David Poole Remembered

In January of 2007 I interviewed David Poole for the original incarnation of this blog.  Below is the post I wrote from the interview.  It was originally posted on January 31st, 2007.

Last Friday, I had the privilege of interviewing David Poole, NASCAR beat/features/commentary writer for the Charlotte Observer and ThatsRacin.com.  Thoroughly respected by his peers and readers, Poole graciously shared his time along with his thoughts on several topics.

How did you get started in journalism?

Well, it depends on how you define started.  I know this story sounds like I made it up, but I swear it’s the truth.

I was a twelve year old kid with no athletic skills whatsoever, but a burning desire to be very good at something.  And, I was a huge sports fan; the kind that always kept notebooks and stats and stuff like that, baseball cards and the whole nine yards.  I was watching the 1971 ACC men’s basketball tournament championship game between North Carolina and South Carolina, sitting in the recliner in my family’s house on Littlejohn Street in Gastonia, North Carolina.  There was a very controversial finish — a South Carolina guard out-jumped North Carolina’s center, and they won the game.  I read the story in the paper, and thought it was a really poor job of reporting what I thought was a really interesting basketball game.  My attitude was well, I could’ve done better than that.  At the time, of course I had no idea about things like deadlines and transmitting stories, and why you only had a six or eight staff running lead in an early edition of the paper and all those kind of logistical things.  It just didn’t seem right to me.  So, I got on my little twelve year old high horse and thought well, one of these days I’ll show that guy how to do that.  And that is where it all began.

In school, I worked in the school newspapers all the way through college where I became sports editor of the Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina.  I still think it’s one of the best jobs in America, being the editor of a big time college newspaper.  After college I eventually came back to my hometown of Gastonia, working as a sports editor.  I covered a little bit of racing during the two years I was there.  I went to Palm Beach, Florida and worked for about a year, then came back to North Carolina in 1990 and went to work for the Charlotte Observer on the copy desk.  I was doing page design, copy editing, headline writing, and getting the paper out every night.  Also, I was covering television, radio, and a sports on the air beat for a couple of columns a week.

Tom Higgins decided to retire at the end of the 1996 season.  Tom had been covering NASCAR for thirty years, and he won the Bill France Award of Excellence when he retired, so he was going to be a tough act for anybody to follow.  So, when Tom retired they were looking for a writer, and they had a huge number of resumes and a huge number of applicants.  The Observer didn’t immediately fill the position, as it was caught up in the Carolina Panthers making the playoffs and going to the NFC championship game their second year in the league.

Before long it was time to send somebody to Daytona, and on the pre-season media tour.  I happened to be off the first day of the media tour, and I had written a little bit, so they sent me.  That is how I stumbled into the NASCAR job.  Looking back, I know now they figured the worst thing that could happen is he could stink at it, and we’ll have an extra six months to find somebody who is pretty good.  That was ten years ago, and I’ve been going ever since, so this is the start of my eleventh season in NASCAR.  I guess I’ve done well enough to keep my job.  Which is what we each try to do everyday.

When you’re on assignment at the track, what is your average weekend like?

Well, a typical week for a NASCAR writer starts with traveling out on Thursdays.  But, now that I’m doing the radio show for Sirius on Thursday morning, for me where I used to typically travel out mid-morning on Thursday, now I have to wait and travel out in the afternoons on Thursday.

So, my typical week in this year is: I’ll do the Sirius show from seven to eleven o’clock in the morning from my house; they’ve got a line going into my house.  Then, I’ll get on the plane or drive, depending on where we’re going.  That afternoon, get to the racetrack, the city, or the city that I can find closest to the racetrack.

I go to the track early Friday morning, as I’ll be doing the radio show from the track from seven to eleven.  Last year, typically I would’ve been at the track by nine or nine thirty. if there is no kind of night activity I usually wind up leaving after that.  However, qualifying is typically at three or four in the afternoon, so I’m usually there until six or seven, writing my stories and trying to get my Sunday stuff together.  Go back to the hotel and collapse into bed.  Saturday, get up at seven o’clock or so and try to get back to the racetrack by eight in order to talk to some people before practice.  Be there in case something happens in practice, then spend the afternoon both writing my Sunday stories and covering, monitoring whatever support race is there whether it’s the Busch series or the Truck series.  Sometimes I get out of there a little bit early on Saturday afternoon, especially if someone else is covering the Busch race for the paper.  But typically, I leave around five or six o’clock.

