My buddy Ray Kowalczyk called me at six minutes past four on Sunday afternoon to report that the green flag still hadn’t dropped at Daytona, and would I like a full inventory of what had happened so far on the broadcast. I said no. He told me anyway. There had been a flyover, a second flyover, a motorcade, an invocation that outlasted the invocation at his daughter’s wedding, a parade lap by a presidential limousine being driven, and I quote Ray here, “like my grandmother used to handle a shopping cart,” and a sixteen-minute feature on a driver’s dog. The dog’s name is Biscuit. I learned this against my will.
The Daytona 500 used to be a car race. I remember this because I have watched it since 1979, which was the year Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough finished the thing with a fistfight in the infield, and nobody had to cut away from it for a commercial about sleep-number mattresses. The race started when they said the race started. “Gentlemen, start your engines” was not a suggestion, it was a verb. The cars then drove around a track for approximately the number of miles advertised in the name of the event. It was a simpler time. I was wearing a mustache.
Now the Daytona 500 is a seven-hour entertainment property that happens to contain, at some point, a car race. The race is the garnish. The race is the parsley. Everything else on the plate is the thing they actually want you to eat. You get pregame, you get red carpet, you get sideline coverage from pit row where a woman in a headset asks a man in a fire suit how he is feeling, and he answers the way fire-suited men have been answering that question since the Eisenhower administration, which is to say, fine, blessed, ready to race.
I called a fellow named Terrence Holloway — no relation, as far as I know, though it’s a big family — who does consulting work for broadcast rights holders. Terrence was very clear with me. “Duke,” he said, “the race is a floor, not a ceiling.” I asked him what that meant. He said the race is the minimum viable product and everything else is “the engagement stack.” I hung up on Terrence Holloway. I am not related to him and I would like that to be part of the record.
Now look. When the racing finally happened, the racing was good. It’s always good. Drafting three-wide at 195 miles an hour is a hard thing that takes men with steady hands and a certain casual relationship with their own mortality, and I respect it the way I have always respected it, which is a great deal. William Byron won the thing. He won it last year too. The kid can drive. I would like to have written eight hundred words about how the kid can drive. Instead I am writing eight hundred words about everything that happened before the kid could drive, because that is what the broadcast gave me, and as a columnist I am a reactive animal.
Coach DiMaggio used to say the worst thing you could do to a game was dress it up. He coached me in 1961 and he was already saying it then. He said the scoreboard tells the story, and if the scoreboard isn’t enough for you, then son, you don’t actually like football, you like pageantry, and there are parades for that. Coach DiMaggio did not live to see a network cut away from a restart at Daytona to show a reaction shot of a celebrity in the infield suite pretending to understand what a restart is. He is lucky.
There was a stretch Sunday — I clocked it, because Ray made me — of eleven consecutive minutes where the broadcast did not show a single car. Eleven minutes. During an auto race. They showed a helicopter. They showed a flag. They showed a man in a suit climbing out of another car, which was not a race car, and walking toward a third car, which was also not a race car. At one point they showed the pace car, static, parked, doing nothing, with a graphic on top of it. I don’t know what the graphic said. I had my head in my hands.
The worst part is the gambling graphics. Every time a lap completes, a little box pops up in the corner telling you what you could have bet on the lap that just ended. Not the next one. The last one. I am being asked to regret a wager I did not make on an event that has already concluded. This is a new category of psychological injury and somebody at FanDuel should be in prison for inventing it.
My across-the-street neighbor Petey Corrigan watched the whole thing with his grandson, who is nine and has a tablet. Petey told me the kid watched the race on the television while simultaneously watching three separate TikTok edits of the race on the tablet, one of which was already up before the actual race had ended. Petey said the kid kept pausing the TV to check the edits. Petey said the edits were better. Petey said this with the face of a man whose world has ended and who is trying to be polite about it.
Somewhere in there a car crashed, and somewhere in there a tire blew, and somewhere in there Byron threaded a hole that didn’t really exist and won a second straight 500, which is a thing exactly four men have ever done. That should have been the lede. That should have been the top of the broadcast, the middle of the broadcast, and the bottom of the broadcast. It wasn’t. It was paragraph six. We are burying the racing in a race. I don’t know who signed off on this but I know they have a LinkedIn.
I’ll watch next year. I always do. Ray will call me at six minutes past four and tell me who prayed and who flew over and what somebody’s dog is named this time, and I will listen, because Ray is my friend and because the alternative is silence, and because at some point, somewhere inside the seven hours, thirty-nine men will climb into thirty-nine cars and do something genuinely difficult at a genuinely terrifying speed, and I will see it, and for about ninety seconds I will remember why I started watching in the first place.
Denise is bringing chili tonight. She says it’s from a podcast.