How did Silly Season get so silly?
By Richard Petty, Special to Turner Sports Interactive
October 16, 2001
2:40 PM EDT (1840 GMT)
I guess we’re right in the thick of "silly season."
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Richard Petty
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Now if you are the kind of person who waits all year for "Hunting Season" or "Football Season" or "Christmas Season," (by the way, there are just 70 shopping days left until Christmas -- so let us know what you need in the line of Petty souvenirs!) then "Silly Season" sounds, well, silly.
But If you are a race fan, and most likely you wouldn’t be reading this if you weren’t, you know all about Silly Season. It’s a pretty important time of year. And if you or your driver is involved, it’s not silly at all.
Silly Season is the time of year when drivers and car owners and sponsors start talking about the next season. You start hearing rumors and rumors of rumors about who is going to drive what car and who the sponsor is going to be. We don’t have any real "dirt" to gossip about in the Winston Cup garage, so this is what we go with.
The gossip is fun to hear about when your teams and your drivers are not involved. Ours aren’t. Kyle Petty in the Sprint Dodge, John Andretti in the Cheerios/Betty Crocker Dodge and Buckshot Jones in the Georgia-Pacific Dodge: all official non-participants in the 2001 Silly Season.
The conversations you hear this time of year in the garage are great. You know you are getting ready to hit on a juicy piece of something when somebody starts a sentence with, "Well, what I hear is . . ."
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Rumors are swirling about the future of the No. 12 car...
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What they mean when they say that is they don’t have the slightest idea of whether or not it is true and, most likely, have no way of knowing if it is true. Still, if everything you heard was true, it would take all of the fun out of it.
How do these things get started? Who knows?
One of the best ways is if you’ve got Driver A who drives for Team A, but he’d really like to drive for Team B. Well, Team B hasn’t bothered to call or anything. In fact, they’ve had their eye on Driver C for awhile now, and haven’t even thought about Driver A.
Then a rumor pops up. You start hearing it in the garage. "Pssst . . . Driver A is talking to Team B." You see it on Jayski.com, one of the bigger rumor-news sites on the Internet. Next thing you know, Team B gets to thinking - "Hey, maybe we ought to talk to Driver A."
The thing is, you find out later that the rumor most likely first started with Driver A all along. He was just passing along a message.
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...and the No. 31 car as Silly Season heats up.
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The Chicken and the Egg thing don’t have anything on these boys. You never really find out which came first in most cases -- the rumor or the fact. Facts lead to rumors but, and I’ve seen this a lot over the years, rumors lead to facts too.
Big names, little names, medium names - everybody gets involved. I think people like the attention the rumors bring, even though they can get awfully frustrating at times. If you are a car owner, you hate hearing your driver might be talking to somebody else. If you are a driver, I’m sure it’s not a good feeling to hear your owner is talking to somebody else. A lot of times nobody is talking to anybody, but the rumors start and it can lead to some pretty bad feelings.
I guess I never was a big part of that as a driver. Outside of a couple of years, I always drove for Petty Enterprises. As far as I know, they never thought about getting somebody else to drive the car and I never thought about driving anywhere else.
So I was never part of any of this. And it was never as big as it is now, with so many top teams and top drivers involved every year.
All I can tell you is Richard Petty is going to be right where is he now when the flag drops on the 2002 season.
At least, that’s what I heard.
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