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Sunday Money: Speed! Lust! Madness! Death! A Hot Lap Around America with NASCAR
by Jeff MacGregor
HarperCollins (cover: $25.95; Amazon: $17.13)

Sportswriters have long found readers fascinated by disquisitions on various sports and the cultures that grow up around them. Perhaps originating from George Plimpton's 1964 "Paper Lion," in which the most famous jock wannabe gave us an insider's view of professional football, the genre has taken on some worthy and riveting subjects.


It's also taken off like reality TV. Whether the topic is the cult of prep football (Bissinger's "Friday Night Lights"), the hyping of high school hoops (Frey's "The Last Shot"), or the cutting edge of baseball management (Lewis' "Moneyball"), we are endlessly curious about the inner workings of the sports we follow and how those sports reflect back on us.

In "Sunday Money," Jeff MacGregor has tried to pull off a similar documentary-style feat -- and with an equally deserving and compelling topic, NASCAR racing. But while the ride the author takes us on is a whirlwind of keen and often hilarious observations, MacGregor ends up braking too often to rubberneck at scenes unrelated and irrelevant to his primary destination.

The promise of "Sunday Money" is tantalizing. Just what is the allure of NASCAR? I want to know. What is the purpose of driving 500 laps or miles or whatever, when races might hold one's attention longer if they were shorter? And how is it that today's stock-car drivers, maybe one or two generations away from hill-country shade-tree mechanics, are suddenly Madison Avenue sexpots calling themselves athletes? Who are these fans, swooning over the Dukes-of-Hazzard, good-ole-boy jive of drivers who in reality belong less to the ranks of the modern Confederacy than to the upper echelons of corporate shillery? And, finally, how is it that the dead Dale Earnhardt so quickly displaced the dead Elvis Presley as the favorite son of Deep-South sentimentalists? Really, I want to know.

To some degree, MacGregor knows what his readers want -- at least part of it anyway. And he delivers in spades the snarky assessment we crave of some of the dumber aspects of NASCAR and the characters who inhabit this exhaust-fogged, burnt-rubber-scented "sport." For instance, he takes a closer look at the "bad math" that "explains" how NASCAR has become America's #2 sport. And he nails the looks and manners of several of racing's demigods -- for instance, describing Richard Petty this way: "Richard Petty is a set of teeth coming at you. Big white teeth." And MacGregor is spot-on in portraying the women who prance through the teams' garage, called "Pit Lizards," naked in their ambition to attract the attention of someone, anyone rich. Also, he captures the very tedium even fans feel in watching just one entire race, let alone closely following NASCAR's stultifyingly long season.

Thing is, while apt, entertaining and sometimes even literary in his essayistic appraisals, these NASCAR snapshots have a way of ending up more like murals. They just take up too much space. MacGregor's physical description of Petty expands over two pages. Another two he spends sizing up a singular female race fan, an aging Dolly-Parton-type bleach blond, who may have been glamorous 30 years ago deep in the backwoods of Tennessee, but who now only seems a worn-out caricature. Throughout "Sunday Money," MacGregor literally has to interrupt his own reveries about his NASCAR-trailing travels and his and his wife's trevails in owning a motorhome to tell us, in stingy McNugget-sized bites, the history of NASCAR racing. It's hard to think a writer could go overboard in describing the excesses of NASCAR, but MacGregor's exuberance spills onto whatever is in his sights, which in "Sunday Money" isn't limited to the subject at hand. The book seems more like a thinly-veiled paean to Tom Wolfe's hyper-caffeinated style than an insightful and amusing ethnography of a season at the races.

Which is exactly why I still don't know whether races consist of laps or miles or whatever. And why I'm still clueless about how the Cup championship points system works (or, I gather from additional reading, why it doesn't). Further, the dust jacket promises profiles of the lives of drivers -- but here we really do get only snapshots. For example, MacGregor skulks around Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s garage stall as well as his hometown, waiting for a Junior sighting, but he never gets anywhere. This may be because, as he admits early on, he doesn't have the Super-Sized Credentials that would get him into the main Media Centers; he sports creds that allow him to gather only "literary color." Nor do the drivers, who have second full-time jobs as Fortune 500 face men, seem inclined to do yet another interview. Most frustratingly, this book is basically three years old: MacGregor has followed the 2002 season, and updates some of the changes in the interim with one- to two-sentence quick hits in his epilogue. I might as well pluck "Ball Four" off the shelf again to see what today's MLB is all about.

MacGregor really is telling us the truth in the first chapter when he writes, "This is a book about our year on the road, my wife and me, chasing NASCAR. In a motorhome." NASCAR is only part of the picture. Readers aren't introduced to team owners until page 96, and for the most part these heavies disappear, never to be seen nor heard from again. MacGregor mentions drivers early on, but they don't see the spotlight until owners exit stage-right. And because MacGregor's mostly following his own capricious and wandering reactions throughout, we don't get a fully-blown narrative sense of any of the drivers or their teams or the season. Only a snapshot of Daytona or Talladega here, a portrait-in-miniature of Tony Stewart there, then MacGregor and his wife manuever their unwieldy teal moho "Homer" on the road again.

What I missed most here, though, was a deeper look inside NASCAR fandom. MacGregor points out that NASCAR fans are attracted to the sort of old-school, spit-in-yer-eye Southern whiskey-runner ideal that went out of fashion in the 1970s. But he doesn't dig in to find out why they cling so tightly to this long-dead cultural icon. Are stock-car racing fans like middle-aged white men who still rock out to "Stairway to Heaven" and "Thunderstruck"? Holding on to a white-shrouded past they've known long enough now to finally feel comfortable with? Afraid of change, and thus terrified by a contemporary and, shall we say, more colorful pop culture? I want to know who these people are and why they are the way they are. NASCAR nation has come to be known by a different descriptor in another arena of American life -- as Red-Staters, and MacGregor had a perfect opportunity to decode for us at least one perhaps telling aspect of their values -- why they prefer this particular and particularizing sporting entertainment. Instead the author seems satisfied by what his eyes tell him, not all that unlike casual fans who are mesmerized by the dazzling colors of a racecar, but haven't got the sustained curiosity to check out what's under the hood.

Usually I finish books in this genre feeling like an insider and wanting to look firsthand into whatever subject I'd witnessed only vicariously through reading. With "Sunday Money," though, I found myself wanting to know more simply because, for all its bloated musings, the book didn't provide ample substance. Reading MacGregor's flights of fancy was like gorging myself on candy-store treats when what I was really in the mood for was a light lunch.