NASCAR has come a long way from the dirt track "strictly stock" races of the late 1940s that were often won by drivers whose skills were honed on backroads delivering bootleg moonshine (the winner of the first strictly stock race was disqualified for having heavy-duty "bootlegger" rear springs on his car). While there is much to admire about NASCAR, I found a recent FOX Sports Net report on "counterfeit" and/or "bootleg" merchandise troubling and illustrative of just how far NASCAR has come over the years .
The main hook used to highlight the alleged problem was the mountain of unauthorized commemorative merchandise related to Dale Earnhardt's tragic death (to illustrate, an Ebay search for "Dale Earnhardt" went from yielding a few thousand items to over a hundred thousand items after his death). Although driver Rusty Wallace and others expressed sadness that bootleggers would try to profit from Earnhardt's death, a representative Ray Childress Racing (Earnhardt's team owner) confirmed that there is currently no official commemorative merchandise for Dale Earnhardt’s fans to buy.
Driver Jeff Gordon seemed quite earnest when he worried that hard working fans who save up to go to races every year might buy a counterfeit item thinking it had "real value" only to find out it was a fake. This contradicted one of the show's main contentions, that being that counterfeit merchandise was easy to distinguish from the real thing.
So after all of the bluster the viewer is left with the question, "Is counterfeit and bootleg NASCAR merchandise the grand problem the show made it out to be?" If one accepts the assertion that counterfeits are easy to spot and therefore avoid, the potential for fraud seems miniscule. If fans buy counterfeit merchandise it can be assumed that they are doing so knowingly. If there is no official Dale Earnhardt commemorative merchandise to be had, how can those who provide it be villianized since clearly the market demand was enormous? The only thing really going on is that entrepreneurs are finding an unmet demand and meeting it. Bootleg merchandise may be lower quality but it is probably lower priced than official stuff. Those who can afford and desire the real thing still buy it.
As for the charge of profiteering off Dale Earnhardt's death, FOX Sports Net ran a "Behind the Glory" episode about Earnhardt after his death which I'm guessing contained paid advertisements. I bought a Dale Earnhardt commemorative issue of Sports Illustrated which cost six dollars and had a back page ad for a hard-bound edition costing twenty dollars. I mention the Sports Illustrated issue only because one its articles hypocritically condemned the Ebay profiteers selling Dale Earnhardt window stickers.
I'm not condemning FOX Sports Net or Sports Illustrated for anything but hypocrisy. People want information and goods that pertain to Dale Earnhardt; the media and others have provided it. Everyone is made better off than they would otherwise be.
The worst aspect of FOX Sports Net special was the comments of driver Rusty Wallace. Wallace assured the viewers that helicopters and FBI agents would be around the track looking for and arresting bootleggers. I can't imagine pioneer NASCAR drivers like Buck Baker or Curtis Turner saying something like that.
April 13, 2001
Greg Davis is an avid reader of Austrian economics and business history books.
