Talking racin'

I am home in North Carolina, watching the Phoenix race on television like everybody else this weekend, but that doesn't mean I have been totally goofing off.

This is the 50th season for Lowe's Motor Speedway and the Observer is preparing to mark that with a special project. We're going to provide 600 hours of anniversary coverage -- that's 25 days -- beginning May 1 and running through the day after this year's Coca-Cola 600.

In preparing for that, I've been talking to people who've lived the track's history. I'm not even close to being done. I am supposed to talk to Buddy Baker, for example, Tuesday night, and there are a lot of other drivers, current and former, I still have to sit down with to talk about their memories of what I consider to be the template for the modern American race track.

But what I did get done this week was pretty cool.

On Monday, I sat down the three guys who've all done the same job I'm doing now. Tom Higgins, Bob Moore and Bob Myers all covered NASCAR for newspapers here in Charlotte. When Myers left the road, he moved to the sports desk at the Observer. When he retired, that opened the spot on the desk that I wound up getting. About 6 1/2 years later, after the 1996 season, Higgins retired as the NASCAR beat writer and I took the job I've got now.

We sat around for nearly three hours and I listened to those guys talk about all the racing they've seen at Charlotte. Myers was telling us about a "race" he saw one time when Curtis Turner and a couple of his buddies showed off racing around in the dirt outside the track for a couple of Hollywood celebrities who'd come to town. Moore's perspective on the sport's history is really interesting. After working for newspapers he went to work for Sports Marketing Enterprises, the group that handled the NASCAR sponsorship for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco. So he saw that side of things, too.

Friday, I spent the afternoon at Humpy Wheeler's house. It was like taking a graduate school course in NASCAR history. We talked about his 30-plus years at the track for what I am doing for the paper. Then, we had one of those discussions about what sport in America might look like 20 years from now. It'll never make the paper, but if one of these days you're watching a ball game or a race at a massive stadium that exists only in some kind of virtual reality, I hope Humpy and I both are around to say we told you so.

I started trying to do the math while I was shaking my head at the completely shameless sponsor shilling that passed for a Fox prerace show before Saturday night's race. I've covered the Coca-Cola 600 11 times now (I missed a year for a family emergency) for the Observer. Myers was at every 600 from the first one in 1960 through 2004. Higgins and Moore have probably been to at least 40 each. Wheeler was at every one from 1976 through 2008 and a few more before that.

The way I figure it, among the five of us we were good for seeing the 600 right about 200 times. That folks, is a lot of left turns.