ShareThisBy MIKE MULHERN
Winston-Salem Journal
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Humpy Wheeler, as the NASCAR promoter who once _ long, long ago, fortunately _ had to handle a near riot at Lowe's Motor Speedway when a pre-race Waylon Jennings concert went south on him. He has learned how to deal with massive, sometimes volatile crowds.
So Wheeler, who manages Lowe's Motor Speedway and Bruton Smith's Speedway Motorsports, can commiserate with Talladega Speedway's Grant Lynch.
But Wheeler considers Sunday's ugly beer can-throwing reaction to Jeff Gordon's victory at Talladega an aberration.
Lynch said he's determined to keep it an aberration.
"I'm going to send the names and addresses to all the track presidents across the country of the 12 individuals (caught throwing beer cans) _ six were from Alabama and six were from out of state _ and ask them to ban them from purchasing tickets at their tracks as well as ours," Lynch said. "Certainly we should get good participation, because everyone understands the seriousness of the situation. Plus, these aren't fans you'd want in your stadium anyway.
"Second, I'm looking into the legal issues of banning them from even walking on our property, period. Plus, I've got our legal team researching this issue to see if we can up the crime (of throwing debris on the track) from misdemeanor to something of a felony nature. I want to put something out there with a little more teeth _ so the punishment fits the crime."
Lynch said it's about more than Talladega, Ala., or his track.
"It's just bad for the sport," Lynch said. "And I wish there were an answer like, 'Wow!' and it just stops.
"There has been talk about putting up bigger nets, like foul-ball nets at baseball parks. But that would just be a challenge, an enticement to see who has a better arm. Still, what we saw Sunday pales in comparison to what we saw three years ago, when there were just buckets thrown. Maybe the statements we made and Dale Jr. made up-front before the race helped.
"And I'm going through our video files to find races where Dale Sr. got beat to the line and nothing happened. So why should this (ugly behavior) be acceptable to some fans now? But I can't put all this on the Junior Nation. Hey, these (12) guys may not even have a favorite driver."
For Doug Fritz, who runs Richmond International Raceway, the issue is more immediate. The Nextel Cup tour is at his place this weekend.
"That was unfortunate that a few unruly fans ruined it for a lot of fans," Fritz said. "We have Henrico police officers, and we'll have adequate security on hand, so if anything happens we can react immediately.
"We're no different than any other professional sport, the NFL, the NBA, Major League Baseball: It's illegal to throw substances on the playing field. It's a crime, and we'll prosecute to the fullest extent of the law."
Dealing with unruly crowds is nothing new for racing promoters, be it short-track Saturday nights or big-league Sunday afternoons.
"There are several answers to it ... and we've got our races coming here at Lowe's, and the one that concerns us more than any is the All-Star race, because it can be pretty wild and woolly," Wheeler said.
"But what we've done here to stop it is we've put a security person every 200 feet facing the grandstand and looking up in the crowd, looking for unruly behavior. And since we started doing that, I can't recall an incident we've had.
"Second, in North Carolina the General Assembly enacted legislation back in the 1970s that makes it a misdemeanor to throw anything on a track.
"We also have a high-response security team that, if we get a report of somebody throwing stuff and we can identify the people, we can go right to them and remove them. These guys are all tactically trained, either policemen or former policemen or military trained in SWAT-type, high-response operations.
"Obviously, this is a problem which if it continues could lead to some long-term ramifications. Hopefully it won't."
One way that tracks have moderated the problem of unruly fans, particularly in the infield, is simple _ raise the price of admission. Another has been to limit the number of beverage cans any fan can bring into the track.
"We've had this (bad behavior) before, in the '60s and '70s," Wheeler said. "But once you make people understand there will be really, really serious recriminations, the race fans usually do a good job of policing it themselves. Race fans are really good about telling on people when they're not acting right. That's a good thing. And people know that, and that keeps them calmed down.
"The worst thing that can happen to a race fan is to be thrown out of a track. When they get unruly and you remove them, they go berserk, because they want to see the rest of the race. However, most of this stuff happens at the end of the race, so you don't have that deterrent.
"But the deterrent is that where there are laws passed, you can haul them off to jail. Handcuff them and take them out."
Wheeler said again that it has been a long time since LMS has had any fan-related incidents, but ...
"I remember that concert....and that was the last real incident like that. And that was a mistake I made _ mixing good ol' Southern boys and outlaw bikers. That was like water and oil. I couldn't have thrown dynamite in a fire and got a more volatile mixture. And I don't intend to make that mistake again."
Wheeler said he has installed television monitors.
"We have them in the control tower, and we're watching people all the time," Wheeler said. "We don't have them in every single place, but we have them where if someone is throwing cans we'll see them.
"But I'm not only concerned about here, but about Atlanta and Bristol, too, and those other tracks, too. Bristol and Richmond and Martinsville are almost made for bottle-throwing, because the fans are so close to the track. But I don't recall anything lately at Bristol _ though Richmond has had some pretty wild things happen. But those fans are pretty well behaved.
"Different places have different fans. The situation at Talladega just isn't repeated anywhere else. It's the legacy of Senior (Dale Earnhardt Sr.) and the popularity of Junior. It is so pro-Earnhardt."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
