Good riddance

It's New Year's Day on our frail little rock, and I suppose that means resolutions and Little Baby 2024 putting Tottery Old Man 2023 on the street (How cruel we are to our seniors!), and hope in our hearts that the new year won't be as big a shiteshow as we all know it's going to be.

But first, a few last words about 2023.

You really decided to whiz in our cornflakes on your way out the door, didn't you?

One last day to show some damn contrition for all those you took from us across your 365 days, and what do you do? You take one more. And not just any one more, but a freaking legend in his proscribed universe.

You took Cale Yarborough

He died on New Year's Eve, at the well-lived age of 84, and, listen, young'uns, he was a hell of a man. Grew up in little ol' Timmonsville, S.C., where he played high school football and boxed a little and wound up wrestling stock cars around back when NASCAR was Richard Petty and David Pearson and two Yarboroughs spelled different -- Cale Yarborough and Lee Roy Yarbrough, which is how you knew they weren't related. 

NASCAR was a lot cruder in those days, not all corporate and glossy the way it is now. It was Southern boys makin' up for Gettysburg by leadfooting a bunch of Plymouths and Pontiacs and Mercurys and Dodges on both asphalt and dirt, and occasionally settling matters with their fists.

Speaking of which, it was Cale and the Allison boys doing a bit of the latter that took NASCAR national back in 1979.

It was the weekend of the Daytona 500 and half of America was snowed in by a massive winter storm, and the Great American Race was aired flag-to-flag for the first time. With nothing else to do, America watched. And what America saw, down there at the end, hooked it for keeps.

What America saw was Cale and Donnie Allison bangin' door handles on the last lap as each went for the win, and finally crashing one another out. Then Donnie's brother Bobby came screeching to a halt next to them. And then, as Petty took the checkers half a lap ahead, there they all were out of their cars throwing hands and feet and even a racing helmet in a full-on brawl.

"What the hell is THIS?" America thought, presumably.

And kept watching from then on.

And while The Fight might have been how NASCAR and Cale Yarborough wound up on the national radar, the irony was it happened at the end of a decade dominated by the latter. He won three straight Cup titles in the '70s, the first man ever to do so. When he retired after winning six races and finishing second in the points in 1980, he'd won Daytona four times, the Southern 500 five times, and 83 Cup races in all.

In 2012, all that got him into the NASCAR Hall of Fame.

And now he's gone, a man from a wholly different era to whom the current era owes much. One last kick in the tender parts from 2023, the treacherous old coot.

Good riddance. Don't let the door hit ya, and all that.