Life on the road takes on a whole new meaning when the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series reaches Las Vegas. Busch comes home - long enough to realize that he could not do this every week.

This is why stock car racing is better than golf.

Well, let me rephrase that, in the interest of reassuring everyone that two days of counter-clockwise watching of NASCAR drivers and the continual roar of engines at Las Vegas Motor Speedway has not totally fried my faculties or reprogrammed my long-held convictions about sports.

But imagine a tour where Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Ernie Els and Vijay Singh competed every week. That's what NASCAR has going for it, a big reason that racing is so popular.

Viewers can tune in every weekend, resuming a continuing story of the season. Fans can buy a ticket to next year's UAW-Daimler Chrysler 400, knowing that Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and the rest will all be back at LVMS.

That's just not true with golf. The occasional convergence of stars is what makes major tournaments the majors, but the side effect is that too many weekly tournaments lose appeal because the top players are missing. Thanks to a combination of wanting to pursue points and please their sponsors, the walking billboards of NASCAR hit the road every week.

"Knowing that our stars are going to be in every event is a big deal," Gordon said, playing along with the golf comparison. "When you don't know who's going to show up for what tournament, it makes it tough."

NASCAR can rely on everybody driving on every track. There's no worrying about who's in the field to drive TV ratings or ticket sales. Even staging the most celebrated race of the season - the Daytona 500 - as the opening event takes little or nothing away from the rest of the schedule.

Golf's Champions Tour radically reduced its playing calendar in the last few years, dropping the senior event in Park City, among others. The logic was that fewer tournaments would result in having the big-name golfers play together more often, and it seems to have worked. The PGA Tour may also reach that point.

Last week's golf tournament in Miami attracted Woods, Mickelson and Singh. But that served only to highlight the fact that such multiple sightings rarely happen - and even then, Els was missing.

That's not an issue with NASCAR. The weekly rewards of points system is a major reason the drivers go everywhere, but sponsorship demands play an even stronger role.

Asked if he wished he could be like Tiger Woods and take a month off in the middle of the season, Kurt Busch said, "I don't have that option. They want us to race, and we're out here all the time."

Busch, the defending champion of the NASCAR Nextel Cup series, said that good-naturedly. Yet he also recognizes that the schedule is demanding and unrelenting, and that even for a 26-year-old driver, a system that's so comforting to fans has its drawbacks.

"Right now, NASCAR has the 'up' arrow around it, we're the hottest thing going, so we're all going to be out here to race," Busch said. "It's going to wear out the guys quicker; it's going to make the careers shorter. I hope that I'm able to stick it out as long as I can."

Like golfers, stock car racers hardly have an offseason. The official schedule goes from February to November. Busch suggests compressing the races - not eliminating any of them, just doing things a little differently, such as staging three races of varying duration in a week - to lengthen the offseason.

That's a creative idea, which would ultimately give the drivers and crews more chance to recover after the season. But it would no doubt affect attendance and ratings, because fans are accustomed to the weekend routine.

And catering to fans' interest makes NASCAR as successful as it is.

"It's a tough schedule, it's grueling," said legendary team owner Richard Childress, "but you know if you choose this career, that's part of the business."

kkragthorpe@sltrib.com