Memphis Million notes scribbled on my BBQ rib bib 9/28/05
First, I had my mind changed by this race concerning watching bracket racing. I've participated in bracket racing for many, many years but I've never enjoyed watching it. I always considered bracket racing to be a massive bore and difficult to understand as a spectator. Well, let me tell you this: I would buy a ticket to watch racing like I saw at the "Million." I sat down at the finish line for a complete round on Friday night and saw some fantastic racing where I had to check the boards to see who won almost every time. Some of the mind and mechanical games those professional bracket racers go through at the stripe are way cool. Unfortunately, my experiences at the Million also verified an opinion I have long suspected and expressed in this column many times. Mainstream drag racing spectators don't give a damn about how much money the racers stand to get if they win. They evidently also don't care about close racing either because there simply were no paying spectators at the Million! I mean zero, zip, nadarooski! On both Friday and Saturday there were never more than 100 people watching the racing from the stands. While there were over 400 entries for the event and the pits looked like the World's largest RV/motorhome sales lot, not even the competitors' families could be bothered to watch men and women bracket race for a potential first prize of nearly a quarter-million dollars. If fans won't pay to watch the best bracket racers in the world race to win that much money then they are never going to pay to watch any kind of bracket racing, period. I'm now absolutely sure that purse structure, close racing and classes mean nothing to most drag racing spectators. They are there to be entertained and they don't care if they're watching jets, wheelstanders, fuel funny cars or fuel altereds go down a track. A majority don't come for the racing; they buy tickets for the action and if the cars don't deliver that the spectators will be gone. The mainstream drag racing press evidently doesn't care about big league bracket racing either. I saw no writers or photographers at Memphis from the print media that covers drag racing other than the folks working for DRO and DragRaceResults.com. Of course, Bret Kepner and the television crew from Inside Drag Racing covered the race. I wonder why the magazines that are supposedly Sportsman racer oriented didn't bother to attend the highest paying, most prestigious bracket race in history. Of course, this was my first race, so maybe I shouldn't be asking. Another drag racing myth was debunked for me at the Million. That's the myth that bracket racers don't work on their cars. I drove around the pits at Memphis on Friday and Saturday and I saw plenty of cars taken apart, as in heads off, intakes off, oil pans off, and transmissions and converters being changed. They weren't doing maintenance between rounds, but before and after there was plenty of thrashing in the pits. You know what I didn't see? Support trailers in the midway for the 400+ racers and cars at this event. No wonder the racers carry all their own spares. These racers buy parts, but where is the manufacturer support? I was at the Million for two main reasons:
With those reasons in mind I arranged to get our bracket racing Editor Jok Nicholson an entry and we set up a program to report directly from the track in the magazine. Apparently the bracket racing fans not only won't watch their own race but they don't care to read about it after the race was over. We started putting up coverage of the Million a couple of days before the event and after the race put one of the cars on my cover along with some race reports and a photo gallery. As I'm writing this "Blast" on Wednesday after the event we have not received one e-mail, call or letter regarding the coverage of the race. I'm not surprised but a little disappointed. After thinking about it and making a few calls I came to the conclusion that a majority of the racers who might like to see the coverage never have the time to get on the 'net. From Memphis they went straight to the $50,000 race at Montgomery, and from there they will be going to the "Ten-Tuck," then Moroso and so on. . .and there probably won't be any spectators at any of those events either. George Howard's "Million" is the greatest race that few people other than the competitors will ever see or attend, but I don't think George really wants a circus at this event. It kind of reminds me of the high-stakes poker game scenes from the "Sopranos." They hold the game above a garage on a dark street in Brooklyn. Everybody who needs to, knows how to get there and who will be playing. The players are generally very, very good and can afford the buy-in. Someone usually leaves the game with a lot of cash but not much notoriety outside of his peers. Maybe that's the way the professional bracket racers like it. Maybe what they want is a place to race for big money with no distractions, no publicity and no spectators. Or maybe they only want to be seen talking to Bret Kepner on TV. |
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eorge Howard's "Million Dollar" bracket extravaganza at Memphis Motorsports Park was a real eye-opener for the Burkster. Attending what I believe to be the absolute premier bracket race, I learned a lot of things about big-time bracket racing that I never knew before and I verified some things about that branch of the sport that I had suspected but had no proof of.
