If you haven't had the opportunity to meet Eddie Gossage yet, don't worry. Sooner or later, he'll get around to saying hello.

If it seems like the president of Texas Motor Speedway knows everybody and anybody, that may not be far from the truth. I met Gossage and his wife in the infield media center at Charlotte Motor Speedway last month, and during the entire 45 minutes of our conversation, he waved and spoke to other members of the media, dignitaries and well-wishers that passed by. And yet, he remained engaged and never seemed to lose track of his train of thought.

This is not only Eddie Gossage's job, but it's his passion. And Gossage may be the best in the business at having his finger on the pulse of the sport, making intelligent business decisions based on a combination of decades of experience, an innate knack for knowing what can or cannot work, plus a circus ringmaster's flair for the dramatic.

Not long ago, there was an advertising campaign for a brokerage firm based around the idea that "when E.F. Hutton talks, people listen." Gossage believes the inverse to be true. A thoughtful, soft-spoken man, Gossage realizes part of the secret to his success comes more from listening than talking.

"I can tell you that I read every e-mail our website gets," Gossage said. "And I respond to the ones that move me, whether that's a great compliment or they really pissed me off and I want to set them straight. And a bunch of others are handled by other folks, but I've read them. To me, it's important to keep your finger on the pulse."

Keeping a close eye on the business of racing is something he's been doing for three decades in motorsports. A native of Nashville, Tenn., Gossage graduated from Middle Tennessee State with a journalism degree. But he decided to get a real job instead, as public relations director for Nashville International Raceway.

"This is 31 seasons for me," Gossage said. "I used to type a press release into a stencil and correct it with a little fingernail polish fluid and put it on the machine and print them off. I used to have calluses on my fingers from folding press releases. That's how you did it, with a few phone calls here and there. It was real basic and simple."

One year later, he was transferred to Bristol. And in 1983, he was hired by the Miller Brewing Company to handle their motorsports public relations. Eventually, he wound up as vice president of public relations for Charlotte Motor Speedway, where he worked under the tutelage of Bruton Smith.

"He is the champion of the regular guy," Gossage said of his mentor. "Really, people don't think of him in that way. Whatever we're talking about, it's always, 'Well, what are you doing for me? I grew up in Oakwood, N.C. What are you doing for a guy like me?' So we've got a $20 reserved seat. He's always thinking, 'What am I going to eat when I come to the races? How much is that going to cost?' And we'll talk about that.

"If you think about it, he was promoting before NASCAR was formed. He knows all of the tricks. He's been just a great mentor, an inspiration and a friend. There are a couple of other guys I know that are about his same age -- Don Carter, who started the Dallas Mavericks -- and I'll go have lunch with him every now and then. If you just listen, they've got 83, 84 years of life experiences to pull from."

Gossage shares a number of traits with Smith, and one of those is the ability to connect with the common man. He believes that's a product of his childhood.

"My dad loaded boxcars for a living at a packinghouse," Gossage said. "We didn't have any money growing up. We had a great life, but I was a fan who bought the cheap seats and sat on the front row at the racetrack. I still have that in me, and I feel like that's been a great advantage to me, professionally, to be the guy who had to scrimp and save or maybe sneak in to the races, or else I wasn't going to get to go.

"But as you get older and get more years down the road, it's harder to stay in touch like that. That's why I talk to the fans, listen to them. One of the coolest things to me on a race weekend is go out into the stands and talk with people. If you'll listen, they'll tell you what they like and what they don't like, and what they're willing to spend their money on."

But with the growth of new media and social networks, like the rest of the industry, Gossage is scrambling to keep pace.

"It's all the more confusing right now because of the changing media," Gossage said. "One of the problems NASCAR has, in my book, is the demise of traditional media. As a sports fan, where do you get your sports news? You get it from the sports page, the evening news, SportsCenter, dot-coms, and increasingly the Twitters and the Facebooks. You're always trying to find out what's 'the next thing.'

"A newspaper is less significant today than it was a year ago. It's hard to know. It's almost as if the public has become ADD, there's so much out there, nothing has their attention."

Gossage was one of the first promoters in NASCAR to see the value of social media.

"Today, we've got a social media person who is posting stuff on the various social media platforms, a lot of which I don't know what they are," Gossage said. "She was showing me things the other day -- some of these sites I don't know what they are -- and we've got a huge following on them.

"The newspaper world has changed so much in the last five years. The whole thing has changed for NASCAR, and that's part of the reason we're having a hard time breaking through, because the pie is sliced into so many smaller pieces now. And the traditional areas -- which some people certainly still use to get their information -- they're not covering us like they did."

