They'll green-flag the 50th Daytona 500 two days from now amid much pomp and flyovers, and it's safe to say the celebration wouldn't be as golden if there hadn't been a 21st Daytona 500.

Or as outrageous a 21st Daytona 500 -- put it that way.

The year was 1979, back when a friend was a friend, an enemy would just as soon punt you into the wall as spit in your goggles and you could tell a Chevy from a Ford by more than the decal they slapped on the sucker. The old-timers -- they look at today's cookie-cutter cars and today's cookie-cutter tracks (and all that cookie-jar cash) and just shake their heads.

"We went down there 1959,'60,'70,'80 or whatever," Richard Petty said not long ago. "Every year we had a different car. We didn't go to [the] wind tunnel. We didn't test. We just took the cotton-pickin' thing down there, put it on the race track and went out and ran with what we had."

That same Richard Petty won the'79 Daytona race, by the way.

But that's not why it ranks now as the jumping-off point for the corporate 18-wheeler we know as NASCAR.

(Or, as we say in back-to-basics land, "Brian's toy.")

NASCAR had puttered along for its first couple of decades -- stereotyped as redneck and relegated to "Wide World of Sports" segments when it could pitch the product to TV at all. Then came Daytona 1979 and the decision by CBS to televise the 500 from start to finish on a Sunday when a snowstorm paralyzed the East Coast. Stay-at-homes -- this was pre-cable, remember -- had few options to blunt cabin fever.

"So we had a captive audience," Petty said. "Fate's funny, you know what I mean?"

The race those earthlings witnessed -- and most of them didn't know Buddy Baker from Buddy Hackett -- was a spectacular crash-a-rama by way of Jerry Springer. It began innocently enough with 16 caution laps to dry a rained-on track and finally boiled down to the last lap, with Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough running 1-2.

Yarborough tried to go low. Allison blocked him. There was contact. Lots of contact. The two cars banged and careened into the soggy infield as Petty whipped past them en route to the win.

"Going over 200 miles per hour," Yarborough dead-panned the other day, "cars don't handle too well in the mud."

Yarborough was a pugnacious sort -- a one-time high school fullback from Timmonsville, S.C. He and Allison exited their cars and jawed at one another. Allison's brother, Bobby -- no Mister Rogers himself -- drove up. He and Yarborough had words. It was an uh-oh moment.

"My recollection is I questioned his ancestry," Bobby said. "He ran at me and hit me in the face with his helmet. It bloodied my nose and cut my lips. I got out of the car, and Cale Yarborough got to beating on his fist with my nose. That's my story, and I'm sticking with it."

The entire, loony scene was caught on TV. Live. Millions of eyebrows perked up ("So that's what stock-car racin' is all about"). Water-cooler conversations were sparked. Petty saw only the replay -- and it would re-play and re-play and re-play -- and pronounced it "more exciting than who won the race." NASCAR had a marketing windfall and ran with it all the way to the bank and beyond.

And still does. NASCAR is coast to coast these days, awash in greenbacks and TV coverage and a presence in the nation's boardrooms. And it all took root in 1979.

"Everywhere I go, it is brought up all the time still to this day," Yarborough said. "I hated to lose that race. But it's the greatest thing that ever happened to NASCAR."

Even in its sanitized condition of 2008 -- ask Tony Stewart -- Bill France U. trades on it still.