The hard-driving fellows who make left turns for a living have gone straight to the top of the TV ratings charts. No more jokes about spinning their wheels or running on corn whiskey.

“On cable television, the NASCAR Winston Cup circuit is the second-highest rated sport there is, second only to the NFL,” said Patti Wheeler, who producers auto racing for The Nashville Network.

NASCAR is higher-rated than basketball or baseball, and it attracts more viewers than ice hockey or ice fishing. Golf doesn’t cut it, and even exercise guru Denise Austin’s gluteus maximus pales in comparison.

If that’s hard to believe, consider that Winston Cup ratings on CBS, ABC, ESPN, TNN and TBS were up 25 percent in 1995 over the year before and routinely draw Nielsen numbers in the 5’s, which are huge for cable.

“It’s just amazing what’s happened in the last decade certainly, but in the last year, it’s just exploded,” said former Winston Cup champion Ned Jarrett, who does a weekly magazine show for TNN. “You wonder sometimes if the bubble is going to burst. It’s been phenomenal.”

Last year, the Winston Cup had three races on CBS, two on ABC, 14 on ESPN, seven on TNN and five on TBS. This year, ESPN has added two races and TNN will do one more, while TBS is down to two. The 1996 Winston Cup makes its debut on CBS on Feb. 18 with the Daytona 500.

In the meantime, NASCAR will have dozens of Busch Series and SuperTruck races scattered around the dial, and ESPN2 and TNN have added studio shows.

Wheeler’s father, Humpy Wheeler, is president and general manager of Charlotte Motor Speedway, a legendary figure in auto racing and a promoter extraordinaire. So, at only 32 years old, she’s had an opportunity to witness stock car racing’s transition from a small-town, dirt-track sport to the big time.

“When I was a teenager growing up in Charlotte, stock car racing wasn’t mainstream, so for me to walk into a convenience store in Phoenix and see a full-sized cutout of Rusty Wallace is unbelievable,” Wheeler said. “When I grew up, you wouldn’t even have seen that in Charlotte.”

Big corporate sponsorships are partially responsible for the growth of the sport, Wheeler said, and NASCAR might also have benefited from last year’s labor problems in baseball and hockey. Jarrett adds America’s renewed love affair with the automobile to the list NASCAR’s attractive qualities.

“NASCAR has done a wonderful job of keeping the rules intact, so the cars at least look like Fords or Chevies or Pontiacs,” Jarrett said. “I think that has a lot of appeal because I still think the American public has a love affair with the American automobile.

“You can go to work Monday morning and say ‘a car just like mine won that race,’ and you can identify and swell up with pride.”

Out takes

ABC will televise the final two days of the Liberty Mutual Legends of Golf tournament, the one that started the Seniors PGA Tour, on March 23-24. Much of the spotlight is likely to be on Chi Chi Rodriguez, who just seems to get better with age.

“I’ll soon be 60 years old, and I’ll be playing in the Legendary division for the first time,” Rodriguez said, and there’s something a little scary in that. The seniors are getting old.

“All the big names are getting to be 60. Gary Player, Miller Barber, Don January. I think Gene Littler is 60. That’s where all the stars are now. We need more big names in the 50-60 division,” Rodriguez said. “I sure hope (Jack) Nicklaus plays. We need those stars.”

Rodriguez, however, fears the aging PGA Tour players won’t need the Seniors Tour like he and his partner, Harold Henning, did.

“When guys like Tom Watson, Fuzzy Zoeller, Tom Kite and Ben Crenshaw, who competed a lot in college, get older … well, they’re going to have so much money, and they’ll be kind of burned out.

“Harold and I? We were born poor, so we had nothing to lose.”

Despite his advancing years, Rodriguez says he isn’t thinking about retiring yet.

“Only fools live in the past and the future. A smart man lives in the time,” he said. “I’m going out this year to be the No. 1 money winner again, and let’s see what happens.”