Hornaday, Martin making boomers proud
The thing about us baby boomers is that for decades we were deemed too young, and now we're considered too old, and we have never accepted either.
We won't quit, go away or even sit down. Hell, even our Beatles music is back.
Two of us are leading the points, gunning for championships, in two of NASCAR's three major series -- Mark Martin in Cup and Ron Hornaday Jr. in Trucks.
Fifty-somethings are nothing new in NASCAR: Richard Petty, Darrell Waltrip, David Pearson and Dale Jarrett all raced until they were 52.
But Martin at 50 and Hornaday at 51 aren't just hanging around at the end like those guys did. They're winning. They're the standards for their divisions.
And who knows when they're going to quit?
Regarding Martin, "I think he's gonna be raisin' hell for a number of years," says Bob Parsons, the colorful founder and CEO of GoDaddy.com (and himself a boomer, Vietnam vet, 1st Marine Division), which just signed to sponsor Martin for two more seasons. Here you have an edgy Internet company, the world's largest registrar of domain names, with a 59-year-old CEO signing a 50-year-old driver through age 52.
"He's in damn good equipment, and it would be hard to hang your hat up, winning races [a series-high five this season] and performing at the level he is," Greg Biffle says of Martin. "So I certainly wouldn't be a betting man on when he's going to hang his helmet up."
As for Hornaday, "I'm going to ride it as far as I can," he says. "Like Delana [Harvick, his truck owner] says, I got a job forever, so I'm having fun doing it."
This, in an era that for a while surely seemed to be a torrential youth movement.
"When I started racing, you had to be 35 to be in your prime, and now you have to be 18," says Hornaday.
"It was kind of a big deal for a 22-year-old to be getting a pole in 1981," Martin recalls. "Now it's not such a big deal at all."
See what I mean? First too young, now too old -- the boomer story, right down to the individuals. We never have been the right age for a sport or a society, so we've learned not to let age bother us.
Of Martin, "I think he's the most dangerous guy [in the Chase]," said Juan Pablo Montoya, after not only being beaten but thoroughly frustrated by Martin in their last-laps shootout on Sunday. "He's the guy with the most experience here. He hasn't won a championship, and he wants one pretty bad."
Plodding through the obligatory nod to Jimmie Johnson, seeking to four-peat, as the man to beat in this Chase, Montoya said, "I mean, I know the 48 is going to be there every week and everything, same as always, but if somebody wants it really bad, it's that 5 guy."
It's still valid to dwell on the fact that Martin hasn't won a championship after four times finishing second in the points and a total of nine times in the hunt, but it's no longer valid to dwell on this maybe being his last shot. He'll have at least two more, with the backing of Go Daddy.
Registering or reregistering a domain somewhere on the planet every second of every hour of every day, GoDaddy.com fits right into author Tom Friedman's "The World is Flat" description of the global socioeconomic revolution of communication and connectivity that is moving so fast that -- well -- even Friedman's book, even updated the past couple of years, is out of date.
"We span all demographics," says Parsons, who doesn't put too much stock in average age. "Our average customer, if there is an average customer, is a male in his mid-30s. But my dad used to tell me, '[Average] doesn't tell the story.' He used to say, 'You take a man and put one foot on a hot stove and the other on a block of ice, and on average, he's comfortable.'"
Besides, Go Daddy's younger customers seem to take to Martin, too.
"The fact that he's a 51-year-old guy [here Parsons is clearly looking ahead to next year], competing and making it in what really is a young man's sport, they kind of like that," Parsons says.
So the young don't consider us boomers stodgy -- it's a bit like my son, 21, tells his friends: "My dad pisses me off sometimes, but my dad is cool."
It's good we get along with the young, because we are America's most powerful generation. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates there are more than 78 million of us baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, and that there'll still be nearly 60 million of us around in 2030. Plus, we're far and away the richest generation ever.
“” -- Ron Hornaday Jr.
When I started racing, you had to be 35 to be in your prime, and now you have to be 18.
I'm often amused that the big advertising agencies haven't kept up with the times, still demanding delivery of audiences 18-34 when we boomers are the ones with all the money. Agencies claim the 18-34 group hasn't formed its buying habits and loyalties yet, but our buying habits and loyalties change all the time -- we don't sit still in our iconoclasm.
Martin and Hornaday personify the trait that may be the boomers' strongest suit: We're the most adaptable generation.
"Before engineers, before technology had infiltrated NASCAR, the driver was the data acquisition," says Martin, "and he was very important, and he could not do that when he was 22. He had to have many years under his belt."
When Martin was young, drivers such as Bobby Allison not only told the crewmen how the cars felt, but exactly what to do to correct the situation -- put in a softer left-front spring, or whatever.
But that era is long gone. The more mechanically ignorant drivers are, the better. They're supposed to sit down, shut up and do what the engineers tell them.
"Fifteen years ago, I probably would have said, 'Put this spring, this spring and this spring in to go to New Hampshire,'" Martin says. "[Now] I don't find out until I get to the trailer what's in the car for here. And if I don't happen to find out [at all], that's not a big issue either."
He has adapted, and it has served him extremely well: Indeed, he credited crew chief Alan Gustafson almost totally for the New Hampshire win, on a track Martin has long considered one of his worst. Like a youngster, he has learned to sit down, shut up and listen to the engineers. Many of his peers couldn't adjust, and that's why Martin is still around at 50 and his old friends are either gone or running in the back.
His boomer followers have adapted with him. I get as much or more e-mail from boomers -- you can tell when they begin by saying they've been fans since the 1960s, '70s or '80s -- as from 20- and 30-somethings. Boomers are savvy on the Internet, and have followed us boomer journalists in our transitions from print media into Web sites and television. (The names of some of my strongest detractors or supporters, I often recognize from back in the Sports Illustrated and Tribune Co. newspaper chain years, so they've clearly made the transition to the Internet.)
For a century Americans quoted Mark Twain: "Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter."
But it took the generation of Mark Martin and Ron Hornaday to come along and actually live by that.
Ed Hinton is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He can be reached at edward.t.hinton@espn3.com.