To beat the traffic, you have to be at the racetrack no later than seven thirty or eight o’clock in the morning on race day.  You’re typically there until, depending on the time or the race, and this year with later starts which we’re going to have I think all year, seven thirty or eight o’clock at night.  Maybe even nine.

Monday, somehow, someway I’ll do another radio show, depending on the logistics from a studio somewhere.  Then, I’ll get on a plane or get in the car and come back home late Monday night.

So, a typical race weekend back before I was doing the radio show would be at the track roughly about ten hours on Friday, more like eight hours on Saturday, and anywhere from fourteen to eighteen on Sunday.  Then, you have to get your wits about you on Sunday night; get back to the hotel and maybe get a bite to eat. You’re sitting there doing your post race stuff, updating your statistical things that you keep.  With me it would be the rankings ever week on ThatsRacing.com.  I have to do those.  Write a second day column.  Keep one eye or ear on the radio or whatever is on TV that is reviewing the race.  If you’re lucky enough to have SPEED Channel in your hotel room, you watch it in case anything developed after you left the track.  Or God forbid, something happened where somebody’s going home.  All kinds of things can happen.

By the time I get home Monday night, I’m already trying to figure out what I’ve got to do to get going for next week.  My typical time at home?  My weekend is Tuesday and Wednesday; that is when I’m at my house.  Those are the days that I do things like get the car serviced, pay the bills, do the laundry, cut the grass.

So it’s kind of like working in retail in a way, where you never have nights or weekends off.

Exactly.  Sometimes weekend nights are the worst times.  When you have a Saturday night race, the problem what time to go to the race track.  Sometimes you can pick the absolute worst time to go.  Noon might be the worst time to go depending upon when they have the grandstands and the crowds going.  Twenty-five percent of my job is figuring out where the traffic is coming from and trying to avoid it.

When you are working with basically the same people every week in terms of the same drivers, team members and such, are you looking to build relationships with them above and beyond professional relationships, or do you try to keep a professional distance?

There is a middle ground in there.  There are people that cover racing, and have been people who covered racing, who go fishing and hunting and fly planes with certain people and develop really close friendships.  That’s fine if you want to go down that road.

I have been to Felix Sabates’ and one other team owners house.  I have never been to Rick Hendrick’s house, I have never been to Richard Childress’ house, and I have never been to Jack Roush’s house. My time away from the racetrack is precious, and I feel like the drivers who have families, their time is precious too.  It is hard for me to make myself impinge upon their free time when I have got so much of an opportunity to see and talk to them at the race track if I just take advantage of it.

There are a lot of people in this business who think you can’t really get to know a driver at the racetrack; you need to get to know them off the track.  There probably are some advantages to that.  It’s not about not wanting to get close to these guys, because I have people in the garage here that I consider friends in terms of crew guys, owners and drivers that I know if I ever need anything — if I needed to fly home from a race track on a minute’s notice — I think I can find six or seven drivers or owners who would give me their airplanes without asking any questions.  I hope to God I never have to use that, but it’s nice to know.

That being said, you also have to understand that these guys are doing a job and I am doing a job.  I just have to depend on the fact these guys know I have tried to be fair with them their whole careers.  There is going to come a time when I might have to say something, and If I have to say something which they perceive as critical they might disagree with what I said.  They may come to me and challenge me or question me on it, and I am interested in their point of view.  That happened to me this year with Mark Martin.  I wrote a column after he signed with Ginn Racing and stated an opinion.  Mark came to me and said “look, you have a right to have your opinion and I respect that.  But let me just give some insight.”  And we had a long chat.  I wrote another column saying I think I might have misjudged Mark. I appreciate that. That’s part of the relationship.

The long-winded answer to your question is if you are going to do this job and be any good at it, you have to build relationships.  But, you have to decide whether you want to become buddies with these guys and go to the dirt track with them or hang out with them.  That’s just not me.

When you are covering the circuit week after week, how do you try to keep the coverage fresh so that you are not just simply turning out the same stories and doing things from the exact same angle every time?

You know, that’s a great question.  It is very difficult to say.  There are times when I literally find myself thinking, “Did I just write this story?  Did I just use this angle?”

Part of it is that each year is a different sort of set of circumstances.  Each year takes on its own character.  Each year becomes its own saga.  And, you have new people coming in, and you have people going out.  Racing is like a lot of sports.  Every time you’ve seen “every” possible play in a football game, basketball game, or a baseball game, or race, you see something else.

Sometimes the hardest thing in the world are times such as when Ryan Newman won eleven poles in a year, or when he won eight or nine poles in a year.  The hardest thing in the world is to write a ‘Ryan Newman wins the pole’ story and make it interesting.  A lot of times you don’t write about it.  You write up the guy who is second, third, or fourth just because you don’t want to repeat yourself.  That can be tough.

