Related story: Southern racing loses something in moving up

By BOB KERR

One of the great luxuries about a column is that just about anything is potential material. It could be new and it could be old.

This stuff was old -- about 30 years and then some. But it provided some perspective on something new: the death of Dale Earnhardt at Daytona.

So, at the suggestion of my colleague, political columnist Charlie Bakst, I pulled out some memories of my long-ago stopover in North Carolina.

The one thing I most remember about the stock-car drivers I met while a sportswriter at the Charlotte Observer is that they were such a part of the life of that place. There was no celebrity distance. Their job was driving fast cars.

I sat next to Cale Yarborough at a Charlotte Checkers hockey game one night and he didn't talk about racing at all. That's why I started the column as I did, by telling about the night I saw the Allison brothers at a baseball game. It didn't have much to do with racing, but it seemed to say a lot about how these heirs to a great Southern tradition were such a natural and easy fit in the place they lived and raced in.

Even for someone who found auto racing completely unappealing, there was an unavoidable fascination with these people who carried so much hard Southern defiance around a racetrack.

There was, and is, also an unavoidable disappointment that something so purely defined by its birthplace has been so predictably diluted by corporate influence.

So I had at it. That's another great luxury of a column. Sometimes, you can just work out. You can push the limits some and try to get vomit, goobers, and punchups in the same 129 lines.

I received some predictable criticism for my conclusion that Earnhardt's death had added to the allure of auto racing, but I think it's very tough to deny that attendance would dwindle if there were assurances from NASCAR that every race would be accident free.

But I don't watch auto racing, so maybe there is something more to it than waiting for a crash. My opinion was offered with no more experience than three or four races seen more than 30 years ago. And the most vivid memories from those races didn't even involve the cars.