Accentuate the positive - or else

BROOKLYN, Mich. - There’s a great phrase in the Southern vernacular that you have to be careful about using. It might rub some people the wrong way, but that doesn’t mean it’s still not perfect to describe what happened here Friday morning.

Whenever someone is called on the carpet or brought in to have his attitude adjusted, people where I’m from sometimes refer to that as a “Come to Jesus meeting.”

The phrase refers to the fervor with which a preacher might make his altar call at the close of a service. It’s not meant to be sacrilegious. When you go to such a meeting, you don’t get advice. You get admonition.

NASCAR president Mike Helton, in this instance, delivered the message. He told the drivers in the Sprint Cup Series, by what few accounts we were able to get throughout the rest of the day, that NASCAR is getting fairly tired of hearing complaints about the new car those drivers are racing this year.

There are various ways you could take that.

It doesn’t exactly send the right signal to your fans if the people who’re competing in your sport get out of the car and talk about how bad the racing is, how much they hate their race cars and how frustrated they are at what’s going on.

One of the points apparently made at the meeting and reinforced after it by other NASCAR officials was that fans are paying $4 a gallon for gas on top of what they have to pay for their tickets and hotel rooms to come to a race these days. If people stop coming or don’t watch on TV, sponsors stop paying the bills and drivers don’t make millions doing what they love to do.

All of that is true, to a point. On the other hand, however, it comes off as pretty heavy-handed for the drivers to be told, basically, to shut up and race.

NASCAR officials said the meeting was something they do from time to time, but nobody remembers the last time the drivers showed up for a day’s work and were summoned to a meeting. Drivers were told the meeting would happen at 11 a.m. and practice opened at 11:30, so it was clear that it wasn’t going to be the kind of meeting where there was a free-flowing exchange of ideas.

Naturally, word of the meeting spread quickly to the media. It lasted less than 10 minutes and drivers walked out declining to comment. The signal was they’d been told more about what not to say.

NASCAR spokesman Jim Hunter afterward encouraged the media to talk to the drivers about what was said, but after the practice ended at 1 p.m. some of the drivers clearly felt like the less they said the better off they’d be.

So it comes off that NASCAR’s message was “We make the rules, we’re not going to change the rules and we don’t want to hear you complaining about them or talking about how the racing needs to be improved.”

What that implies, though, is that there are things that need to be changed but that NASCAR isn’t going to change them because the drivers haven’t toed the line and kept their mouths shut.

Drivers weren’t the only people who got a talking to Friday. I was told that similar messages were delivered to the sport’s television and radio “partners.”

NASCAR has a problem handling criticism. I know this from personal experience. A lot of the people very high up in that company believe anything that’s not positive is meant to tear down the sport.

What NASCAR doesn’t realize is that the very fans they’re trying to “protect” know when they’re being fed a line of malarkey. They don’t like being told by a TV announcer that the racing is great when it’s half a mile from the first-place car to the second-place car. They know that it’s phoney baloney when guys sit around on a stage and talk about how wonderful things are.

They’ll notice when a driver swallows his tongue for fear of being called to the NASCAR hauler instead of voicing a complaint or criticism that the driver quite likely means to be constructive in hopes of making things better.

After Friday’s meeting, they’ll know if for sure.