A chance to return to your roots

By Jim Huber, Turner Sports Interactive
April 10, 2001
12:16 PM EDT (1616 GMT)

NASCAR doesn't give its people many weekends off during the season.

Jim Huber

From start to finish, it's one of the most grueling endurance races of any sport. And so when there comes a gap in the schedule, you can bet these men (and women) take great advantage.

Some of them.

There is one of those blips on the racing radar screen the second weekend in May.

So what will Steve Park be doing? Playing a little golf? Swinging in the backyard hammock?

Sleeping 20 hours a day to put back some of the lost rest, rejuvenating his beat-up body for the long, hot summer stretch run?

Steve Park will be racing during his Easter break.

Nope. Steve Park will be going racing. At the CVS Pharmacy Grand National at New Hampshire International Speedway.

He is, of course, a former standout in that region and a mainstay of the Busch Series, so it's a bit like going home for him.

"It'll be a vacation," he told one writer. "It's nice to have some time off to spend some time with the fans and say hello to old friends and drivers who helped me along early in my career."

Being rather new to this sport, I suppose this happens quite a bit. But I'm betting not as much as it once did, years ago, when purses were thin and a man had to run every night of the week, it seemed, to make a living.

One of my fondest early memories of stock-car racing was a Friday night in a Miami suburb on the edge of the Everglades. The track was dirt, the walls were topped with chicken wire, and there was Fonty Flock and the Allison boys and a dozen more of the top names in the sport, running like there was no tomorrow.

It wasn't Daytona. It wasn't Darlington. It wasn't bright lights. Back then, Miami wasn't big city. But they were there: battling, treating the fans to a rare and wonderful sight.

It is a wonderful thing when a man who has made it -- a Gordon, an Elliott, a Petty or Park -- returns to his roots, giving back to those who cheered him when he was just a struggling kid.

Might be nice if there were more gaps in the Big Boys' schedule to allow just such returns on investment.

Jim Huber's column appears every Tuesday on NASCAR.com. The opinions listed here are solely those of the writer.