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It’s the holidays. Sometimes they aren’t fun, but we aspire to it. We pay homage to lords, saviors and the like, but, as Tom T. Hall wrote, in “The Year Clayton Delaney died,” “It could be that the Good Lord likes a little pickin’, too.”

That could be. Like Tom T., I’m banking on it.

It could be that the Good Lord likes a little racin’, too.

The late David Poole and I had two versions of the same slogan. I stole mine from Dudley Moore in Arthur: “Isn’t fun the greatest thing you can have?”

David got his from a sign at some county fair when he was growing up: “Fun. You just can’t beat fun.”

To guys like David and me, fun was important, though you’d never get some folks into whom David lit to believe it. He couldn’t have raised hell any better if he’d traveled with an oil well. David, who was a teetotaler but loved golf, raised hell in his way. His rants were the stuff of legend, and he let one fly every day of his life when I knew him.

He must have thought it fun. You can’t beat fun.

As usual in this space, I’m taking a while getting around to why I started writing this in the first place.

I don’t think racing is as much fun. I don’t think the drivers are as much fun. Maybe they are, but there are people whose full-time jobs are dedicated to hiding it.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. represents the last of the NASCAR fun that we can see. Clint Bowyer is fun, but he’s a little calculating with his. Many times I’ve seen Bowyer use his personality to duck out of media conferences, avoiding questions by cracking a joke and hustling out with his handlers while the chuckles were still erupting.

Stuff like that is what makes them think we’re so stupid. They also think that because we don’t make much money.

Junior, if a man (or woman) has credentials that will get him (or her) within a country mile, will sit around and still shoot the bull. In the early 1990s, when I arrived full-time on the NASCAR beat, guys like that were everywhere.

Sterling Marlin would call a writer up in the transporter to show him a deck of cards, where, if you thumped the queens in all four houses just right, they’d all strip naked before your eyes. Harry Gant would tell a whopper just to see how gullible the sober and sensitive fellow with the tape recorder was. Darrell Waltrip was as slick as a snake. Dale Earnhardt would call a writer every vile expletive banned from the Book of Mormon just for fun. Then he’d asked if the writer had ever hunted mule deer in the Rockies. Few had.

Maybe today’s race drivers have every bit as much fun, but fun has changed.

The most fun I ever had was with David Pearson, who was long retired by the time I got there.

A formal interview with Pearson was futile. The discerning writer had to get Pearson laughing. Then he didn’t care what anybody thought.

My favorite Pearson one-liner was when a writer asked “what do you think it says about how NASCAR has changed” that a sport once sponsored by cigarettes was now embracing products designed to help folks quit smoking. (I think it was a Nicorette media conference.)

“I think it pretty much says NASCAR’ll do anything for money,” Pearson cracked wisely.

Anyone who ever thought race drivers were dumb never traded barbs with Pearson. No one who drives a race car can possibly be dumb. The split-second problem-solving required to wrestle a race car around a track at breakneck speeds for three hours is not possible for dumb people. Race drivers are highly intelligent; many of them are poorly educated, but anyone who’s seen my income taxes – I hope that’s a small number – knows the difference between intelligence and education.

I’m hanging on. So is Pearson, I hear. December 22 is the day he turned 82. His health is declining. No one should feel undue sorrow for a man who would have taken better care of himself had he known he was going to live so long. Pearson has crammed more life into 82 years than Methuselah wedged into 969. I heard that when Methuselah died, he didn’t look a day over 850, but I can’t say because they didn’t have videotape back then, not even on ESPN.

I wouldn’t be surprised if David Pearson outlived me. Of course, if that happens, I wouldn’t know.

Every column should have a purpose, and most of mine do. A man ought to know what people think of him while he’s still alive. The first time I met Pearson, I was about 12 years old, and our paths crossed at the Spartanburg downtown airport, where my daddy was negotiating a deal with a crop duster he needed to spread the fertilizer Daddy was selling to peach farmers.

I just shook his hand and told Pearson he was my all-time hero, above even Johnny Unitas and Carl Yastrzemski. I was aware, even at that young age, that greatness was in the conditioned air of the little terminal that was more like a real-estate office.

He was the best. At this late lap of caution in his life, he still is.