NASCAR tries to tackle the big boys

Sporting News, The, Sept 17, 2001 by Lee Spencer

Regardless of what happens nine of the next 10 Sundays, when Winston Cup telecasts on NBC go head to head with the NFL on Fox and CBS, Dick Ebersol thinks he has a pretty good thing going.

Still, you have to wonder if mainstream America, Madison Avenue and Wall Street will embrace NASCAR with the same bear hug that they squeeze the NFL. Probably not, but given some of the surprising numbers this summer, who knows?

NBC brought NASCAR's ratings to a new high in July when the viewing audience increased by 36 percent overall for the season for the Pepsi 400 at Daytona. Then, in August, ratings for the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis grew by 56 percent compared with numbers from that race last season.

NASCAR led the list of sports programming for four consecutive weeks, starting July 22 with New Hampshire and running through August 12 at Watkins Glen. TNT carried the first two races during that stretch and NBC the final two.

Ebersol, chairman of NBC Sports since 1998, had the hit of the summer on his hands, and no stick or ball was involved.

"We felt going into NASCAR that we had attached ourselves to a real growth sport, but I don't think in our wildest dreams did we think it would be at this level," Ebersol says. "This is against the backdrop of every other major sports package going down with the exception of whatever golf tournament Tiger (Woods) plays in."

Ebersol, one of the creators of Saturday Night Live and the mastermind behind NBC's securing the rights to the Olympics through 2008, knows how to pick winners and drop losers (the XFL, remember?). He sees NASCAR's success as a combination of factors and cites talent and product as the most important.

"Every week, it's an All-Star game--every star shows up," he says. "In baseball, there are 30 teams and in basketball, 29. So you don't see all the best players of the game on the field at the same time. You do here.

"The other thing is the competition--the way (NASCAR) keeps adjusting the rules to keep things close. The way they try to regroup in the last laps if they have any excuse at all to keep things competitive. I think the fans are turned on by that and the fact the stars are probably by far the most approachable of any in sports."

NASCAR is the ultimate made-for-TV sport, and Ebersol is the ultimate salesman. One driver recently used the word "manipulated" to describe some of the events that have occurred this season.

Maybe, but even to the harshest critics, one thing should be clear by now: Ebersol and the television partners at Fox and Turner are capable of massaging this Southern-fried sport into a nationwide darling.

"This is the only sport in the history of our country that grew up in a rural area and had plenty of urban areas to grow into," Ebersol says. "When the other sports went to expand, they already had New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston. In this world, they're perfectly set up to go to the West Coast, to go to Chicago and Kansas City, and some day, New York and Seattle and Denver. No other sport has that kind of growth ahead of it."

Though Ebersol and folks at NBC can pat themselves on the back for exposing NASCAR to a record number of viewers, they can't hide behind the ratings--or from the e-mails. NBC and TNT have taken shots from all directions since taking over the coverage at midseason.

The e-mails I have received that include negative comments about NBC's presentation and content rank second in volume only to the e-mails that flooded my mailbox after Dale Earnhardt's death.

My colleagues receive similar e-mails, and so does NBC. Ebersol says he hopes fans will adapt to NBC's style of coverage, just like they did to Fox's at the beginning of the season and ESPN's in the past.

"I started Saturday Night Live in the middle '70s, and when I came back in the early '80s, people were saying it was dead," Ebersol says. "It wasn't because they thought any one show was weaker. They missed the old cast members. When you get it in your head after watching something week after week that Chevy Chase was there every week--he wasn't. He left after Year One. You thought the Rolling Stones were the musical guests every week, and Steve Martin was the host.

"After the first part of the season when Fox did a terrific job--they were on their `A' game, and Darrell (Waltrip) was perfect ... he was pretty damn good--there were two or three weeks that the technology didn't work for them. For us, the hardest thing was that it was our very first race (Daytona in July), and it didn't work. That's not us. That's the connection from the technology company to our truck."

NBC is different from Fox. Once you get past the heavy-metal music and fender-banging, sparks-flying promos, the broadcast tone of NBC's top analysts--Benny Parsons and Bill Weber--tends to be more of what you would expect, a bit more serious than that of Fox counterparts Larry McReynolds and Waltrip. Add Jeff Hammond to the mix, and it feels like you're learning and having more fun with Fox.

Maybe NBC could use a little more fun to spice up Sundays this fall. It doesn't have John Madden, and it doesn't have a pigskin. But it has a product that, when presented properly, is tough to tackle.