NOTE: To the knowledge of The Student Life editorial staff, all of the anecdotes expressed in this story are true.
I didn’t used to like NASCAR, but ever since the past few years when I started going to races I realized what a truly awesome sport it really is. When I moved to North Carolina I couldn’t hardly even spell NASCAR, but since I was living in Race City USA—that is Mooresville, North Carolina—I didn’t really have a choice but to learn about it. For one thing it was really awesome being so close to all of the action. Sometimes I would even see Junior driving his pick-up truck down the streets of my own town! Also lots of other famous NASCAR racers live in and around the Mooresville/Lake Norman area. For instance I used to live in the same trailer park as the leader of Bobby Roberts’ pit crew’s ex-wives. It was really cool conversing to them and getting all of Bobby’s signed autograph cards for free. Those wives were the first ones who really told me all about the history of NASCAR and why it is the greatest sport in all of the USA and probably the world.
For starters, NASCAR was founded in Appalachia during Alcohol Prohibitin’ in the 1930s when those bootleggers were making whiskey and using their cars for transporting it past the police that were waiting by the road to catch them. Lots of times they would need to be real fast to escape the cops, and after a few years the bootleggers had developed a love for the fast-paced twisting and turning races down the roads away from the police cars. Even after Prohibitin’ was over, the bootleggers continued doing NASCAR things like racing down hills and going real fast around curves. It is possible to go extra fast on the curves if your car is made well because of the centripetal force that holds your tires to the road. Also, the drivers had a reason to continue running from the cops because lots of them had developed stills for moonshine which they would create and then take down from Appalachia to sell in cities like Gastonia and Davidson and the future Race City USA.
The actual organization of NASCAR wasn’t founded until the year of 1948, when one of them moonshine boys decided that he could probably make a lot of money off of making people pay to watch racers drive their cars in a circle. Folks, I think the rest is probably history, so let me talk just a minute about my own experience with NASCAR races. For me, the races were not that interesting until I learned all of these things, but even then I was still skeptical until I actually heard and saw my first race.
You could hear the engines at Charlotte’s Lowes Motor Speedway for miles and miles around, even above all the other city noises! When we got there and gave the lady at the counter our tickets the noise was already so loud that I couldn’t even hear myself think, but if I did I’m sure I would have been thinking about how awesome of an event it was about to be. At first the cars going around in the circle seemed boring, even though I had already learned the history of it and its origins from Bobby Roberts’ wives. And the noise kind of hurt my head at first, but after a while I stopped hearing it and had what I can only characterize as a religious experience where I couldn’t hear anything and the rumbling feeling from the cars was so strong that I got dizzy and just followed the cars around with my eyes for the whole rest of the race. When the last car finished the race and all the noise died down and I couldn’t feel the rumble anymore I was overcome by this amazing feeling of happiness and I guess that’s what people love so much about the races. For me it was all about the experience of waiting for it to be over and that great feeling to come back.
That’s why I think more Americans should be NASCAR fans, since it gives a good feeling whenever you’re done watching it, which is more than I can say for a lot of sports. And all that is to make no mention of it was founded right here in the United States and carries on our strong traditions of breaking a law that is unjust (Prohibitin’) so that we can have freedom. This is what America is all about and why we are Number One in the world, thus NASCAR stands up as the greatest, most American sport in the country, making it the greatest sport of the greatest country, which is why I believe that NASCAR is the greatest sport of all time!
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