Indy. Helio. Some day-after thoughts

 One by one they came to him, after he stopped the car and climbed the fence as of old. After he climbed down and knelt on the wall and wept and rose again, mock-conducting the roar from the fans with a wave of his arms, the roar that waterfalled down on him from 135,000 souls that sounded more like half-a-million.

They came to him, as Helio Castroneves got down off the wall and jogged the wrong way down the track, and the fans -- God bless the fans -- kept making their sound. As he celebrated like no Indianapolis 500 winner has ever celebrated, because how many times in 110 years does a man achieve this sort of milestone?

That's an easy one: Four times. Four times a man has won the 500 for the fourth time. And the last time it happened was 30 years ago.

And so Helio jogged and cried and waved his arms, and now here they came. And it was not just his race team and his team owners, Mike Shank and Jim Meyer. 

It was everyone. 

Here came Will Power, his old teammate from Penske Racing. Here came the rest of the Penske guys. Here came Juan Pablo Montoya -- Helio actually leapt into his arms -- and Simon Pagenaud and Conor Daly, and now at last true royalty.

Mario Andretti.

Who leaned over the pit wall to congratulate him. And when Helio dipped his head before this Indy prince, Mario kissed it.

There may have been more popular winners at Indianapolis. No, scratch that. There haven't been.

This was Dale Earnhardt finally winning Daytona in 1999, every crew member of every team lining up to congratulate him as he rolled slowly toward Victory Lane. Like Earnhardt, like Mario, Helio is a prince himself at Indy, and was long before Sunday afternoon, when he joined A.J. Foyt, Al Unser Sr. and Rick Mears as four-time winners a dozen years after winning his third. 

That owes more than just to his absurd skill, understand. It also owes much to the man himself, so endlessly cheerful and engaging and accommodating that he has become not just respected by fans and rivals, but beloved.

And it was one hell of a show he and his 32 friends put on Sunday.

It was billed as the kids vs. the old hands, and the kids lived up to the billing. Twenty-one-year-old Colton Herta went to the front on the very first lap. Twenty-year-old Rinus VeeKay led three times for 32 laps. Twenty-two-year-old Pato O'Ward led 17 laps. And Alex Palou, 24, led 35 laps and turned it into a duel to the checkers with Helio in the closing laps.

Five times in the last 50 laps they swapped the lead, the last time on Lap 199, when Helio swept around the young Spaniard on the outside three laps after Palou swept around him. 

And that was that. No way on God's earth was the old hand going to give the kid another opening.

Thus, again, 2021 remains the Year of Geezer Revenge, the 46-year-old Castroneves joining 43-year-old Tom Brady and 50-year-old Phil Mickelson on the top step of the podium. That he did it for a rookie racing team in its very first IndyCar start -- after 10 fruitless years of chasing No. 4 for Penske -- only gave the storyline a bit more shine.

Not that it needed any, of course. Not that any Indy 500 in memory ever shone brighter as it was.

Remembrance of things lost

 Memorial Day weekend, and out on O'Day Road the sun is shining and the sky is blue and it's '68 again, '69, '70. Joe Walsh is singing about the glories of Rocky Mountain Way. A Huey evac chopper is beating at the air as it settles in to land, side doors open, men and women peering out.

A few feet away, men hold tight to their bush hats against the prop wash, transported God knows where in their memories. 

They are old now, these men. They are gray-haired and white-haired and the beards they sport, some of them, give them the look of haunted Santas. Because this is all just a setpiece, out here on O'Day Road. That's a cover band rocking through Joe Walsh, and the Huey is a restored 1970 model taking the old vets and their wives on peaceful rides, and it's not really '68 or '69 or '70, not at all.

Memorial Day weekend, and they are dedicating the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial. And they have brought the traveling version of the Wall to commemorate, panels and panels of names stretching away, beginning ankle high and growing until the names stretch far above your head.

The names are Thomas C. Treadway and Harlin P. Treen and Vicente D. Perez. 

They are Sam Tenorio and Wilson N. Flowers and Edward O. Bilsie

They are Jimmie D. Brown and Lanny M. Hamby and Marcas J. Garcia and Vincent Saldano, all of whom died between 23 Sep 1968 and 28 Oct 1969, along with Valentine B. Suarez and David L. Sackett and dozens and dozens more.

