surprised by anything folks put in their mouths. My boyhood home was in sniffing distance of the annual Chitlins Strut held in the nearby town of Salley, South Carolina—where thousands gather to snack on that portion of the hog most susceptible to the effects of a high-fiber diet. My own grandma had a special way to cook a part of the hog she called the melt, an organ unheard-of in any butcher shop or biology book with which I am familiar. She also made headcheese, kept a barrel of cracklin’ next to the stove, and whipped up a mean pot of squirrel pilau (pronounced “per-low”), a favorite of mine.
My experiences are fairly typical, which is why, in the vittles department, we Southerners don’t scare easy: If you haven’t eaten a handful of live bait, a huntin’ dog, or another human being, we’re not impressed.
And I’m not surprised that people would sit around and watch strange things getting eaten. When I was eight and working in a tobacco barn in Conway, South Carolina, I paid a quarter to see Mr. Red Winburn bite the head off a tobacco worm. Tobacco worms are green, gooey sacks of tobacco juice, a long, clingy booger of a bug, and I was eager to see a grown man—and my boss, to boot—put one in his mouth. He did it, and as he reached out to take my quarter, he taught me a valuable life lesson: A redneck will do anything for money.
When I was around twelve or so, my more rustic relatives tried to get me to eat odd, hard-to-identify, exotic items for their entertainment pleasure. The looks of anticipation around my aunt Celie’s dinner table told me something was up. My uncle Teenyboy would shove a plate of some unidentifiable tissue toward me and urge me to dig in. When I asked what it was, he would cough up some backwoods euphemism straight from the Redneck Marketing Department: “Oh, them’s liver and lights, they’re good!” or “Why, that’s a mountain oyster! What, you never had one?”
Now, I’m no Jacques Cousteau, but even I knew that “mountain” and “oyster” didn’t go together. You bring me out a plate of “desert clams” and maybe we’ll talk. On those occasions when my trust would overcome my reason and I would take a bite or two of the proffered delicacy, my relatives would burst into laughter and start shouting to my mother, “Pat, hey, Pat—come see what your boy done eat!” as I scurried red-faced for the nearest chamber pot. No doubt about it, watching people eat disgusting animal parts is a redneck comedy riot.
It also cracks TV’s Top 20 almost every week in the good ol’ U.S. of R.
You can dispute my contention that modern America is as race-obsessed as the Old South, you can reject the idea that Yankee ideals of merit and accomplishment have been superseded by the good-ol’-boy notion of “Who’s your daddy?,” you can even deny that NASCAR is a traditionally southern pastime that now laps the nation. But to deny that America has been ‘neckified in the field of entertainment, you’ve got to shoot your TV, burn down the Barnes & Noble, and throw away your brain.
The Glutton Bowl may have garnered relatively modest ratings—it was up against the Olympics that night—but more significant was the lack of attention it received from finicky media critics and TV writers. Where was the outrage, Bill Bennett might ask.
Sorry, Bill. Another night, another gang of unappealing Americans subjecting themselves to bizarre tortures and humiliations for the entertainment of their countrymen. That’s hardly news in the Redneck Nation.
Then… TV Listings, 1961
CBS, Playhouse 90. First-rate American writers, directors, and actors brought outstanding productions like “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” “The Miracle Worker,” and “The Days of Wine and Roses.”
NBC, Omnibus. A wide-ranging ninety-minute show hosted by Alistair Cooke presenting everything from Shakespeare to golfer Sam Snead to Jonathan Winters. An eclectic mix of news stories, concerts, documentaries, operas, and comic sketches drew performers from James Dean to Charlton Heston.
ABC, the Ernie Kovacs specials. Described by many as a comedic genius, Ernie Kovacs’s experimentation with television won awards and redefined the medium. One award-winning episode is the only thirty-minute television program in history with absolutely no dialogue. It was a great success.
And Now… TV Listings, 2002
CBS, Survivor. Twelve unknown, talentless Americans travel to exotic locales to undergo physical and emotional stress, eat worms, and battle for $1 million.
NBC, Fear Factor. People stay in the United States, undergo physical and emotional stress, eat worms, and try to win significantly less than $1 million.
ABC, The Chair. People get strapped into a chair, and while has-been tennis pro John McEnroe yells at them, they go through physical and emotional stress (skip the worms) and answer trivia questions with hopes of making their next three car payments.
What did I miss? What happened between 1962 and 2002 to take us from Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone to entire TV series made up of home movies showing men being hit in the crotch? Was this the triumph of 1960s intellec
tualism over bourgeois American values? Or did every American spend a summer with my uncle Arthur Joe, who liked to hook an electric capacitor to a chain-link fence and watch it send yard dogs howling after they lifted their legs?
The proof of redneck media dominance isn’t in the fact that television sucks. Television has always sucked. The same 1961 TV season that featured Omnibus and Ernie Kovacs had a minor hit called The Hathaways, starring Peggy Cass, Jack Weston, and a troupe of theatrical monkeys. Imagine a pre-evolutionary version of The Partridge Family (but with better music), and you’ve got the idea.
What’s strange is not the badness of television, always our lowest-common-denominator medium, but rather the style and quality of the badness it currently exhibits. There are so many ways for TV to suck, who would have imagined it would suck the southern way?
In 1961, one might have predicted a television future filled with boring news shows, turgid documentaries, and self-serving conversations among pompous yet insignificant pseudo-celebrities living in Manhattan. But PBS wasn’t created until the Johnson administration.
Forty years ago, one might have feared a future of bland, forgettable sitcoms, or vacuous variety shows, or nonstop westerns, or even, worst-case scenario, a national TV network based around Hee Haw, a wildly popular syndicated show across the South (and in the Graham household) when I was a kid. But the worst Hee Haw-inspired nightmares can’t match the truth, the “reality,” of the suckitude of modern American television. The Hee Haw gang may have lacked savoir faire and je ne sais quoi, but they never set themselves on fire, covered themselves with mucus, or videotaped the vaginal penetration of a member of the livestock family—though they were no doubt sorely tempted.
Such programming may sound like country, but it’s really rock ‘n roll. Or to be more precise: MTV.
MTV’s Jackass was an entire program wholeheartedly dedicated to the traditional southern belief in the entertainment value of gross stupidity. The premise is simple: A group of young twenty-something guys hit the road in search of the line where stupidity equals death. Then they straddle that line, with tape rolling.
Redneck Nation Page 19
