billy@snitch.com

Today I’d like to belatedly tip my Valvoline hat to automobile racing. I didn’t grow up with it, which I’m sure is one of the reasons I’ve been remiss in not doing a better job of chronicling its remarkable rise to prominence in the last 10 or 15 years.

Had somebody told me, when I got into this business in 1959, that the day would come when stock-car racing and professional wrestling would be two of the most popular sports in the nation, I would have bet my paycheck — which, in those days, was something like $38.73 a week, after taxes — that they were nuts.

But 45 years ago, who could have predicted the changes in America’s culture and values?

Not thoroughbred racing, which then had a monopoly on legal gambling that bred a level of complacency that made the sport sluggish to react to the challenges of off-track betting, casinos, lotteries and riverboats.

If you attended the movie “Seabiscuit,” which I hope you did, look at the exalted place that belonged to horse racing in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. Horses were genuine national heroes. Huge crowds packed the tracks for the major races.

To this day, the sport is still trying to figure out what happened.

The same can be said for major-league baseball, boxing and college football, the other major-interest sports of the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, and even the ’60s.They really had no competition.

The NBA didn’t begin to develop a national following until Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain and Oscar Robertson came aboard in the late 1950s.

The NFL didn’t start becoming the real national pasttime until Johnny Unitas led the Baltimore Colts to that historic overtime win over the New York Giants in 1958.

The PGA Tour was barely a blip on the national radar screen until Arnold Palmer ridded the sport of its country-club image and excited blue-collar fans who played at the muni courses, but knew a fellow scuffler when they saw one.

While these sports were rising, the traditional Big Four failed to meet the challenges of a changing America that was becoming increasingly hooked on television.

Suddenly you began hearing that horse racing and baseball were too slow and too boring; that boxing was too corrupt; that college football was a hypocritical semi-pro endeavor that wasn’t as honest, or as entertaining, as the NFL.

As these values were shifting over a couple of decades, automobile racing and professional wrestling slowly, but inexorably, moved into the void, aided by the almost suicidal tendencies of their rivals for the entertainment dollar.

Automobile racing found ways to capitalize on America’s fascination with cars, not to mention the people who built them and drove them. Like the nation itself, it was all about speed and entrepreneurship and the down-home values that many Americans hold dear.

The drivers were your next-door-neighbors. They were humble, brave and admirable. Mostly, they were accessible. They almost went out of their way to relate to their fans. When their fans looked at them, it was almost like looking in the mirror.

The reaction to the death of driving icon Dale Earnhardt in a racing accident raised a lot of issues and questions, some of which the country didn’t understand or certainly didn’t want to face.

What was missed by many, perhaps even including me, was that Earnhart was Joe DiMaggio or Johnny Unitas or Bill Russell, maybe even more, to a large middle-class, God-fearing, blue-collar segment of our society.

I understand the dynamics of the stock-car racing phenomenon more than professional wrestling. I’m confused by the fascination with a “sport” that is contrived or choreographed. Yet I suppose it has something to do with our inherent need to be able to identify good guys from bad guys, to be assured that right eventually will triumph over wrong.

So if you look at professional wrestling as the sort of morality plays that Shakespeare and others wrote, perhaps you can see some redeeming social values. And if you look at stock-car racing as something that’s as uniquely American as cruising the local fast-food restaurants on Friday night, at being fascinated by mechanics and engines and the need for speed, that also makes a lot of sense.

On any given summertime Saturday, a crowd of more than 12,000 might show up at your local horse-racing track. The attendance at a major-league baseball game might be around 25,000 or so. But crowds of more than 75,000 are routine on the NASCAR circuit.

So I tip my hat. There’s obviously something about automobile racing that appeals to something important that’s deep inside many Americans.