Weekend That Was: M'ville (cont'd)

Petty was asked if he is surprised by the staggering growth the sport has undergone since those simpler times.

"I think the answer for me to that is a resounding yes and no, OK?" Petty answered. "And my point is this: I grew up in the '60s. When I was 7 and 8 or 9 years old, The King switched from Dodge to Ford and back to Dodge and Plymouth. We were going from Fonda, N.Y. and Islip [N.Y.], short tracks in what we called the Northern Tour. You'd race at these places and there would be 10,000 or 15,000 people there, and you'd think, 'Man, it'll never get any bigger than this.'

Kyle Petty, circa 1997

"Then I grew up racing in the '80s and '90s, and you thought, 'Man, it'll never get any bigger than this.' And now we're here in 2007 and you say, 'Man, it'll never get any bigger than this.'

"So if you look at the progression that followed from '65 to '85, and then from '85 to 2005, and that's probably the rate it should have grown. You know what I mean? If you look at it and extrapolate it out from what it did in this 20 years and what it did in the next 20, you would hope that it would grow that way. Any business would hope that they would grow like that."

But the massive growth came at a price, Petty added.

"I think the part that kind of surprises you now more than anything is that as it grew through those periods for me, it was still a Southeastern sport. In '85 to the early '90s, it was still a Southeastern sport," Petty said. "Everybody wanted to give it lip service that we were racing in California and we were racing in other places, but it was still a Southeastern sport. Now we look at it and we see there is one racetrack in North Carolina. ... It fell from eight races within a 150-mile radius of Charlotte to three races. So we as fans have lost that, and that's the heart of where the sport was.

"I don't think it surprises you. I'm amazed by it, but I won't say I'm surprised by it -- if that makes sense."

Asked what it means to have been able to make so many starts, Petty, who has eight career victories but none since 1995, naturally had a complex but thought-provoking answer.

"It means I'm old," he said. "It means I've been doing it a long time. I look at it, and probably in 10 or 15 years you'll look back and say it means something. Today, I just think it's really cool.

"And I've said this before: to have raced against Richard Petty and Darrell Waltrip when they won championships, to have raced against Ricky Rudd, to have raced against Dale Sr. his rookie year. ... and then to have come along and raced against Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart and Bobby Labonte and guys like that as they have won races, and then to move one step further and have raced against guys like Kyle Busch and Casey Mears, that's the coolest part. That's what that eight-hundred and whatever number it is means to me more than anything else. I've been very blessed to have seen Pearson and Petty, Earnhardt and [Rusty] Wallace, Gordon and Stewart, and now Busch and guys like that.

"So when I look at it, I don't look at the amount of races. I really don't. I don't look at the years I've been doing this. What I look at is the people who have come through this sport, and the great names in this sport that have come through here -- that I consider myself blessed to have been able to race against, to see their talent and see what they've done, and to be a part of the sport at a time when these great guys come through."

To put into a perspective that truly is mind-boggling, Petty then added: "It would be like being a baseball player, and playing against [Babe] Ruth and [Hank] Aaron and Barry Bonds all at the same time. It would be like during the span of your career being able to see and play against all three great home-run hitters at the same time. When you start talking Petty, Earnhardt and Gordon, you've seen all three of them at the same time. So that for me, is the bigger deal."

Different times, Part I

Petty also spoke of how the sport seems to be cyclical in so many ways, and that how long drivers drive apparently is one of them.

Let him explain.

"When you talk to Ned [Jarrett] and Junior [Johnson], you ask 'em, 'Why did you retire so young?' They'll tell you the reason is that that's the way other professional athletes did it. Baseball players retired young. They were comparing themselves to other sports even at that time, so they retired young," Petty said.

"And then all of a sudden guys in our sport started going into their early 50s. So when I started, and you're racing against your father and Bobby Allison, David Pearson and Cale Yarborough and Buddy Baker, you start thinking, 'Yeah, well, I can race into my 50s, too, then.' Heck, Harry Gant didn't even start until he was 50, it didn't seem like."

That won't happen with the current generation, Petty predicted.

"These guys now, they don't expect to go long. And the demands are a lot greater. But beyond what the demands are, they just don't expect it," Petty said. "I think these guys look at it and whether they admit it or not, I think a lot of them already have a day in their mind -- 36, 41, whatever it may be -- where they see themselves tapering off and doing something different. That's another part of the sport that has changed." (Continued)