Tony Stewart went fishing last week with legendary Alabama driver Red Farmer.

“Between you guys (the media) and everybody else, you keep us running around doing so many ‘Mickey Mouse’ things that we don’t have an opportunity to have a life,” Stewart said. “So to have an opportunity to get in the deep woods of Alabama and go fish for some nice largemouth bass, that was exactly what the doctor ordered.”

If Stewart thinks he was doing a lot of Mickey Mouse things before, he’s going to feel like he’s running Disney World if he can hold onto the Winston Cup points lead for the final six weeks of the 2002 season.

Even before he took over the lead with his second-place finish in last Sunday’s EA Sports 500 at Talladega, Stewart seemed a likely candidate to take charge in what has been a very strange championship chase.

He was 36 points behind Jimmie Johnson and 25 behind Mark Martin when Sunday’s race started, but when it was over he was 72 ahead of Martin and 82 ahead of Johnson. He also is the fourth driver to lead the standings in the past five weeks.

Stewart’s pattern over his first three seasons in Winston Cup has been to finish strong. He’s won races at four of the six tracks remaining on this year’s schedule, and while he’s never won at Lowe’s Motor Speedway, he has finished sixth or better in five of seven starts at the site of Sunday’s UAW-GM 500, including the past four in a row.

“Being the favorite doesn’t mean a darn thing to me,” Stewart said after taking the lead at Talladega. “I’ve led points championships before.”

Stewart has won titles in the U.S. Auto Club and the Indy Racing League. But although he’s finished fourth, sixth and second in the final standings in his previous three years in the Winston Cup series, Stewart has never really been in the thick of a stock-car championship stretch drive.

For the first time in his four years on the Winston Cup circuit, Tony Stewart leads the points standings, 72 points ahead of second-place Mark Martin.

Things will be different this year.

More race fans and photographers will buzz around him at the track, the very things that have helped put him in the soup several times already in his racing career.

There will be more press conferences and more interviews, and he will be asked questions about his altercation with a photographer at Indianapolis, for which he was fined a total of $60,000 and placed on probation by NASCAR and his team’s sponsor, The Home Depot. There will be more questions about the anger management counseling he agreed to in the aftermath of that incident.

Stewart needs to be ready to deal with that. Jeff Gordon dealt with the pressure every time as he won his four championships. Bobby Labonte and Dale Jarrett endured it on the way to their titles. Stewart will not be set upon by a howling pack of jackals, but he can’t expect to avoid the same distractions other champions coped with.

Stewart said last Sunday he was proud of the way he dealt with the weekend at Talladega. He’d blown an engine in the season-opening Daytona 500 and finished last, wrecked at Talladega in the spring and finished 29th, and wrecked again at Daytona in July and finished 39th. More trouble at the season’s final restrictor-plate race may have doomed his title hopes.

“It’s no secret that I’ve hated restrictor-plate racing,” Stewart said. “My mindset this whole weekend has been calm. I told Zippy (crew chief Greg Zipadelli) after an hour and a half of practice I didn’t cuss anybody to myself and I wasn’t screaming ‘I hate restrictor-plate racing!’ I just did my job and that’s all I did today.”

After Sunday’s race, a reporter asked Stewart what it would mean to him to win the championship.

“What do you think it would mean?” he said. “It’s a question that doesn’t even need to be asked.”

It’s hard to tell his tone by seeing those words on paper. Stewart didn’t snap at the reporter. It wasn’t a confrontation. The question wasn’t the most penetrating one asked in the history of sports journalism. It was, however, the kind of question Stewart will be asked several times in the next six weeks if he continues to hold the lead in the Winston Cup points standings.

Reporters know the championship is a big deal, but it’s the drivers fans want to hear from. And as it turned out, Stewart did actually have a good answer.

“It would mean more than anything,” he said. “Everybody in this garage area is searching for a Winston Cup championship even the guys who have won it. That’s what we’re all striving for.”

In paper or in person, that answer sets a different tone than his first response.

As long as he holds the points lead, Stewart will also set the tone for this championship stretch run. He won’t be able to make the next six weeks as relaxing and enjoyable as going fishing with Red Farmer, but he can keep it from seeming like six weeks of root canal.