Well, we’re getting closer.
Incrementalism, they call it.
It ain’t much, but it’s … something?
Geoff Bodine, who can’t even get nominated for the NASCAR Hall of Fame, got to be Grand Marshall in Darlington this weekend. Kinda.
For the Sunday race? Nope. But for the Saturday parade downtown that’s part of the annual “Throwback Weekend” at Darlington. At 75, I reckon, you don’t turn down remembrances, but it’d sure be nice to see him treated as well as so many of his contemporaries.
Bodine won 18 races during his 18 years of full-time racing, including the 1986 Daytona 500 back before the occasional randomness of plate-racin’. But before his NASCAR career he was the Richard Petty of modified racing in the Northeast, and frankly, some NASCAR Hall of Famers are enshrined for little more than such things.
“How many minor-league ballplayers are in Cooperstown?” a knowledgeable Bodine fan asked me recently.
Well, a lot, actually, but none of them were enshrined for what they accomplished before their big-league careers.
For whatever reason, Geoff Bodine, like Smokey Yunick, can’t get through the nominating committee, which is a different subset of racing insiders than the eventual Hall voters.
