"Smiling Bob" Waves Goodbye To NASCAR Fans

Few topics have generated as much email as the interesting ads featuring "Smiling Bob" and his permanently smiling wife.

Many NASCAR fans felt that Bob and his rather thinly disguised pitch for an "performance enhancer" called Enzyte should not have been seen in NASCAR TV programs oriented toward the family.

While medical drugs like Viagra and Levitra focus their advertising on tasteful and sometimes humorous approaches to promoting their product, Enzyte was different.

The advertising never crossed any line that involved nudity or profanity, but the entire character of "Smiling Bob" was beyond tasteless for many. The themed commercials pitched Bob as a dolt who simply made his way through life blissfully unaware that his wife liked to tell her friends all about Bob's "new found confidence."

Apparently, many men went directly to the phone and picked-up a free supply of Enzyte after seeing Bob and his wife smiling a lot. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the Enzyte product. It was all a scam.

A credit card number was required to pay the shipping fee for the free samples. The company then began to charge that credit card for monthly deliveries of the herbal mixture. When you got the free sample, you had automatically enrolled in the monthly plan.

Complaints were referred to a non-existent department within the company and customers who said the product did not work were asked to go to their doctor and get a note to verify the "problem." Needless to say, eventually some folks were going to be heading for jail.

Click here for the story from the AP about the 42 year-old president of the company that sold Enzyte going to federal prison for 25 years. Conspiracy, fraud and money laundering were going-on at the company constantly even while the ineffective but harmless mix of herbal suppliments continued to be shipped nationwide.

It was several years ago that complaints first began to surface about the male enhancement product. Click here for a USA Today story about the real ingredients of Enzyte. "It makes no sense medically," said one well-known Urologist.

All the same, many TV networks were happy to take the cash from this company despite the on-going federal investigation and publicity. Perhaps, the final result of this scam will be a new set of standards for national TV advertising of herbal solutions that are not federally tested and have no actual medical value. The TV networks were the conduit that made this corruption possible.

All of this took place in the Cincinnati area, and you can click here for the final article where the details of just how corrupt and devious the company practices actually were to customers. The judge in the case had trouble with the sentence because no one could really calculate just how many hundreds of millions of dollars this scheme had generated.

So, "Smiling Bob" will not be returning to the airwaves and will slowly fade to become just another fascinating element of this culture and a Wiki page on the Internet forever.

The remaining ED products advertised in NASCAR are prescribed medical drugs promoted by well-known pharmaceutical companies and prescribed by a physician. It certainly was an interesting run, but so long "Smiling Bob."

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Saturday on SPEED: Trucks and Shows

This should be a fun day to watch SPEED with the diverse NASCAR programming and the unusual circumstances taking place in Richmond.

The Craftsman Truck Series crew is in Gateway and will originate three programs on Saturday. Rick Allen will host qualifying at 11AM live with Phil Parsons and Doug Richert alongside this weekend. Krista Voda will be back with The Set-Up at 2PM. Coverage of the race itself will start at 2:30PM. Ray Dunlap and Adam Alexander will round-put the TV crew as pit reporters.

Over in soggy Richmond, SPEED will bring Tradin' Paint with John Roberts and Kyle Petty along at 12:30PM. This week the media guest will be Jenna Fryer, who is one of the most popular guests. This AP reporter always had some interesting opinions.

NASCAR Performance is next at 1PM. Hosted by Larry McReynolds along with Chad Knaus and Bootie Barker, the show offers a discussion of NASCAR topics from a crew chief perspective.

Next up is NASCAR in a Hurry at 1:30PM hosted by Randy Pemberton. The show catches viewers up-to-date on the events at the track since the Cup Series arrived.

This post will host your comments about the Saturday line-up on SPEED. To add your TV-related comment, just click on the COMMENTS button below and follow the easy instructions. The rules for posting are located on the right side of the main page.

Thank you for taking the time to stop by, the full weekend NASCAR TV schedule is listed on the main page.

TV Networks Scramble To Make A Happy Ending For Fans

Once NASCAR made the announcement of the big Richmond schedule change there were certainly a lot of phone calls and emails flying in the sports TV world. Networks directly affected were ABC, ESPN, SPEED and ESPN2.

The biggest blow is that the Sprint Cup Series race steps-off the very big stage of the ABC television network in prime-time on Saturday night and moves to ESPN on Sunday at 1PM.

One interesting note is that ESPN has decided not to originate a NASCAR Countdown show before this race. Needless to say, this is a big event in the season-long Sprint Cup Series.

On ESPN the highly-rated NFL Countdown show is scheduled from 11AM to 1PM and over on ESPN2 there is a IRL support race. This is the live finale for the Indy Lights from 12:30 to 1:30PM.

The decision not to move the ESPN2 program and originate the full one hour NASCAR Countdown show for this crucial final race before The Chase is a big one. What a tough call.

It will actually be SPEED that takes advantage of this situation and schedules the NASCAR RaceDay program from 11AM to 1PM. This puts SPEED back in the position of covering the events at the track right up until the network TV coverage of the race begins.

Just a reminder, Sprint RaceView on NASCAR.com is free for the Sunday afternoon Cup race by clicking here for the link page. This is a fun computer broadband application that shows multiple camera angles, driver audio and has lots of other gadgets.

Over on ESPN2, there will be a thirty minute edition of NASCAR Countdown at 6:30PM as the lead-in to the Nationwide Series race coverage at 7PM.

Despite the Nationwide race being live, SPEED is going to keep the normal Sunday night block of SPEED Report at 7PM, Victory Lane at 8PM and Wind Tunnel at 9PM.

Currently, we are still waiting to see if ESPN decides to add a Sunday night episode of NASCAR Now to wrap-up the long day of racing. Once we get that info, we will pass it along.

Now that Sunday is set, let's turn out attention to Saturday. There is still a lot of NASCAR TV to be seen and all of it is on SPEED. At 11AM, Rick Allen will host NCTS qualifying live from Gateway with Phil Parsons. Doug Richert will be stepping-in this week for Michael Waltrip who is in Richmond.

At 12:30PM, the always opinionated NASCAR AP reporter Jenna Fryer brings her views to Tradin' Paint. John Roberts hosts this program and Kyle Petty is the other panelist.

That will be followed at 1PM by Larry McReynolds and NASCAR Performance. Bootie Barker and Chad Knaus join McReynolds and these three talk NASCAR strategy and other interesting topics from a crew chief perspective.

At 1:30, NASCAR in a Hurry will try to find something to show fans for thirty minutes. This show recaps the happenings from the time the teams arrived at the track up to show time. TV veteran Randy Pemberton will have the challenge of making this show into something memorable.

Krista Voda appears at 2PM to host The Set-Up. This is the pre-race show for the NCTS and is always interesting. Allen and company begin the race coverage next at 2PM. Ray Dunlap and Adam Alexander will be patrolling pit road for the Trucks.

There is no info on what programming the ABC stations will be using to fill Saturday night now that NASCAR is gone. SPEED is going to stick a re-air of Trackside into the Midnight timeslot that Victory Lane was going to use.

All-in-all, a scramble that resulted in some good decision-making from the TV networks to keep on-the-air most of the NASCAR TV that fans have come to know each weekend from the two remaining NASCAR TV partners, ESPN and SPEED.

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