I Won’t Miss Tobacco’s Presence In NASCAR
The memories of the days when tobacco sponsored NASCAR’s top series remain strong. But good memories, they are not.
My eyes teared up and my nostrils flared the first time I walked into a media room at a Winston Cup race. And not because I was sad or angry.
The cigarette smoke in the room was as thick as Bill Elliott’s accent. It was corner-bar dense.
This was during a time when the harmful effects of the stuff were well-known and widely publicized. People knew in those days that smoking cigarettes could kill you and that merely inhaling the poison from other people’s cigarettes could shorten and destroy your own life.
So, by the time I covered my first race, restaurants, for example, were beginning to segregate smokers. Non-smokers in other places were becoming increasingly militant when it came to asking puffers to snuff their butts.
But in Cup media centers, none of that was an option. Not in a sport which was receiving millions of dollars annually from R.J. Reynolds.
Not only was smoking permitted, it was encouraged at tracks. Tobacco company reps would come through and hand out cartons of cigarettes to the media. Open cases of the things were left lying around the media rooms.
I bring all this up because at the end of this month, tobacco and racing will part ways for good. New rules by the FDA prevent even smokeless tobacco from sponsoring cars in NASCAR.
Some consider all this an infringement upon their rights. Some say the government should not be in the business of telling people they cannot have bad habits.
And me, I really liked the people I knew/still know from RJR. In many ways those were the golden days of NASCAR.
But the political indignation I feel, and great memories of Winston Cup I harbor, go up in smoke when I remember the last time I saw my mother. A smoker in her earlier days, her final days were spent curled up in a ball in hospital room hooked up to machines that performed the functions her lungs no longer could.
No, I won’t be mourning tobacco’s death in racing. Just my mother’s in life.
June 7th, sportingnews.com