Vintage racing

Less than 12 hours from a vacation that will feature nothing more than fishing, swimming, beer swilling and little else for the next 8 days, I needed something to get me excited about racing.

Leave it to ESPN to take car of that, as it wraps up its "Ultimate NASCAR" series with a 2-hour segment entitled "Families."

I jumped in smack in the middle of Dale Earnhardt footage, back when he was still building his Intimidator reputation. It's classic stuff, stuff that helped build the NASCAR we have today. Checkers or wreckers for the likes of Earnhardt, Darrell Waltrip and Richard Petty.

Watching, it turns my stomach to think about how plain, how vanilla big-time stock car racing has become. Points racing, polite camera-speak, Michael Waltrip's endless and shameless sponsor plugs. Not only should Earnhardt and Davey Allison be rolling over in their graves, but it's a wonder short-track racing is suffering.

PASS, ACT, the Late Model Sportsman division at Wiscasset Raceway, the Wednesday night Runnin' Rebels at Oxford Plains. All of them hold more action than a Sunday afternoon at Vegas or Kansas or wherever the heck else the Nextel Cup Series is racing. Even Bristol isn't what it once was, back when Earnhardt or Rusty Wallace or a younger, hungrier Jeff Gordon would just as soon boot you out of the way as finish 2nd.

That's, as they say, racin'. What we're seeing today, I'm not sure it's much more than a 4-hour commercial for 40 companies.

Maybe ESPN can dig up some more footage, some of those races from Darlington and North Wilkesboro, the more obscure ones I can't remember who won. Even if I can remember, I bet they're still more unpredictable than today's Cup events.