NASCAR on TV: We've come a long way
By Richard Petty, , Special to Turner Sports Interactive
September 4, 2001
2:41 PM EDT (1841 GMT)
Some people called our comeback in 1979 one of the neatest things that ever happened in NASCAR Winston Cup stock car racing.
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Richard Petty
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Now I don’t know if that’s the case or not, and even if it was, I’m sure a lot of pretty big things have happened since then. We were behind by 180-something points to Darrell Waltrip in the middle of the season and came back to win the championship. Pretty great feeling, believe me.
But I didn’t tell you that to talk about championships.
That championship came down to the very last race of the season. It was tooth-and-nail between Darrell and me, and it was the first time the championship had gone down to the very last race.
So there we were, at Ontario, Calif., racing for the biggest and most prestigious title in all of stock car racing. Guess how many people watched us on national television?
None.
That’s right. There wasn’t any national television package then. There wasn’t anybody covering the races at all. ESPN was just getting started. CBS had covered the Daytona 500 that year, but that was the first time anybody had covered a NASCAR race live flag-to-flag.
If you don’t remember those days -- or the years afterwards where maybe a few races were covered, or maybe half were live and half on tape-delay -- then you can’t really appreciate how good we have it now.
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The early days of NASCAR included virtually zero TV coverage...
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Televise Happy Hour? We were lucky if they televised us at all!
I guess somebody decided a few of the problems we’ve had this year were reason enough to trash the FOX and FX guys and the NBC, TNT and CNNSI folks. And I'm sure a couple of things have happened this year that the TV folks wish hadn't.
Hey, I’ll be the first to tell you that Richard Petty does things from time to time that he would like to do over too.
But it’s tough to say bad things about these networks who are taking us into more homes and placing in front of more viewers than anybody ever before for motorsports. Not just stock car racing -- all of motorsports. In fact, we’re getting more viewers than a lot of other sports completely.
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...while today's NASCAR races are broadcast to millions of fans.
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It goes further than that too. I’ve watched those boys in the pits working as hard as they can work, doing everything they can to give the folks watching on television a good show. I’ve seen them running up and down pit road. I’ve seen them early in the morning and I’ve seen them late in the day. They are going all the time.
I learned a long time ago not to think badly of anybody who works hard for a living, and those boys work harder than anyone I’ve seen. They take a lot of pride in what they do, and you can see that everytime you turn on the television.
The production is better than any we’ve ever had over the course of a whole season. They work hard to make things interesting, to explain what’s going on and to bring the viewers onto pit road. You are getting as realistic and complete a portrayal of what is going on in our sport as any race fans ever have at any time in the history of motorsports.
I guess you could always turn on the TV on Memorial Day, at least at night sometime, and see the Indianapolis 500. And then you could start turning on the TV about the third Sunday in February and see the Daytona 500. Now you can turn on the TV any Sunday the cars are running and see live flag-to-flag coverage of NASCAR Winston Cup racing . . . or any Friday and see qualifying . . . or any Saturday and see the Busch race or see Happy Hour.
Happy Hour?!? On TV?!?! Man, we were lucky to make the local evening news not that long ago, and here FOX, NBC, TNT, FX, CNNSI and FOX Sports Net are taking us all over the country and, soon, all over the world every single week.
I can’t speak for anybody else, but I have no complaints. My remote control and I are pretty happy right now.
Thanks, guys. You are one of the best things that has happened to our sport.
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