In the newest edition of ESPN The Magazine our motorsports department page looks at the havoc that Jimmie Johnson's amazing three-peat, soon to be four-peat, has wreaked on the NASCAR media corps.
The idea for the story came from actual conversations that I kept having with my print and television colleagues as we hammered away on our laptops from Bristol to Charlotte to Martinsville, as it became more and more apparent that Johnson was pulling away in the point standings -- again. It was a dilemma we were repeatedly forced to face during our "NASCAR Now" Monday night roundtable show. We didn't want to gush about No. 48 for an hour, but we kind of had no choice.
The dilemma for the media comes down to this: How do you cover yet another Johnson title, especially when the storyline has been essentially the same each year? Jimmie cruises into the Chase, Jimmie romps in the Chase, Jimmie wins the Chase You get the picture.
For quotes in the piece, I thought about going exclusively to my buds at ESPN.com -- the firm of Blount, Hinton, Newton and Smith -- to see how they had been covering the season. Thanks to their daily deluge of quality content, I already knew how they felt. Newton was investigating why marketers have avoided the JJ bandwagon, and Terry Blount was proving that Johnson was a lock even as Phoenix had yet to be run.
Armed with their finely-penned takes, I went outside of the Worldwide Leader for a couple of opinions.
"The Johnson backlash in the grandstand has made it even tougher," Jeff Gluck, NASCAR Scene associate editor and well-respected beat writer, told me. "I am a big believer in Twitter. Well, anytime I Tweet anything about the No. 48 team, the Tweeps just go crazy: 'You guys in the media are so in love with Jimmie. That's all you ever talk about!' But what are we supposed to do? You can't ignore the team that's about to win a fourth-straight championship."
ESPN's television crew learned about that anti-Johnson sentiment during their coverage of the Dickies 500 at Texas two weekends ago. Johnson wrecked hard just two laps into the event, sending his car behind the wall for more than an hour of repairs. The TV cameras set up camp in the garage and covered every minute and detail of the repair job until the Lowe's Chevy finally made it back out onto the track. Fans went to the web to complain that the producers of the telecast had devoted too much time to a car that wasn't even in the race.
But what exactly was the production truck supposed to do? Ignore the championship leader as if he was just another nobody's car getting repair work during just another run-of-the-mill midseason race?
"Here's all you need to know about how big a deal that was," says Darian Grubb, crew chief for Tony Stewart, one of the teams desperately trying to catch Johnson throughout the Chase. "We all have televisions in our pit boxes. I looked down there where our big screen is and it was like a movie theater with all the people crowded around to see how the repairs on the 48 were going. The guys out on the track were all radioing in wanting updates on Jimmie. That was the story of that race."
In the face of this fan backlash, the challenge that writers and producers have is to try and dig up previously unvisited angles to entertain consumers. "People say to me all the time, Jimmie is racing's version of Tiger Woods or Roger Federer, so cover him like those writers cover them. They never get old," says Gluck. "But Jimmie's personality isn't one that lends itself to revisiting time and time again."
So I went to a man who was there for the last -- heck, the only-- time that another driver did what Johnson is doing. In 1976-78, Cale Yarborough won three straight Winston Cup titles, all clinched with at least one race remaining in the season. So, did the motorsports media of the day get fatigued with Cale?
"No," says Ken Squier, founding father of MRN Radio and the former "Voice of the Daytona 500." "When Cale was dominating the sport -- or Darrell Waltrip a few years later -- the regular traveling NASCAR media corps was just a handful of people. Local papers would cover their local races and then not write about the sport the rest of the year, except for Daytona. It's totally different now. Jeff Gordon's run (he won three Cups in four years and missed making it four-in-a-row by only 37 points) was just 10 years ago, but no one had heard of a blog or Twitter back then. Now your storytelling options are limited because there are literally dozens of journalists and website folks cranking out material seven days a week. Finding a unique angle becomes nearly impossible."
Well, let's think about that. Perhaps someone should take a look at Johnson's place among the greatest NASCAR champions of all-time? Wait, I wrote that for The Mag last month. So, how about an in-depth profile on his genius crew chief Chad Knaus? Oh yeah, I already did that for the The Mag, too. In 2005.
"Wow," the champ said during his Martinsville post-race press conference on October 25, when the line of questioning centered around the possibility of crashing at Talladega seven days later, not the second place finish he'd scored moments before. "You guys have really run out of stuff to ask me."
For the record, not everyone believes that the last Jimmie stones have been turned. USA Today's Nate Ryan is among that minority, which he proved with this fine cover story in Thursday's edition of the paper. As Ryan says in my current Mag story, "What's boring about someone who is about to do something that no one's ever done before? This story here is one of the angles. Why aren't making a bigger deal out of this?"
Like Gluck, he had more to say: "There are plenty of angles here from the historical perspective. Take the CoT. Does the fact that he's the only driver to win championships in the new car, a car that is much less about engineering and technical advantage, mean that he's the best pure driver in NASCAR? Johnson and Knaus, are they the best driver-crew chief combo of all time? And this conversation that we are having here right now is a great angle itself. Why doesn't Johnson get the credit that he deserves?"
I don't know. But, like all of my friends in the Media Center, I'm working on it. And, as I wrote in The Mag, Jimmie doesn't feel the least bad about our dilemma.
"No," he says with a chuckle. "I hope next year your problem is even worse."
Ryan McGee