The other thing about it you have to balance is when do you let the season dictate what you write about, and when do you try to dictate what you write about?  I will give you an example.  Last October in Charlotte I decided to write a story that was basically what that weekend’s race meant to half a dozen drivers from half a dozen different perspectives.  You had the guys in the chase, and you had the guys in the chase who had fallen out of the championship race early.  You had the guys who were jockeying for positions trying to get into the top twenty.  You had the guy who was jockeying to make the top thirty five at the end of the season.  Then, you had a guy who was just trying to get into the race.  Sometimes you can step back and look at things from a lot of different perspectives.

One of the things that really helped me is last year was spending the last half of the year basically hanging around one team. I hung around Jeff Burton’s team to do a book that is going to come out this year about that team’s experiences.  I know these guys work very hard, and I know these guys sacrifice a lot to be in this business, but being around that team as much as I was for ten weeks renewed and refreshed my appreciation of just how hard these guys work and just how many different types of talent are brought to get a competitive car on the race track every week.  That’s why it was good for me to do that.  It gave me a renewed perspective of just how many people’s talents and expertise it takes to make a Jeff Burton or a Jimmie Johnson look good on Sunday.

Do you go to every race or do you take a few weekends off?

I’ve started taking a few weekends off.  Last year I had to take a couple off because my daughter had a baby, things like that.  I average between twenty-eight and thirty-two races.  It goes up and down a little bit because you have to take a few off for your sanity.  Nobody should have to do two Dovers or two Michigans or two Poconos in the same year.  I always try to take one of each of those off.

We have two people who cover many of the races for the Charlotte Observer, and we discovered the spring Phoenix race, which is a Saturday night race, begins around eight o’clock eastern time.  It is pointless to have two people there, because you can only get one story in the newspaper.  So, I started skipping the spring Phoenix race to save myself that one cross country trip a year.

You try to pick your spots.  That’s what you have to do, and you know it is difficult.  I will tell you this.  Except for the travel and the time, it would be an easier job if you went to every race because if you miss two in a row… this year I am going to miss the two immediately after Michigan.  When I go back to the track that third week I will be lost.  I will feel like I haven’t been there in a month, or six weeks.  Things change very fast, very rapidly in this sport and you have to keep up.  If you miss a couple of races you feel like you’ve been gone for a month.

Do you believe NASCAR tends to manipulate coverage of races?

Manipulate is a strong word.  They try to get their spin, very much like any politician wants their spin out there.  They want their version of it, and NASCAR is no different.  They are human beings, and they like some guys and they don’t like others, and they take care of some guys better than others in terms of what they give them.  Sometimes I am on the good list and sometimes I am on the bad list.

Let me answer the question this way.  Do I think NASCAR uses the media to talk to the fans and to talk to the competitors?  Do I think the competitors use the media to talk to fans?  Absolutely.  One hundred percent.  NASCAR does everything it can to get the message out they are a growing, thriving, prosperous sport because that’s the image they want out.

Sometimes I think we are a little bit guilty of looking for a cloud in the silver lining.  There are times when the media misses a story, good and bad.  One of the mistakes I think the media makes, when people talk to us about the media and about the jobs we do, is sometimes pretend like we don’t make mistakes; we don’t do anything wrong.  And that’s silly.  We are human beings.

I will tell you a story.  This is absolutely true.  The year that Ray Evernham was going to leave as Jeff Gordon’s crew chief, we were obsessed that year with trying to find out… who was going to drive the #4 car.  That was the big story everybody was fighting to get down the stretch.  Ray left and was going to work for Dodge.  The story we worked on was that Ray was going to leave and going to go to work for Dodge.  Meanwhile, the main story was Ray Evernham was trying to get Jeff Gordon to leave Hendrick to go with him to Dodge.  For all we think we know, sometimes we are foolish.

Nobody in the sport knew until thirty-six hours beforehand Juan Pablo Montoya was leaving Formula One to come to NASCAR.  Sometimes we miss some pretty big deals.

Overall what is you opinion of how you and your fellow journalists cover the sport?

Overall, I wish papers cared more for the sport.  I wish papers had the same level of commitment.  I don’t mean my newspaper; I mean papers across the country having the same level of commitment covering NASCAR as they do for college basketball, the NFL, major league baseball — whatever their beat is.  I don’t see how you can be the Dallas Morning News or the Miami Herald or the Los Angeles Times, the Kansas City Star, the Forth Worth Star-Telegram, the Detroit News — I don’t see how you can have a racetrack that’s in your circulation area and not have somebody who basically goes to the majority of the races not if you want to consider yourself a good sports paper.

