Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

NASCAR Doesn’t Belong on the Sports Page

By Bob Wire, 5-11-11

	"Nobody replaces the filling in my Twinkies with lite sour cream! NOBODY!"

I’ve never watched an entire NASCAR race. Oh, I’ve seen a few minutes here and there in a bar, or on a big screen while walking through the appliances department at Sears on the way to get a toilet snake or something. For this casual sports fan, a few minutes of NASCAR is enough. How could anyone watch this monotonous show for three hours? I don’t even think this stuff could hold my interest if the Daytona 500 was shortened to the Daytona Five.

It’s just boring. It’s as boring as watching dried paint age. It’s a 300-mile race to Coma City. NASCAR officials know it, the fans know it, even the self-important, preening drivers know it. Track attendance numbers are down, TV ratings are falling, and the confederate flag industry is in a tailspin. That’s why NASCAR officials instituted a new policy a year ago that encourages drivers to “work out their differences” themselves. (Translation: bring on the pro wrestling shtick.) The result has been an explosion of feuds, fights, on-track vendettas and enough shouting matches to reduce the once-proud tradition of stock car racing into a high-speed Jerry Springer episode.

More people are talking and writing about the post-race and pit area shenanigans of the feuding drivers than about who won last Saturday’s race. The recent victory by Regan Smith in the Southern 500—his first career checkered flag—was overshadowed by the pit road squabble between serial hissy fitter Kyle Busch and his arch-nemesis (this week, anyway) Kevin Harvick. Busch, aka the Harbinger of Doom, ran into Harvick late in the race, causing him to spin out. Afterwards, Harvick, aka Sergeant Smackdown, blocked Busch’s car on the pit road and tried to punch him through the driver’s window. I don’t know why Busch didn’t just roll up his windows and lock the door. Maybe push the On-Star button for help. Instead, he pushed Harvick’s empty car into a wall and proceeded to engage him in a Rocky III-style stare-down. Then he hit Harvick across the back with a folding chair. Not really. Busch drove away, presumably to appear on Dr. Phil’s show to talk about his rage issues and his disappointment over not being breast-fed as a baby (“Mom said she only like me as a friend”).

Busch seems to get in more than his share of scrapes with the other drivers. And it’s not like he’s a dumb guy. For instance, in his last pit stop at Fontana two weeks ago, he pulled in and ordered two new tires from the crew. Then he produced a coupon that gave him 50% off the other two. Well played, Kurt Busch. He saved some money, won the race.

After the Southern 500 incident, Busch and Harvick were summoned to meet with race officials in the NASCAR hauler, a sort of mobile principal’s office. Meanwhile, poor Regan Smith stood in the Winner’s Circle with his trophy and a surfboard-sized winner’s check, saying, “Hey, man, I WON the friggin’ race!” while camera crews encircled the hauler. No one ever knows what takes place in the hauler. Rumors fly about fisticuffs, shouting matches, and the odd make-out session (hard to resist a man wearing leather). Both drivers wound up getting fined $25,000 and being put on double-secret probation. But it seems whatever discipline gets handed out in the hauler, it’s not enough to keep the drivers from playing out their soap opera clashes on the track. Hey, fellas, there’s already a sport where contestants get to fight while they race. It’s called roller derby.

Another recent incident featured Ryan Newman and Juan Pablo Montoya reporting to the hauler, helmets in hand, after a race at Darlington. Newman apparently angered Montoya with his driving tactics, and Montoya confronted him in the pits after the race. “My name is Juan Pablo Montoya. You bumped my Chevrolet. Prepare to die.” While in the hauler receiving a stern finger-wagging from race officials, Montoya supposedly hit Newman right in the fist with his face. Neither driver would confirm this, although it was hard to understand what Montoya was saying through all the bloody gauze and cotton packing up his nose.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be into NASCAR, nor am I trying to cast aspersions on fans of racing. It’s just not my cup of Mountain Dew. Still, I have to wonder how the hell hundreds of thousands of fans will spend wheelbarrow-loads of money to see these races every weekend, and then bitch about paying $4.00 for a gallon of gas to run their Chevy Avalanche or F250. A couple hundred years from now, after the fossil fuels have been depleted and we’re back to rickshaws and goat-based transportation, archeologists and historians will scratch their heads about this self-defeating behavior: “Can you believe they used to waste so much petroleum just to entertain themselves? Someone should have punched them in the face.”

And I’ve always wondered why NASCAR is even on the sports page. It should be featured in the entertainment section, right alongside Schwarzenneger’s divorce and the latest escapades of the genetic sinkhole known as the Kardashian sisters. Race car drivers aren’t athletes. They’re go-kart nuts who never grew up. They’re outsized jockeys who look good dressed in leather jumpsuits (well, except for Tony Stewart). Boy, all that turning left and hurling your helmet at another guy’s plastic car after the race must really wear a guy out. I’d like to see any of these clowns tackle an I-5 onramp at 5:30 p.m. in downtown L.A. on a Friday. See what it’s like to trade paint with armed drivers.

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