7/9/04

You May Call it Kissin' Ass (And it Well Maybe To a Degree,) But The First Nationals (Both Of Them) Rate High on My List

don't think I'm alone on this: I like to be at really important events. I like to be able to say, "Dammit, I was there." I saw the Wright Bros. in North Carolina. I witnessed Babe Ruth hit his 60th home run. I stood in awe when John F. Kennedy stumbled out of a Sunset Blvd. Mansion with Angie Dickinson on his arm, and I was shocked as anybody when W.C. Fields rolled out of a cab, put a dime in the parking meter and declared, "Godfrey Daniel, I've lost 100 pounds."

And so it is that I wish I had been in Great Bend, Kan. on August 29 through September 1 for the first National Championship Drag Races. By the way, that's the first race with a title rights sponsor in case you didn't know. Our greedy friends at Mobil Oil have their name on the now delightfully naïve banner that said "Starting Line."

You have read and undoubtedly will read more volumes on this event and its rainout date November 19-20 at Perryville, Arizona. I know, I used to crank this jazz out every Labor Day Weekend at "the White House."

Even by 1955 standards and earlier, the race was not the best event ever held. Cars had run quicker. There had been bigger fields, and (a little stretch here), more comfortable surroundings. However, what took place on a dusty flat old World War II airstrip in the heart of "In Cold Blood" country, had repercussions that shaped all of we drag race aficionados' lifestyles.

As a professional spectator, I look at the pictures of the event in awe, to a certain degree. The grandstands were only on one side of the track, giving the hard core people a view of a couple hundred pioneers and the endless Kansas prairie. With my prejudices, I would've survived ok. Get to the track early. Pull the car behind the small redwood bleachers, and make many beer runs. I would guess that, at best, there might've been maybe 5,000 total so it wouldn't have been hard getting out of the place.

The event has to be put in a special category. NHRA had run many of the classes off, in fact, damn near all of them, before a Midwest gully-washer came in and wiped the event out. According to the 1974 NHRA U.S. Nationals program, it appears that only the dragster class eliminations remained to be completed.

Of course, that's like saying after a rained out national event, "I had a great time, saw hundreds of cars. But the rains killed nitro qualifying."

In 1955 on Labor Day Weekend, I was 8 years old. The only sports I was interested in were pro boxing, and to a lesser degree everything else. Had I the jones that I had in my best years at NHRA, I would've sold my body to a gang of pedophiles to make the rainout at another old abandoned airstrip, the one in Perryville, just outside of Phoenix, Ariz.

Knowing what I know now, I would've been as thrilled as a winning CEOI in a stock swindle. Again the race was "good" but as we all know the best was obviously yet to come. This nobody's-fault clumsy two-part entry into the world of sport's entertainment was a big deal. It was James Naismith shooting a basketball through a peach basket in the early 1900s, John L. Sullivan squaring off with Jake Kilrain in a swamp in Mississippi where Bat Masterson was the time keeper, and famous Old West outlaws were sprinkled within the sea of straw hats, walrus moustaches, and string ties.

That aura, that energy, that enthusiasm, that type of performance, say like a 1954 Elvis Presley shocking the country and western fans at the old Louisiana Hayride is, in a word, gone. Sure, everybody wants to say that they won the oldest and most prestigious. In some respects it is. The flack copy reminds of this every Labor Day.

Sadly, the old girl at age 50, looks like her other sisters on the contemporary NHRA /POWERade trail. The profit motive, the 24/7 wooing of corporate backers, has consumed the decision makers in drag racing. They say, as does every entertainment medium from rock 'n' roll to full contact skateboarding, we will break our backs to deliver a cash, credit card flashing audience to our sponsors. You see it almost everywhere.

I suppose, considering the Mobil backing of the first NHRA Nationals, that fact was true 50 years ago. However, drag racing, NHRA, AHRA, UDRA, WHRA, UHRA and all the glorious independents, followed that race with a wild, full-throttle independence that shaped and gave this sport its glory years.

The races are still fun. However, if I had my druthers and a time machine this coming Labor Day Weekend, I'd rather have been at Great Bend and Perryville than contemporary Crawfordsville.

For me, there's a difference, to a degree, between making money and making music.