Most of those papers do have people who cover NASCAR very well.  They scaled back in recent years as budget cuts hit, and NASCAR is one of the first things to be cut.  I don’t understand that.

As far as the job that we do, there is a perception out there racing guys run around and get free hats.  They are good old boys: play along, go along, get along.  I think that is really not true.  Some of the best journalism is what my colleagues write about the major stories in the sport.  There’s a lot of bad stuff out there.  There’s a lot of Internet sites and magazines out there that print silly stuff about the sport and make stuff up.  But that’s the beauty of the Internet these days.  Everybody can be a “journalist” if they have got an IP address and a keyboard.  I use “journalist” in quotes.

If you are a NASCAR fan these days, it is a very interesting situation.  Ten years ago, when we started our website ThatsRacin.com there was very little online.  If you were a NASCAR fan living in Spokane, Washington, it was very difficult for you to follow the sport.  Now it is infinitely easier because there are dozens and dozens and dozens of websites that cover races.  The challenge now is to figure out the ones that do it well and differentiate those from the ones that do it poorly.  You know now it is not a lack of information. It is you having to be a more educated consumer of information, in my opinion, in order to not get weighted down in the crap that’s out there.

Which leads to then next question, which would be about the blogosphere.

Again, this is the quality of journalism, the definition of journalism changing as the world changes.

One of the things that is absolutely true is, it used to be in the newspaper business — and this was even when I was starting — you would hear something at seven o’clock or eight o’clock in the morning, and you would spend four or five hours that afternoon or that morning or early afternoon walking around talking to people checking it out, figuring out if what you heard at seven o’clock in the morning was true.  There would be true things about it, there were false things about it, and the real story was far more nuanced then that first thing you heard.

Well, in those days you could wait until four o’clock in the afternoon to write your story when you had all the pieces of information.  Now with the blogs and Internet sites and the minute by minute updates and all this kind of stuff, the pressure from your editors and on them is to get this stuff up as fast as possible.  Stories are not given a chance to develop and breathe, and become the full story they are meant to become before they are reported.

What I think happens is some of that initial sort of chat or chatter that you hear, that’s what gets repeated down the road and misunderstandings fall into place.  I will give you a perfect example.  When FOX started broadcasting NASCAR in 2001, there were a lot of people who were writing a story saying that FOX was going to send John Madden to the Daytona 500 to be the analyst.  Well, that was just ridiculous.  I did a little snooping around, and what happened was FOX actually did consider sending John Madden to the Daytona 500 to do a story for the pre-race show about tailgate parties.  It went from that little shred of information to this very rampant rumor on the Internet that John Madden was going to be the NASCAR analyst for FOX, and it was not based on anything other than what we call the echo effect.  It’s the old game of gossip.  You start a fact at one end of a long line of people, and by the time it gets to the other end of a long line of people it is not recognizable.  That’s what the blogosphere does.

People don’t have a chance to walk over to somebody in the garage and say “hey, this is what I heard — tell me, is it is right?”  There’s not enough of that going on, not only from the people writing blogs but the people at the race track.  You can’t un-ring a bell.  Once a story gets out there, if it is wrong, there are five or six or six thousand or seven thousand or twenty-five thousand or however many people are going to see the wrong pieces of information.  That’s the last thing they see, and they are going to say it is fact.  That’s how things get on the wrong path.

I don’t believe a lot of people who get all high and mighty about the Internet, nonprofessional people on the Internet and the bloggers and all this stuff.  Listen, you know seventy-five percent of the time I watch the race the same way people at home do even though I am at the racetrack.  I am usually watching the television broadcast from the media seat. I don’t always watch the race from the press box because at some places, logistically that’s the wrong place to be.  If I am watching the race from the press box, I am still monitoring television audio because my readers are seeing the race through the eyes of television and if something is covered on television that I don’t see and address in some way, especially if it is a controversy, they don’t think I was even at the race track.  You have to factor all that in.  It’s very complicated.

At the same time, I think that from the blogger standpoint, sometimes they get a bad rap.  There are guys out there that are going to write the most antagonistic or annoying things they can possibly do just to call attention to themselves.  That happens in the newspaper business too.

You are in a position where you wear three hats.  You do basic beat reporting, you do features, and you also do commentary.  Do you ever have trouble differentiating between the three, or are you able to categorize them?

