In the 21st century, spectator sports are big businesses that are popular around the world. They're such elaborate enterprises involving so many venues and people that it's hard to imagine their humble beginnings. And all of them — football, baseball, basketball, and even stock car racing — started out with a bunch of guys messing around. The team-oriented ball sports began in a field or gym as low-key athletic games, but stock car racing, the American-made sport of pitting fortified and specially engineered cars against one another on an oval track in events that last the equivalent of hundreds of miles, started in a much more roguish and extraordinarily illegal manner.

Long before the historically important Daytona 500 became an annual happening, NASCAR was officially launched in 1949

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