By Bob Markus

Watching the rain-shortened Daytona 500 Sunday was like having sex without an orgasm; it was like entering a marathon and dropping out with four miles to go or climbing three fourths of the way up a mountain and then turning back. It can be exhilerating while you're doing it, but it ultimately provides no satisfaction. Except, of course, to the winner, Matt Kenseth, who was in the right place, first place, at the right time when the rains came. Victory does not always go to the fastest car and driver, which may or may not have been Kenseth on Sunday. Almost as many races are won on fuel economy or tire conservation or some other pit strategy as are won by some driver simply blowing the doors off his competitors. But at least they have a definable end game scenario. This one left viewers hanging, wondering what would have happened had the race gone on to its scheduled conclusion.

Would Jeff Gordon or Mark Martin, my own two favorite drivers, have come back to win, Gordon for the fourth time, Martin for the first? Both had the car, the time, and the talent to do so. Would Tony Stewart have turned his first drive as a car owner into an improbable victory? Would Dale Earnhardt Jr., who had a miserable day, with two pit road snafus and one lame-brained wreck-inducing wrench of the wheel, somehow have found his way into Victory Lane? He was, after all, still on the lead lap at journey's end. We'll never know the answers and it all could have been avoided had not NASCAR switched the starting time to late afternoon from its traditional 1 p.m., Eastern Time, green flag to accommodate television. The race should have been over, all 200 laps of it, long before the rains came.

The Daytona 500, which has been called "The Great American Race," is unique in that it is widely regarded by drivers as the Super Bowl of the sport, yet it opens the season rather than closes it. Winning it assures a driver lasting fame, if not a season championship. In the 51 years the race has been run on the 2 1/2 mile Daytona International Speedway, only eight times has the winner gone on to claim the season championship. Five of those perfectas were notched by the Petty family, patriarch Lee Petty accomplishing it in 1959, the year of the inaugural Daytona 500,and his son Richard winning the big one in four of his seven championship seasons.
The others to do it are all going to be in the racing Hall of Fame--Cale Yarborough,
Jeff Gordon, and Jimmie Johnson.

When I was writing sports for the Chicago Tribune, the Daytona 500 was one of my favorite assignments. I loved the race day walk from my hotel to the track, about a mile and a half away, with the fans waving banners of their favorite drivers and the sun already beginning to warm the day. I remember one such race day morning when I was being interviewed by a Chicago radio station and I offered: "There's nowhere else in the world I'd rather be on this day than right here in Daytona." I was the first writer for The Tribune ever to cover it and my first race was one of the two Daytona 500s that changed the face of auto racing in the United States. The year was 1976, the bicentennial year, and Richard Petty was in mid-reign as The King of stock car drivers. There were plenty of other top tier drivers out there, guys like Bobby Allison, Buddy Baker, Cale Yarborough, and Benny Parsons, to name a few. But Petty's most persistent pursuer was David Pearson, the Silver Fox, considered by many of the southern writers as Petty's equal, if not his superior. The race was so riveting from start to finish that I didn't leave my seat in the press box, even to go to the bathroom, for fear I'd miss something. It came down to Petty and Pearson with Richard leading on the final lap before David drafted past him in the back stretch. Entering the fourth turn Petty tried to stick the nose of his car back in front, but the two cars banged doors and started to spin into the infield. The fans were going nuts and the good old boy writers in the press box were thunderstruck and so was I. The whole scene was so chaotic that I didn't know who had won the race. When I asked the writer next to me he bellowed what sounded like "Parsons." "Benny Parsons won?" I said. "No, not Parsons, Pearson." The Silver Fox had managed to keep his engine running and get back on the track to cross the finish line. Petty, meanwhile, was futiley trying to crank his engine as his car sat in the grass some 100 yards from victory. It was tradional back then to bring only the winning driver up to the press box for the post race interview. But this time both made the trip up through the stands.

Three years later the race was nationally televised for the first time and what a mid-winter treat for America's auto racing fans. The race came down to a duel between Donnie Allison and Yarborough and I was secretly rooting for Cale because, a few years earlier, he had visited me in the hospital while I was recovering from surgery. Allison led for most of the race, but on the final lap, Cale tried to squeeze past him entering the backstretch and wrecked both cars. While Petty circled the track to win for the sixth time the fans in the third turn were treated to the spectacle of Allison and Yarborough throwing fists and helmets at each other, a fight eventually joined by Donnie's brother Bobby, and all of it caught on camera.

In all, I covered nine Daytona 500s and some of them were routine and some were memorable. Among the latter were 1989, when Darrell Waltrip celebrated his only Daytona 500 win with a victory dance while shouting childlike: "I won the Daytona 500, I won the Daytona 500."; 1990 when Dale Earnhardt, Junior's father, seemed poised to finally win the race that had always eluded him until, while leading halfway through the final lap, he cut a tire in turn three and Derrick Cope swept past him; and 1993, when Gordon made his Daytona debut by winning one of the Thursday qualifiers and finishing third in the big show while Earnhardt and Dale Jarrett dueled it out over the final laps. I can still remember hearing Ned Jarrett, Dale's father, who was lead announcer on the telecast, screaming, "two laps to go, it's Dale and Dale," trying to report objectively while his son was earning the biggest victory of his career. That in fact was my last live memory of the Daytona 500.

The next year we had a new sports editor, Margaret Holt, the first and so far only woman sports editor the Tribune has had. I liked Margaret and she always treated me with respect. The day she was removed as sports editor she called me at home to tell me and I thought that was a classy thing to do. But our relationship did not start out so well. Shortly after her arrival she invited me to lunch at the hotel dining room next door to Tribune Tower and wasted no time in telling me: "You're not going to Daytona. The Orlando Sentinel (owned by Tribune Company) has an auto racing writer and we'll use her stories. Now you've got five minutes to get mad and get it off your chest and then I don't want to hear any more about it."

A few weeks later I was at home when I received a call from the copy desk. "Neil Bonnett just got killed at Daytona, can you make some phone calls and get us a story on it?" "No," I replied. "You've got a writer from the Orlando Sentinel covering. Use her story."