I grew up with a father who couldn’t be pried from the TV every Sunday, sometimes Saturdays for the Busch races, too. So, naturally, I hated NASCAR. Everything about it. The kneejerk taunts of redneck ridicule were easy for me to saddle up to as well.
But really, the older I got the more boring anti-NASCAR sentiment became. Generally it’s ignorant prejudice, if we’re being honest, and even though I probably haven’t watched a race beginning to end since the one I attended at Bristol in the late-1980s, I every now and then get the urge to stick up for what is nevertheless one of the most popular sports in the world.
With that in mind, I sort of delighted in reading Jenna Fryer’s AP story on the 20th anniversary of Tony Scott’s “Days of Thunder,” a film I must confess to loving. Robert Duvall’s minute or two soliloquy to a parked car is, seriously, top notch stuff in my book. Fryer makes early points about how the film reflected a number of real events but later explains an exaggeration of bump and grind on the track turned off a great many.