Sometimes, especially when you write columns, you get pigeonholed — you’re pro-Chase or you’re anti-Chase.  Back when Bruton Smith and Bill France were having at it, you were either pro-Bruton or anti-Bruton; all that kind of stuff.  In the Indy car split, you’re either pro-Champ Car or pro-IRL.  You get pushed into one of those two camps, both by what you think and what you like and by the perception people have of you.  You get a reputation of taking one side predominantly over the other on a certain issue.

There comes a time when you have to write a certain piece, such as when you’re covering a race and a controversy happens.  Like, say, Talladega last year; the Brian Vickers / Jimmie Johnson / Dale Earnhardt Jr. thing.  You can write a lead that plays that right down the middle, but if someone perceives you as pro-Earnhardt Jr. they’re going to read what they want to read in not only your column, but your coverage.

All you can hope to do as a journalist is try to be fair to everybody in everything you write, whether that is a column, a feature, or a race cover.  You try to understand that it is your job to tell the fans what you think.  Sometimes — and I’m guilty of this and I hate this about myself — you have a line that is so good and that you like so much, you’ll put it in the story.  When you see it in print, you go “man, that was over the line.  It was mean spirited.  It was not what I should have said.”  You wish you could take it back.  It might be exactly what you think is right, but it just doesn’t come across in that commendation versus condemnation argument you sometimes have with yourself.

It is tough on feature stories.  I don’t really write a whole lot of negative features.  By that, I mean I don’t go out and write a story about why this guy’s team stinks. If I’m going to do that, I’m going to do that in a column and take a side and argue my point.  Otherwise, it’s just not fair.  The feature stories I try to write are about the human interest side of the sport — what makes guys tick, things that have happened to them, and what they like to do off the track; how that relates to racing and their family.  I wrote a story last year about Jeff Burton, his wife Kim, and their relationship; how people jump on Kim when he is about to win a race.  But there is a reason she cries.  It’s because it means that much to her; because she is a part of everything that Jeff has ever done.  You try to tell people this is why this woman gets so emotional when her husband wins a race. That is when you do a feature.

The whole Teresa Earnhardt thing that has been happening over the off season… there have been times when people have sent me e-mails telling me I’ve been awfully harsh on Teresa.  They say she has been through a whole lot.  At no point in my columns have I actually criticized anything that she does or says that is related to her husband’s death.  I have no right to do that.  Any criticism I have had of Teresa has been in her role as owner of the #8 car and the #1 car and the cars that run on the racetrack.  I’ve criticized her in the way she has done her job as car owner.  I think that is fair.  I have this line I use sometimes: fair is where you go to get funnel cakes.  You can’t always be fair, but you can always try.  It’s not going to come across fair to the person you are criticizing, but if you do your best to be fair, to treat people with respect and honor the work they do and honor the effort they put in, I think you’re OK.

Last question. At the end of the day, what do you most hope you’ve accomplished with your reporting?

There are actually two answers to that question.  The first and foremost answer is to entertain.  We’re in the business of people.  I’m not going to tell anybody who won a race that cares.  By the time they read my story, most of the time they’re going to know who won the race.  What they want to know from me, as entertainingly as I possibly can tell them, is not only who won the race, but how they won it, how they felt about it, and what they felt like helped them do it — all of the back stories that go into winning the race.

Information is a big part of that.  You have to inform a reader to entertain him, but you can certainly inform him without entertaining.  That is the cardinal sin.  If a guy comes away from your story thinking “okay, Harvick won the race and that is all I know,” you’ve failed him.  If you show him or let him feel the excitement or the thrill or the angst or the drama or whatever went on to make that happen; if you take him there, and help him sort of be a part of what happened, then you’ve done your job.  Entertain is a big part of it.

The other side of it deals with how, for some reason, this seems to be a sport where rumor seems to take on a life of its own.  And once a rumor gets down the track, it is hard to turn it around and bring it back, and those things can be hurtful especially if they’re false.  One of the things I try to do in my stories, and on my radio show that we do, is go find out if there is any truth to something that is out there and tell people, look, what you’re hearing is malarkey. This is from the guy’s mouth, and he says this.

I’ve been lied to.  No question about that.  But most of the time, I’ve found if you go ask people “hey, I’m hearing this, is there any truth to this” they’ll tell you one of two things.  They’ll say that’s absolute malarkey; don’t pay any attention to that.  Or, they’ll say I can’t talk about it, but maybe something will be coming down the road.  You get the sense that there may be something to it.  It’s the oldest journalism tenet there is.  If your mother says she loves you, check it out.  You’ve got to check things out.