And in a market that includes the Dallas Cowboys, the Texas Rangers, the Dallas Stars and the Dallas Mavericks, not to mention huge fanbases for college and high school football, a couple of PGA tour events, horse racing and niche sports, Gossage has his work cut out for him when reaching out to potential customers.

"Take the Cowboys, for example," Gossage said. "They've got 65 players, coaches and Jerry Jones. And they're there most of the year. The Cup drivers are in Dallas-Fort Worth six days a year. That's 359 days a year they're not there. So it is a struggle."

So how does Gossage fight through the clutter?

"Because there are so many different mediums to use to reach [potential customers], we've got to have a way to directly speak to our fans," Gossage said. "We don't do anything unless there's a data collection onto it. Our show car program -- I don't think another track has one -- before you play a video game, before you get a poster, you have to fill out a little card that gives us your data. We want a way to shoot an e-mail to you, and we do between 150 or 200 a year to talk to our fans.

"You can't trust the newspaper [to cover the sport] because their space has gotten more and more limited as the paper's gotten smaller. And as we've seen, they're not going to cut back on Cowboys coverage or the Rangers in the playoffs. So if this percentage is using Facebook and this percentage gets their information from Twitter, we've got to be in all those places. But the easiest way to do it is to shoot you an e-mail."

For a man who makes his living out of creating catch phrases, Gossage has coined his own: "If we don't make a big deal out of it, nobody else will."

It's a message he hammers home to his staff every day.

"Why would I expect a reporter or an editor to say, 'This is a front-page story,' if we don't make a big deal out of it?" Gossage asked. "So we have to make a big deal out of it. Everything has to be the Super Bowl. So the staff knows that one. It's burned into their minds."

And Gossage is as good as anybody else in the business when it comes to off-the-wall promotions. Monkeys selling race programs? Check. Pretty girls and hot rods to play up the idea of "No Limits?" Check. But that's only a small fraction of his day-to-day responsibilities.

"There are tricks, and I don't know any new tricks anymore, so we just recycle the old ones and try to disguise them," Gossage said. "To me, that's the fun part of the job -- the creative side of it. People don't realize it. They think of me as this promoter guy.

"But that's maybe about 3 percent of the time. The rest of the time, I'm running the business that has to deal with politics and laws and contracts and staff. Just regular management things. Particularly as a public company, I'll bet 97 percent of my time is spent on the minutiae of running a business. Whether that's running a race track or any other business, I'll bet that's the same."

Still, there's a fire that kindles Gossage's eyes when he talks about why he loves being a promoter.

"Promoting is a 365-day-a-year job," Gossage said. "It's not something you can do two, three, four weeks before a race. It's something you have to do all the time. I go out to the driveway, pick up the paper and every story I see, I try to find an angle for us."

And what sets Gossage apart is his ability to turn thoughts into actions. Consider this brainstorm:

"At the Cotton Bowl, the big game of the year is the Red River Rivalry: Texas-Oklahoma," Gossage said. "They were talking about how the Cotton Bowl has fallen into disrepair, the neighborhood is bad, blah blah blah. And before I got back to the door to go into the house, I thought, 'They need to play that game at Texas Motor Speedway.'

"I get to work, get everybody together real quick and explain to them, and by that afternoon there's a football field painted in the grass between the front stretch and pit road. And Texas and OU helmets sitting on my desk. One of the schools was very interested. The other school was really hacked off. And we got a few days worth of publicity out of it."

Gossage had similar success when he talked up hosting a possible heavyweight showdown between Lennox Lewis and Mike Tyson a few years ago.

"We pulled the plug because I'm not about to pay $30 million for a boxing match," Gossage said. "But you can't do that very often because you've got to be believable, so some of them have to come true.

"We've held the largest music festival in the history of this country, bigger than Woodstock. Four hundred thousand kids in one day. Worst day of my life but you've got to deliver some of those or else you don't have any credibility."

And credibility is critically important to Gossage, particularly in today's economy. He's a pragmatist when it comes to looking at the issues facing NASCAR and motorsports right now.

"We didn't get in this position overnight," Gossage said. "It took years. And so many different things have happened to make that ship turn that direction. It's going to take the same amount of time and the same effort to get turned back.

"I'm a regular critic of NASCAR and rightfully so. But if I was running NASCAR, I don't know what I'd suggest they do that they haven't done this year. The 'have at it, boys' is a very important thing. They're doing all the right things."