Every one of them on this stretching-forever wall had families, and some of them had wives and some of them had children. None of them came home to them from Vietnam. Names and names and names, all of them lost in some benighted place halfway around the world, all of them remembered now on this weekend.

Memorial Day is not a happy day, nor is it supposed to be. It is not about thanking some uniform for his or her service. It is about all of those who did that service, and who didn't survive it.

It is about the dead -- the truest heroes of this filthybusiness of human beings killing other human beings, most of whom didn't ask for any of it.

It is about the men in bush hats and caps porcupined with unit pins, shuffling slowly along the panels and bending close occasionally, searching for their lost brothers.

"Find who you were looking for?" I ask one of the bush hats, whom I'd noticed peering intently at one of the panels.

"Yep," he says.

And then: "Well, four of 'em. There's 12 on there somewhere."

Twelve brothers. Twelve men -- kids, really, most of them -- he laughed and lived and ate and likely got drunk with.

Twelve who didn't make it back.

He did, and so he's here. Because it's his job to remember them, on this weekend and all weekends.

And now here comes the Huey again, beating the air. The cover band screeches away. American flags flutter in the cool breeze, and the old men search, and the panels stretch on and on, names and names and names again, sacrifice in every one.

Fan-dumb

 It's an iffy undertaking, determining the gestation period of nostalgia. Just how Back In The Day does Back In The Day have to be before gooey longing for it is legit?

In other words: Is it too soon to miss the Bubble Days of Bastard Plague Sportsball World?

Because, listen, the fans are back, and that's a good thing. But also, the fans are back, and they're just as hideous as ever.

And that's a bad thing.

Come with us now to Madison Square Garden the other night, where some jamoke spit on Trae Young of the Atlanta Hawks. And come to Philadelphia, ground zero for idiot fan behavior, where some cheesesteak-head dumped popcorn on Russell Westbrook of the Washington Wizards as he limped off injured. And come out to Salt Lake City, where three sheet-and-hood Jethros shouted racial slurs at the family of Memphis Grizzlies guard Ja Morant.

Hey, look! Over here! Is that a couple of drunk women brawling in the cheap seats at a White Sox game?

Why, yes, it is. Isn't it great, having the fans back again?

Now, before you start in, let me offer the standard disclaimer: Most fans are not brain-cell deficient drunks, louts and racist turds. And no one seriously denies having them back restores Sportsball World's soul. Without them, it's all just a bunch of overgrown boys and girls playing catch in the backyard,

But, damn, don't those overgrown boys and girls bring out the stupid in the human species.

Part of it's entitlement, of course, because tickets, parking and concessions leave you as arm-and-leg-less these days as the Black Knight from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." And, gee, the players make all that money for throwing a ball through a hoop or across homeplate or to Gronk down the middle. And so why can't Joe Fan spit on them and say vile things?

I'm sure the sheet-and-hood Jethros out in Utah were thinking that when they shouted this at Ja Morant's dad, who is black: "I'll put a nickel in your back and watch you dance, boy."

Nice. And it's not just a Utah thing, of course.

Kyrie Irving took some heat the other day for making a passing reference to Boston as a bastion for sheet-and-hood jamoke-ery, but he wasn't wrong. Boston's rep as one of the nation's most racist cities goes back decades and is well-earned;  Bill Russell was the first to call out the city for it half-a-century ago, and Boston made national news in the '70s when white folks from Southie rioted over desegregation of the school system.

That didn't even happen in Mississippi when they desegregated the schools. So there's that.

As for what happened in Utah and New York and Philadelphia ... well, here's some truth for ya: The price of admission, no matter how exorbitant, entitles you to nothing. It entitles you to sit your ass down, cheer for your guys and boo the refs.

That's it. That's all.

The good news is, the various organizations understand that, and acted swiftly and accordingly. The Knicks banned the guy who spit on Trae Young from the Garden "indefinitely." Utah fans around the Morants lit into the Jethros when they started vomiting their spew, and Jazz coach Quin Snyder and his star player, Donovan Mitchell, were furious.

Snyder called for a lifetime ban for the Jethros. Mitchell said "there's no place for that in life, not even just in the game of basketball."

As for the 76ers ...

Well. They banned from Wells Fargo Arena the guy who dumped popcorn on Westbrook -- who had to be restrained by security from going after him.

