{"id":409,"date":"2009-01-05T08:55:39","date_gmt":"2009-01-05T14:55:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/?p=409"},"modified":"2026-08-31T18:24:42","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T00:24:42","slug":"woody-fairgrounds-racing-all-but-gone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/woody-fairgrounds-racing-all-but-gone\/","title":{"rendered":"Woody: Fairgrounds Racing All But Gone"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Larry Woody, in an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nashvillecitypaper.com\/news.php?viewStory=65119\" target=\"_blank\">article<\/a> published on the Nashville City Paper&#8217;s web site, says the Fairgrounds track is on life support,  and the plug may about to be pulled.<\/p>\n<p>Woody lays the blame on several entities: City Hall (via the Fair Board), the economy, and race fans. I&#8217;d add one more group to that list: NASCAR.<\/p>\n<p>Every time NASCAR has a Cup race on Saturday night, it keeps local fans away from the local tracks. NASCAR has been eating its own young for years this way. You can&#8217;t really blame a race fan for staying at home and watching a race for free instead of going to a track and spending $20 to get in plus about that much in food. And now with everyone deciding to have a recession, no one is spending money for anything, so that&#8217;s going to make the track&#8217;s survival that much harder.<\/p>\n<p>I <a href=\"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/2008\/12\/50-complaining-neighbors-1-nashville-and-history-0\/\" target=\"_blank\">said<\/a> a few weeks ago that I didn&#8217;t think there&#8217;d be any weekly racing in 2009. I still think that&#8217;s going to be the case. I took a lot of heat over it on one of the local racing forums, but other than some wishful thinking, I didn&#8217;t really see anything that would make me change my mind.<\/p>\n<p>I think the best case scenario is that we end up with a year like 1979, where there wasn&#8217;t any weekly racing. But they did have about one major race weekend a month. Weekly racing resumed the next year, but by then folks had found other things to do on Saturday nights.<\/p>\n<p>The Fair Board meets tomorrow, and what comes out of that meeting will have a big impact on what happens at the Fairgrounds in 2009. Unfortunately, I won&#8217;t be able to attend the meeting (one almost gets the impression that they have them on Tuesday at 8:00 am in order to make it difficult for the general public to attend the meetings).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Larry Woody, in an article published on the Nashville City Paper&#8217;s web site, says the Fairgrounds track is on life support, and the plug may about to be pulled. Woody lays the blame on several entities: City Hall (via the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/woody-fairgrounds-racing-all-but-gone\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,3,13],"tags":[36,22,18,21,94,98],"class_list":["post-409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-racing","category-sports","tag-fair-board","tag-fairgrounds-speedway","tag-nascar","tag-nashville-speedway","tag-politics","tag-racing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=409"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":426,"href":"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409\/revisions\/426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenharness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}