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.

The loss of the Southern 500 crushed Darlington, the news landing with the dull thud of a plant closing or a bad harvest. It filled everyone with a sense of gloom, left them bracing for the loss of the race track itself. Instead, incredible things happened. Lights. A new grandstand. A string of sellouts. Suddenly, for the first time in decades, the raceway's future seemed something other than uncertain. Track president Chris Browning took advantage, quietly asking series officials and industry insiders about the prospect of bringing back the one race name, the only race name, that had ever really meant anything in Darlington. He got the answers he wanted. The Dodge contract expired. And now the Southern 500 is back, and Darlington Raceway -- and the town that surrounds it -- are whole once again.

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"People were just ecstatic," Browning said of the reaction in Darlington, "because they understood what that name meant, and the heritage of that name, and what all it encompasses."

So please, spare me the complaints. No, the race isn't on Labor Day weekend, which the Southern 500 occupied from its founding in 1950 until California was handed that schedule slot prior to the 2004 season. It absolutely does not matter. The fact that so many people seem fixated on an arbitrary calendar spot, blind to the joy this revived race name provides to so many people, is beyond ridiculous. It's selfish. It's as if some NASCAR fans want everything their way, and if they can't have it, they dismiss it entirely out of hand. They forget that virtually all relationships -- husband to wife, president to prime minister, sports fan to sports league, owner to dog -- require some degree of compromise, and compromise means giving something up to get something else. In this case, that means giving up a certain weekend to get a revived Southern 500 at a revamped Darlington.

But that's not good enough, so they're going to sit in a corner and pout. Rather than complaining about the date, race fans might want to notice the millions of capital improvement dollars that parent company ISC has showered on Darlington, making an old, beloved race track viable again. They might want to see that Darlington is doing everything in its power to pay tribute to a past many think the sport has forgotten -- from bringing back the Southern 500 race name, to painting the track walls retro red and white again, to unveiling a Johnny Mantz trophy named after the first Southern 500 champion and featuring images of other past Darlington winners. They might want to realize that the renaissance of this once near-obsolete facility is one of the best things happening in NASCAR today.

No, instead they're going to pine for the days when the temperature was 100 degrees, and it rained every other year, and the grandstands were three-quarters full, and it was hard to determine which was worse -- the tropical storm warnings, the sunburn, or the gnats. They're going to get hung up on the one thing Darlington has lost rather than celebrate all it's gained.

"In a perfect world, we would be on Labor Day with the Southern 500. Heck, in a perfect world it never would have left. But it's not a perfect world," Browning said. The Labor Day experiment in California was a flop. Now, it's Atlanta's turn. Given that Darlington has defied so many grave expectations, it's not outside the realm of possibility that Labor Day might be one day be returned to its ancestral home, a place many people strongly believe it rightly belongs.

But this week, that shouldn't matter. A yearning for a reunion of Labor Day and Darlington shouldn't undercut the laudable steps the track has made to merge its promising future with its glorious past. It shouldn't overshadow the happiness that locals feel about getting back a race name they've long considered their own. The Southern 500 has been strong enough to defy many of the greatest drivers in history. It's been strong enough to defy NASCAR schedule realignment. It's strong enough to defy the calendar, as well.

The opinions expressed are solely of the writer.