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The track at Talladega is so big--2.66 miles--that between 20,000 and 30,000 fans can set up their campers on the infield and watch the race from there. It's like a small city, with good neighborhoods and bad. Guys with pickups spin doughnuts in the mud, then stand an Ellie May or a Daisy up in the back and drive slowly through cheering throngs. When the girl collects enough Mardi Gras beads from slobbering Bubbas, she answers their obscene chant with a lift of her shirt. Fights break out. Sirens wail. It's like spring break, except nobody came from college.
There's even a gated community called the Front Runners Club, which charges $500 per motor-home parking space. It's in this section that I find two black guys and tell them they must have taken a wrong turn, because racing is a white man's sport. Cloyd Nightingale, 46, turns to his friend Johnny Hill, 52, and they bust out laughing. "It's a white man's sport," Nightingale repeats to his friend. They're both truck drivers from Memphis, Tenn., and big race fans. "The flags don't bother us," says Hill. "It's not like the world is any different here than it is at home, in school, at the office." Says Nightingale: "Tell them black people love racing too."
So what's not to like about Jeff Gordon? "He kind of looks gay," says Doris O'Bryant while selling $10 Fans Against Gordon T shirts outside the Talladega racetrack. The acronym is like something of an inside joke, and one suspects the wink it produces leads to an inevitable flatulence joke or two.
The T shirt has a little sketch of Gordon's car upside down and the words THE WAY IT SHOULD BE. Just up the road, Doris' husband Todd is making a sale to a Missouri man who says, "He's a little cocky, but he's from the north."
And that is clearly a big part of it. NASCAR didn't go national until a Yankee became its star, and resentment is the breeze that keeps those rebel flags flying. "I'm not one of those redneck hillbillies," Todd O'Bryant says. "I just think Gordon needs to be a little more down to earth."
The object of this scorn walks into his trailer, where I'm waiting to put a magnifying glass on him, and says, "Hey, what's up?" in a slight Midwestern drawl. Gordon grew up in California, but his parents moved him to Indiana at 14 because he'd been racing midget cars since he was a five-year-old, and there was more action in Indiana.
I tell him I saw people selling Fans Against Gordon T shirts outside the stadium and stopped to talk to them, and he's curious to hear what they had to say. All the usual stuff, I tell him. He's too pretty for NASCAR. He's from the north. He's rich. He always wins. He married a gorgeous woman. If there is a more American urge than to want everything, it's to take down the guy who gets it. "All I can do is try to earn their respect by being who I am and doing what I do," Gordon says.
Good Lord, I want to grab this kid and shake him, mess up his hair, maybe get him to take up cussing. He admits, in the course of 90 minutes of insufferable evenhandedness, that the pressure, obligations and spotlight are overwhelming. "But if you had said, 'Hey, you're never going to have a personal life; you're constantly going to be traveling...talking to sponsors and signing autographs every day for the rest of your career,' I think I'd still say, 'O.K., I'll take it.'"