Eclipse

Years back, in the before time, it was appointment viewing for me. Come a certain Saturday night in August, I'd flip on the TV, settle onto the couch, and watch the boys go around and around that infernal bullring. Or I'd head out to a favorite sports bar, knowing it would be on every big screen.

Around and around they'd go. Sometimes they'd run into each other. Sometimes they'd shake their fists and cuss after running into each other. Once one of them actually pulled an automotive head butt on the last lap, punting the winning driver sideways beneath the checkers.
The headbutt-er was Dale Earnhardt. The headbutt-ee was Terry Labonte. And it was pretty much the definitive Bristol night race moment.

Now?

Now I had to look up who won the Bristol night race on Sunday morning, on account of I forgot about it. Pretty much the way I forget about NASCAR as a whole five minutes after the checkers fly in the Daytona 500.

This may be just me, mind you. I was never more than a cursory NASCAR fan to begin with; IndyCar stole my heart as a kid, and it still owns it.  It's better racing, for one thing. It's better racing even when Takuma Sato goes full nitwit and wrecks a whole pile of drivers on the first lap of a 500-mile race, the way he did Sunday at Pocono.

IndyCar was already thinking of dumping Pocono, despite the fact it's one of IndyCar's oldest venues. This likely will only push the series closer to doing that -- even though being an idiot, the way Sato was Sunday, is not a condition that's ever been tied to geography.

But I digress.

("Yes, you are," you're saying. "Constantly.")

The topic here is not IndyCar, but NASCAR, and in particular the Bristol night race. It indeed might be just me, forgetting about it, but it might not. Apparently it's disappeared from a lot of radars in the 15 or 20 years.

Word on the street is NASCAR's having a hard time selling it out these days, just like NASCAR is having a hard time selling out every Cup event. Swaths of empty seats dot every race on the schedule now. The Brickyard 400, once one of the NASCAR crown jewels, has gone from crowds of 250,000 to maybe 50,000 and a whole lot of crickets. And where once the Bristol night race was the toughest ticket in American motorsports ...

Well. Not so much now. It's not even appointment viewing for some of us anymore.

Which is why it was Sunday morning before I found out Denny Hamlin won the Bristol night race Saturday, passing Matt DiBenedetto with a handful of laps remaining just when it looked as if DiBenedetto, who found out earlier in the week he was losing his ride, was about to notch his first Cup win.

Hamlin apologized to him for that afterward. There is no record of Earnhardt doing the same after head-butting Labonte across the finish line on that night years ago.

Hmm. Maybe Bristol needs more of that. A thought.