Pining for Labor Day isn't way to honor Southern 500

In downtown Darlington, S.C., there's a little brick-lined alleyway where the hand prints of many past winners of the Southern 500 are cast in concrete. It's nothing fancy, just a place where a race fan can snap a few photos, or an employee over at the nearby county courthouse can enjoy lunch outside on a pretty day. But it says something about how much one race track -- or, to be more specific, one event -- means to a farming town where even the sides of police cars sport checkered flags.

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The Southern 500 returns to Darlington Raceway this weekend, an unlikely and somewhat unexpected revival given that the race was shuffled off the schedule following the 2004 season. The grand dame of NASCAR races was the sport's first 500-miler, was the first event on a paved race track, was bigger than even the Daytona 500 until the track that hosted it began to fall into disrepair. The Southern 500 was as much as part of Darlington's fiber as cotton fields and tobacco leaves, such a presence that the raceway's former shareholders once believed they could live off the event's reputation alone. Even during the track's tough years, and there were plenty of them, any thought of the Southern 500 being eliminated seemed as far-fetched as aliens from outer space landing in the middle of the town square.

And yet, when NASCAR and International Speedway Corp. realigned the schedule in advance of the 2005 season, the Southern 500 was nowhere to be found. Darlington had a contract with Dodge, backers of the track's spring race, and officials chose to honor it. So when the inevitable finally happened, and one of Darlington's annual events was shipped elsewhere -- to Phoenix, in this case -- more than a half-century of NASCAR tradition stunningly went with it.

To the folks in Darlington, it was like a death in the family. No question the track's former spring race was a big deal, another big economic generator, an event weekend that sold out local hotels and packed Red Bone Alley on Friday and Saturday night. But the Southern 500 was Darlington. That was the race that brought out all the festivals, that felt more like a family picnic than a major sporting event, that provided the town with an identity. The Dodge Dealers 400 could be anywhere. The Southern 500 was at one place and one place only, and anyone who had ever been within earshot of a race car engine knew where. It was a fact that set Darlington apart from the countless other small towns like it in the region, and from the farmer's market to the cottonseed oil plant it filled locals with an unmistakable sense of pride. (Continued)