That’s Racing: Fairgrounds track on life support

In 1904, years before auto racing was even a chrome gleam in someone’s eye at Indianapolis, new-fangled motor cars were whizzing around a horse track at Nashville’s Cumberland Park, site of the current State Fairgrounds.

In 1957 Bill Donoho and Bennie Goodman partnered with the city to build a modern paved track on the premises, and for some three decades many of the best race drivers on the globe wound their way to Music City: Richard Petty, Cale Yarborough, Darrell Waltrip, Bobby Allison, Dale Earnhardt … locals like Sterling Marlin got their start there and went on to NASCAR fame. When Marlin won his first of two Daytona 500s, he said he hadn’t been so excited since, well, since he won his first Saturday-night feature at Fairgrounds Speedway.

Now that’s about all that is left — the legend and the lore, the heroes and the history. The old track has had a great run, but you know what they say about “all good things …”

Weekly short-track racing is a dying sport. It’s been on life-support for over a decade, and the pulse grows fainter ever year. The Fairgrounds has been hanging by a thread, and that thread is about to snap.

The State Fair Board, which oversees the Metro-owned track and other Fairgrounds facilities, last month elected not to renew the operating agreement with Joe Mattioli. Mattioli had kept the track running – just barely – for five years.

Buck Dozier, the Fair Board’s executive director, said he personally hopes racing can be saved but admits keeping it alive amid a stale economy will be an uphill battle.

Dozier’s plan calls for the Fair Board to lease the track on a race-by-race basis. A “point man” will oversee the day-to-day operation.

I’m not sure that will work. Drivers and teams have to plan their schedules months in advance. Sponsorships, already a hard sell, may be impossible for an iffy ’09 season.

The beginning of the end can be traced back to 1984 when the city allowed NASCAR to slip away. While people in charge quibbled over a bucket of tar to patch a leak in the roof of the Fairgrounds office, NASCAR yanked two annual Cup races now worth over $100 million each.

Nashville racing has been going downhill ever since.

While City Hall bumbling blew big-league racing, nobody is at fault for the demise of the weekly program. Local-level stock car racing is an archaic sport struggling — like a dinosaur trapped in a tar pit — to survive in a modern new world.

The jillions of fans are still there, but they stay home and watch big-league races on TV instead of going to their area track to catch the local Bubba battles.

When the end comes — and it could come soon — let the obit read that local racing succumbed to the most common of all maladies: old age and neglect.