Columnist Ron Kantowski: Speedway officials should instigate a big cover-up

Tuesday, Sept. 21, 1999 | 9:59 a.m.

Ron Kantowski's notes column appears Tuesday and Thursday. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or 259-4088.

It's a lock that when the Indy Racing League rolls into town for Sunday's Vegas.com 500 there will be more empty seats than at a Metallica concert during a Shriners convention.

You can attribute much of that to the growing pains of a relatively new racing series. The IRL, despite featuring some exciting racing at speeds that make Winston Cup cars look like identically prepared Country Squire station wagons, is nowhere near as popular as NASCAR or even Championship Auto Racing Teams (its open-wheel racing rival). That takes time -- in NASCAR's case, 50 years.

Even CART, which was started by disgruntled car owners when the United States Auto Club (USAC) let American open-wheel racing outside of Indianapolis slowly fade away, has been around since 1978.

But the track owners aren't exactly IRL allies. To attract NASCAR, they have built these sprawling new facilities with massive grandstands suitable only for Winston Cup. Then when race day dawns on any other series and half or even three-quarters of the seats are unoccupied, it looks terrible on television with the cars speeding past the vacant stands.

It's a perception thing. Put 70,000 fans -- as were on hand for last year's IRL race at Texas Motor Speedway -- in an 80,000-seat stadium, and you've got an event that is viewed as an overwhelming success. But put 70,000 fans in cavernous Texas Motor Speedway, which seats about 155,000, and the place looks as empty as the space between Gomer Pyle's ears.

The IRL track owners should take a page out of Syracuse's book. When Jim Boeheim's basketball team plays a home game in the Carrier Dome, it pulls a curtain to cordon off about 20,000 of the 50,000 seats. That way, the place still rocks.

It might take Liz Taylor's shower curtain to achieve the same effect here. But it would behoove LVMS and some of the bigger tracks to invest in some sort of tarpaulin or canvas that can be used to cover the empty seats on non-Winston Cup weekends. Make it a tasteful forest green and put some Goodyear logos on it, if you must.

In the long run, a report stating that the stands that were open for a particular event were nearly filled will be a lot better for business than one that says the place was nearly empty.

* AROUND THE HORN: There must have been a million column inches written about Saturday's Trinidad-De La Hoya fight, yet Sun boxing writer Dean Juipe might have been the only person at ringside to point out that Oscar's biggest problem during the final three rounds was more fatigue than strategy-related. During the latter stages, De La Hoya looked more winded than William Conrad after taking the stairs with the elevator out. ...

A colleague who was watching the pay-per-view hype spots on Cox Cable earlier in the day said HBO's Larry Merchant appeared disheveled as if he had spent Friday night in Las Vegas with Dennis Rodman. That theme continued during the broadcast itself. During his prefight remarks, Merchant stumbled on his words and couldn't recall who De La Hoya was fighting. Finally, he just referred to Trinidad as "the other guy." ...

This might sound like Dana Carvey's crotchety old man character on Saturday Night Live. But when I was kid, we had to go to a movie theater to see big fights such as Leonard-Duran, Leonard-Hearns and Hagler-Hearns ... and we L-I-I-KED it! You can add pay-per-view fights to rock 'n' roll and the Avengers to the list of things that were done better yesterday than today. ...

As a Sun reader pointed out, in addition to boxing buffs, the UNLV athletic department alienated about 1,000 Bishop Gorman fans by sticking to a 7 p.m. start for the Rebels' home opener against Iowa State rather than move it to the afternoon. Gorman, which doesn't have its own football field, played Bonanza on Saturday night at Valley High. ...

For all its shortsightedness, UNLV still made out like Tom Cruise at the box office Saturday night. But the announced crowd of 26,000-plus seemed to be considerably under the total in the house, at least according to observers who placed the crowd in the 32-000-34,000 range. Leave it to the Rebels to under report attendance when just about everybody else around her inflates it like Pam Anderson's bicycle tires. ...

Now that the Rebels finally have a suitable stadium (and a couple of wins under their belt), perhaps UNLV can set its sights a little higher when it comes to football scheduling. If Michigan and Notre Dame and their legions of fans are agreeable to playing a 12th game at Hawaii, there's no reason they shouldn't be willing to come here for one of 11. The tourist dynamic is nearly identical. ...

Although I was resistant at first, I have come to enjoy the graphically enhanced orange first-down marker used on TV football games. Now, I wish they'd take the technology a step further and put graphic extensions on the uprights, so made and missed field goals become more obvious.

Or maybe John Madden can finally make his telestrator pencil useful and draw them on.