Boston emerging as capital city in Northeast for sport

The racetrack may be 70 miles away in a small town in New Hampshire, but for NASCAR this weekend is really all about the home of Beacon Hill and the Old Post Road. Boston offers a locale both rewarding and challenging -- the most sports-mad city in America, but one where the vast majority of that fervor is reserved for the Patriots and Red Sox. Virtually everything else, even a successful intercollegiate program like Boston College, is an afterthought.

In that atmosphere, what chance does the Nextel Cup circuit have? How can NASCAR compete with Big Papi and the Green Monster and the latest on Tom and Gisele? How is it possible for stock-car racing to find footing in a region that, on the day the race weekend at New Hampshire was set to begin, seemed much more concerned with the moves the once-great Celtics made in Thursday night's NBA Draft?

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Yet of all the great cities of the Northeast, those that NASCAR has worked for decades to try and capture, Boston stands as the one where the sport seems most capable of gaining traction. The right combination of factors -- from geography to history to local support -- exist for the Massachusetts capital to emerge as the one city in the region where NASCAR can stand, if not on equal footing with the major-league stick-and-ball sports, but at least on more of an equal footing than it does anywhere else.

Oh, you can hear them guffawing at that one in the box seats at Fenway. Boston is a city that lives, eats, breathes and dies all things Red Sox, and to a lesser extent the Patriots, and shakes its collective head over what's become of the Celtics and Bruins. And NASCAR is going to crack that little cabal? This in a state where the sport's premier series has competed exactly once, in a 1961 event won by the legendary Emanuel Zervakis, at a Norwood track that's now part of an industrial park?

Maybe. Yes, pro team sports have a grip on Boston more firm than in any other big city in America. But for years, the city's two major newspapers have regularly staffed several NASCAR events a year, not just those in New Hampshire. Nextel Cup races in the region are broadcast not by a country music radio station, as they are in so many other parts of the nation -- a surefire way to prevent the casual sports fan from ever discovering them by accident -- but on an all-sports station, just as they should be.

The recent merger between Roush Racing and the Fenway Sports Group promises to give NASCAR more of a presence among one of the most dedicated fan bases in all of sports, an effort which began in earnest Friday when Nextel Cup drivers threw out first pitches before a Red Sox game, and continues Sunday when Carl Edwards wheels a Red Sox car. There's the track itself, closer to Boston than Dover is to Baltimore, Richmond is to Washington, Pocono is to Philadelphia, or Watkins Glen is to New York. The 91,000-seat facility is sold out for the 25th consecutive time dating back to its inaugural NASCAR weekend in 1993.

Those people have to come from somewhere, and they come from a part of the country that has long known and loved racing. Boston is the hub of a New England region with racing roots stretching back decades, through a myriad of short tracks that have produced scores of late model and modified drivers. There are places like Oxford Plains Speedway in Maine, which hosted NASCAR's big show three times, saw Richard Petty celebrate in Victory Lane, and is still around today. So is Thompson International Speedway in Connecticut, where David Pearson and Bobby Isaac once took checkered flags.

Short-track activity abounds in Connecticut. NASCAR's Busch East and Whelen Modified regional touring circuits make regular stops in the area. Nextel Cup drivers have sprung from places like Maine (Ricky Craven) and Vermont (Kevin Lepage). Crew chiefs have come from Berlin, Conn. (Greg Zipadelli), Boylston, Mass. (Kevin Manion) and Portland, Maine (Steve Letarte). Joey Logano, the most promising up-and-coming driver in stock-car racing, hails from Middletown, Conn.

All this not in Boston itself, but in the sprawling backward of a city intrinsically linked to the rest of New England. That's not to say that No. 24 stickers will start appearing on car windows from Southie to Hyde Park, or that Dale Earnhardt Jr. will be spoken about as routinely as Robert Parish or Raymond Borque. But NASCAR seems to have a foot in the door here, more so than anywhere else in the Northeast. Besides, you'd think a city that witnessed a down-three-games-to-none comeback in the 2004 American League Championship Series would believe anything is possible.