If racing had a gentleman’s agreement, Winston Cup cars would still be running at North Wilkesboro Speedway.

Only in golf, where fans don’t yell and the ball doesn’t move, is there a gentleman’s agreement. In racing, the only agreement is to refrain from putting the other guy in position to be seriously hurt.

At the drivers’ meeting before Sunday’s Dodge/Save Mart 350, Robby Gordon asked officials several times about passing under a yellow flag.

He was told there was no gentleman’s agreement to stop him. So every driver at Infineon Raceway knew, or should have, what Gordon would do if he were presented with the opportunity to pass on a caution lap.

The time to engage Gordon in debate was then, not later. Jeff Gordon (who really, really is no relation to Robby) ripped Robby Gordon after the race and so, in a more succinct manner, did Kevin Harvick. It was Harvick’s car Robby Gordon passed under caution on the 71st of 110 laps.

Robby Gordon, Jeff Gordon and Harvick, all California natives, finished one, two and three on the California track. You want to know why Robby Gordon, who won the race, passed Harvick? He passed him because he could.

Here’s how human nature works. If somebody offers you a better deal, you take it. That’s what Robby Gordon did.

That’s what NASCAR did when it left North Wilkesboro after 1996. That’s what NASCAR did when it announced the week before last that it was yanking a race out of North Carolina Speedway in Rockingham and replacing the coveted Labor Day race at Darlington, S.C., with a lesser one.

As ratings, ticket prices and the top three finishers in Sunday’s race attest, racing no longer is a Southern sport. Folks around the South have bemoaned the change in the schedule. They bemoaned the change at North Wilkesboro, too.

But when was the last time somebody even mentioned North Wilkesboro? In time, small-town tracks are remembered less as places that lost a race than places that had one.

What NASCAR did to North Wilkesboro, which hosted its first big-time race in 1961, is what Wal-Mart has done to ma and pa grocery stores. It’s not pretty and it’s not folksy and it’s not nice. It’s what people do. NASCAR saw a better deal and took it.

Miami, Syracuse and Boston College were offered a better deal by the ACC so they tried to take it.

If you were offered a better deal from a competitor, think you might? The athletics director at Connecticut – the state in which Big East schools, Connecticut among them, filed a suit against Miami, Boston College and the ACC – received such an offer. He just accepted the athletics director’s job at Kansas. What are you going to do? Sue?

Robby Gordon saw an opportunity to enhance his chance to win the race and he took it. There was no gentleman’s agreement.

On Sunday afternoon, with hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake and teammates and owners and sponsors and fans desperately urging their driver to win, there are no gentlemen.

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(c) 2003, The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, N.C.).

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PHOTOS (from KRT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): NASCAR

AP-NY-06-23-03 2105EDT