If not the economy, then what else is causing the trend downward? Gossage had a surprising response.

"We are finally feeling the effects of losing Dale Earnhardt," Gossage said. "I don't think anybody's really thought of it that way, but people immediately jumped on the Junior ship. And for a few years, Junior carried the responsibility and the burden of it. You think about it, Junior's won 18, 19 races. There are drivers that are going to be in the Hall of Fame that haven't won 18 or 19 races. But he hasn't sustained that.

"So those people who jumped from Senior to Junior -- at first they were like, 'Yeah, he's winning races.' And then he stopped being so successful and it was, 'We're hanging on, we're hanging on. But I'm not as interested as I used to be.' So instead of feeling the effects of Dale's passing in 2002 or 2003, we're feeling it in 2009 and 2010."

Perhaps Gossage's biggest pet peeve is how the perception of the sport doesn't match the reality of what's happening on the track.

"The perception is that the racing isn't very good and it's not like the good old days, and all that kind of stuff," Gossage said. "We all tend to romanticize the old days, but when Terry Labonte retired back in 2006 or 2007, we had a big ceremony for him and gave him a pickup truck.

"I remember when Terry burst on the scene at Darlington and finished fourth or something in his first race. And I've been a huge Terry Labonte fan ever since. I get to looking at all the records and stuff. Well, he finished fourth, like seven laps down. If you had a guy finishing fourth, seven laps down today, they'd burn the racetrack down. The racing today has never been better. But the perception is what we have to deal with. We have to change that perception."

For Gossage, that's focusing on getting the right message to the fans.

"It's to get them to understand the objective statistics: Lead changes, margin of victory, cars on the lead lap," Gossage said. "It has taken us a while to get into this dilemma and it's going to take us a while to get out of it. It's frustrating to see TV ratings because I think the racing has never been better. Every week there's a feud, all of the things the fans have told us they wanted, they're getting it. It's really been a great season, but they're not following it. It's just going to take time to turn it around."

Part of the problem, Gossage believes, can be placed at the feet of the media that cover the sport.

"It's a cynical room that breeds only more cynicism," Gossage said. "A yardstick is 36 inches long everywhere in this country. It's not 24 inches in this part of the country and 18 inches in that part. It's 36 inches. So we're going to measure everything the same.

"I don't want to hear about how so-and-so didn't do well when they sold 50,000 more tickets than Homestead? Sorry, no. That to me affects the credibility of that reporter because the fan is going, 'Well, last week you said 110,000 at Track X was horribly disappointing but this week, the 65,000 is a fabulous sellout.' "

Once again, according to Gossage, the perception doesn't match the reality. And part of the blame can be shared by the people not only in the press box, but inside the garage area.

"The perception came from the 'objective media' which doesn't understand why their circulation's dropping but they say stupid things like that," Gossage said. "You know, the readers are smarter than that. I don't understand. My degree's in journalism. I don't understand journalists. Last week, 10 was big but this week, 12 is smaller. How can that be? But that feeds the perception.

"Chevy wouldn't hire a celebrity salesperson to say, 'The 2011 Chevy sucks. Buy one today.' Well, our celebrity spokesmen -- the drivers -- have been saying 'the racing's not good.' Well, what do you think the fans are going to think? I'm not suggesting the drivers don't tell the truth. But they weren't telling the truth when they were saying how bad it is, because it wasn't that bad."

But when asked to forecast the future, Gossage is an unabashed optimist.

"The sport is extremely healthy," Gossage said. "We've got the highest live attendance of any sport in America, per event. You name it, they'd love to have our attendance averages. To be back where we were, it's going to take a little while. But it'll get there and surpass that. I have no doubt. This is the original extreme sport. A kid on a skateboard, that's impressive and all. But they're not doing what these 43 guys are doing, by any stretch."

Gossage remains bullish on NASCAR's growth, as long as there are others in the business willing to put in the time and effort to promote the sport in a positive fashion.

"I'm not concerned about the future," he said. "I'm concerned about how quickly we can get back on track. But we're not far off track. It's all going to be good. But you've got to work. Unfortunately, because of that boom period, so many people got fat, happy and lazy. ...

"We don't have many promoters in this sport any more. To me, that's the fun part. That's why I got into it. I wanted to be a promoter and do the colorful, fun things.

"It's creating an interest and a fever pitch in what you have to offer, to the degree that they're willing to part with their money, spend a day of their life and go home, hopefully feeling like they got their money's worth and then some."

When Eddie Gossage gets around to saying hello to you -- and he will -- you'll definitely get more than your money's worth.