Before you read these articles, here is some information you might need.

[NickHolt]

Before you read these articles, here is some information you might need.

1) If the article didn't fit in the scanner, I had to make two or three pages out of the article, which often makes the article all broken up in the post.  I trust you can figure out how it's supposed to read. 

2) Sometimes the print is very small.  To make a page of the article larger, just click on that page and a new screen will pop up with a larger version.  To make it even bigger, click that new page and it will get even bigger in some cases. 

3) The date on the stories is the date the article was published, not the date of the event being written about. 

4) Some articles seem very short, but every article I wrote was actually 15 column inches, or more.  The way the sports section worked was that everything was up to the sports editor. How the page looked, how much room was allocated to what sport and to each article, where the story was located on the page, what importance the editor ascribed to each sport, etc, was all up to the editor.  And, of course, sports editors had little 1st-hand knowledge about stock car racing unless it was the Indy 500 or Daytona, so local stock car racing was pretty far down the totem pole.  If the editor needed more space for a Spurs story or a last-minute advertiser, guess whose article got cut.  Yep. 

5) For page layout reasons, the sports desk chief wrote all headlines.  I wrote the story. He wrote the headline.  That meant that every now and then the headline on one of my stories didn't reflect what was written or contained an error.  After a few months, I got wise and wrote a "suggested headline" with each article - which was, more often than not, discarded.

I hope you enjoy these articles. 

Nick Holt