By BOB KERR

I remember a night at a Charlotte Hornets game in the wonderfully rickety old wood stadium that the Minnesota Twins' minor-league team maintained back in 1970. It was the only stadium where I ever stood in the beer line behind a first baseman recently pulled from the game.

Down along the third-base line sat Donnie and Bobby Allison, brothers who drove cars with a deep regional defiance of anyone or anything that might slow them down. They were having a night at the ballpark, gearing down with a sport as rich in subtle strategies as theirs was in the brutal abuse of high-performance engines.

Even if you were only making a temporary stop below the Mason-Dixon Line, as I hoped I was, there was no avoiding the Allisons, Richard Petty, Cale Yarborough, Buddy Baker — the royalty of stock-car racing. They were a cultural force, as much a part of the region as collard greens and lingering reminders of racial segregation. They were a connection to Thunder Road — to a backwoods tradition of running whiskey and outrunning the law.

And they were some of the most charming people I ever met. They had a natural ease with the idea that they were taking the Chevy out for a run at maybe "a hunnert and fifty" and might drive right through to Eternity. They were men who defined red neck, and yet had to be appreciated as standard bearers for a vital but vanishing part of the place they were born in.

If you wanted to taste the South back in the late '60s and early '70s, you had to take at least a sip of stock-car racing, preferably on a racetrack infield littered with chicken bones and beer bottles and women with bad intent who pushed messages to the drivers through the chain-link fence around the pit area.

To paraphrase another observer of Southern tradition, you could tell a stock-car fan by the vomit on his shoes.

It was a pageant of cracker belligerence, filled with speed, whiskey, Bible thumping, sex, and the kind of edgy Rebel paranoia that always left open the possibility of a good old punch-up.

Tom Wolfe provided a great look at the tradition when he wrote about Junior Johnson, one of the originals who really did learn to drive by running moonshine. Junior, it was said, developed the ability to throw his car into a 180-degree turn and head back at the "revenooers" who were chasing him.

But in the slick, corporate televised production in which Dale Earnhardt met his death at Daytona on Sunday, there seems little of Junior Johnson or the Allison brothers or that fierce Dixie refusal to quiet down and act normal.

The cars and drivers have become moving billboards, and a sport that once helped define a lingering Southern hostility has become just another vehicle for selling stuff. It has been repackaged so that people with private planes and Northern addresses can watch a race and not feel like goobers.

The sport itself is still cars going in circles and people waiting for them to crash. There is still drinking — surely fighting.

But it is all dressed up now, and the typical fan might well have tassels rather than vomit on his shoes.

Stock-car racing has broken out of its birthplace. It is the fastest-growing sport in America. In the new millennium, millions of people have found something they can watch for hours and not have to think about at all. Most of them probably don't trace any cultural roots to trackside.

Probably the one solid connection between what happened Sunday at Daytona and what happened decades ago is the enduring sense of gratitude felt toward Earnhardt and the others before him who lost their lives to too much speed.

For without them, racing would lose much of its allure. Like hockey fights, deaths on the track create an expectancy that is the great, though unspoken, selling point of the sport.

Take it away, and there would be empty seats.

Bob Kerr can be reached by e-mail at bkerr@projo.com .