The Hat That Got Me Laughs All Weekend at Talladega

My son handed me a cap two years ago and said it was for my Talladega trips. It was a FirstCos Talladega Nights hat, the movie joke one, and he had that look on his face like he had gotten away with something. I put it on, looked in the hall mirror, and told him it was the dumbest thing anybody had ever bought me. Then I packed it for the fall race anyway, because he is my kid and he was proud of it.

I want to be plain about what this thing is before I go further. The FirstCos cap is a novelty baseball cap. Cotton, adjustable hook-and-loop strap in the back, movie-themed, and that is the whole of it. It is not official NASCAR team merchandise, and nobody at the track is going to mistake it for team gear. If you want a team hat, this is not that, and I would rather say so now than have you find out in the parking lot.

What it is, is a conversation starter. Linda and I rolled into Talladega on a Friday, and by Saturday morning she had stopped walking beside me in the concourse. Not out of meanness. She got tired of standing there while strangers stopped me to quote lines from a movie that came out twenty years ago. She has seen it. She just did not need to relive it forty times before lunch.

We have been doing this a while, Linda and me. Spring at Bristol, fall at Talladega, and the rest of the season on the couch in the basement with the TV and my recliner. Two races a year in person is what we budget for, so when we go, I want the day to be worth the drive. Some of that is the scanner. Some of it is the seat cushion. Some of it, apparently, is a hat.

The first one was a fella in a folding chair outside the souvenir trailers. He looked at the cap, looked at me, and delivered the line about the baby Jesus with a completely straight face. I gave it right back to him. We stood there ten minutes. He told me he had been coming to that track since 1989. I told him about my dad and the races we watched on the couch in the seventies. Neither of us bought a thing from those trailers. Best ten minutes of the weekend.

Linda counted. Three separate times on Sunday, somebody in the row ahead of us turned around just to say something about that cap.

Sunday was warm, the way Talladega in the fall can still be warm when the sun decides to show up. The cap is cotton and it handles heat about like cotton does, no better, no worse. I wore it from the time we hauled the cooler up the steps until the checkered flag, and I took it off maybe twice. I have a bad left knee and I turned 61 this year, so I am not standing in the sun for entertainment. I am in my seat with my cushion, listening to my scanner, watching the pack go by.

That last part matters more than it sounds. I wear a behind-the-head headset so I can hear team radio, and the band runs around the back of my skull, which means a cap can sit underneath it without a fight. The strap on the FirstCos is hook-and-loop, so I set it once Saturday morning and it stayed where I set it all weekend. Nobody wants to be fussing with a hat strap when the field comes down to the green.

Here is the honest part, because you are not going to get a sales pitch out of me. It is a novelty cap. The stitching is what you would expect, the brim has a little give to it that a stiff fitted team cap does not have, and it is not going to survive being sat on. My brother-in-law asked if it was official, I said no, and he nodded like that closed the case. Fine. He can wear his plain cap and keep his thoughts to himself. He still asked to borrow mine on Sunday.

Two years on, the cap hangs on a hook by the back door and I wear it around the yard most of the summer. It has been to two fall races at Talladega and through a lot of mowing. It has faded some. The strap still holds. For a joke gift from a grown son, that is a better return than most of what is in my closet.

The other thing I would mention is the drive. It is about six hours from Hamilton down to that track, and the cap rides in the console between Linda's coffee and the map she still prints out. By the time we hit the gate I put it on and turn into the fella who talks to strangers. Some of that is the cap. Some of it is just being at the track. Either way, the two go together now.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you it is a cotton novelty cap with an adjustable strap and a movie joke on the front, and that if you want team gear you should buy team gear. I would tell you it has held up two seasons of yard work and two trips to Talladega without falling apart. And I would tell you the part that actually matters to me. I have been going to that track for years and mostly kept to myself. A dumb hat fixed that. People I had never met talked to me like we had known each other a while, and all it took was looking a little ridiculous in the grandstand.

If your kid hands you one of these, wear it. If you are buying it yourself, know what you are getting: a conversation piece that happens to keep the sun off your head, not a piece of team equipment. That is the whole honest picture.