The Blob's take on that: Too bad security did its job so well. Too bad.

Crudball*

 (* - Suggested musical accompaniment: Yakety Sax)

Time now to check in with the Blob's favorite not-really-a-major-league-baseball-team, the cruddy Pittsburgh Pirates, and before you all start whining about how nobody cares about my stupid Pirates, let me say you might actually enjoy it this time.

In a, you know, SNL skit, Comedy Central, Yakety Sax sort of way.

We take you now to yesterday afternoon in P-town, where Javi Baez of the Cubs has just hit a routine grounder to third. The Pirates' third baseman scoops it up, fires it over to the first baseman, and then ...

Well. See for yourself. 

Now, some folks will applaud Baez for some heads-up baseball. Far more of us, however, will stare slack-jawed at the exquisite dumbness of the Cruds, who took stupid baseball to heretofore unimagined levels with the most Crudtastic display of Cruddiness since Fred Merkle did that stupid baserunning thing back in 1908.

Show of hands here. How many people watched this and shouted "JUST STEP ON THE BAG, DUMMY!" 

You? You? All of you?

And how many people shouted "DON'T SUDDENLY LOB THE BALL TO THE CATCHER, DUMMY!" 

You? You? All of you?

And how many people shouted "WHERE DO THE CRUDS GET THESE PEOPLE? TEE-BALL? THE MOE, LARRY AND CURLY INSTITUTE FOR PHYSICAL COMEDY?"

OK. So that was just me shouting that.

You hesitate to call this the dumbest defensive sequence in baseball history, because that covers a lot of waterfront. I'm sure, somewhere in the mustiest corners of baseball's past, there was a play where a routine groundout resulted in an entirely idiotic rundown, a run, two really bad throws and the grounder-outer winding up safe on second.

On second thought ... nah.

The Crud stands alone on this one. That's my conclusion.

Your Probably Wrong Again Prediction

(I wrote this for my old employer, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. It's local journalism, and local journalism is more important than ever in an age when greedhead vulture capitalists are resolutely trying to kill it. So, the Blob humbly requests you subscribe, like, yesterday. 

Here's the link:  http://subscribe.fortwayne.com/)

Half-A-Loaf Indy, I suppose you can call this. Better-Than-Echoes Indy. Lights-Turned-Low, Roar-But-Not-A-ROAR!, Masses-On-The-Half-Shell Indy.

This Indianapolis 500 will be all of that, when the 33 come to the green early Sunday afternoon. There will once again be humanity, but only half the usual humanity. You'll once again be able, if you're standing down inside turn one at the start, to track the field hurtling toward you by the sound rolling through  the grandstand ahead of it -- even if it won't be quite the same sound as usual. 

And over whom will that sound wash, when the checkers fly 200 laps later?

Well, it probably won't be Marco Andretti. I'm not making that mistake again.

I'm also not picking Tony Kanaan for the umpteenth wrong time or Helio Castroneves for the umpteenth wrong time or Josef Newgarden, who is surely going to win this someday. I'm also not picking Graham Rahal or Simon Pagenaud or anyone in the last row,.

Even though 2018 winner Will Power starts there because he somehow showed up in a Soapbox Derby car this month.

This likely means he'll become the first driver in 105 years to win from the 11th row, because that's how my luck runs. I covered my first 500 in 1977 and my last in 2017, and in all that time my crystal ball has worked right four times. Which probably tells you more about my troubled relationship with technology than anything else.

This year?

Well, it ain't gettin' any easier.

That's because there are suddenly all these kids around, and they're all talented and engaging and fast, so fast. Five races into the 2021 IndyCar season, there have been five different winners, and four of the five -- Alex Palou, Colton Herta, Pato O'Ward and Rinus VeeKay -- are 24 or younger. Palou, Herta and VeeKay are 21 or younger.

Scott Dixon, your polesitter Sunday, may still be the Jedi Master of IndyCar. But suddenly he and the other old hands are surrounded by the most gifted crop of young drivers since Mario Andretti, Gordon Johncock and the Unsers showed up in the mid-'60s, And so probably two-thirds of the field has a legitimate shot to win this.

Sentiment dictates I pick one of the young'uns -- Herta, maybe, who starts in the middle of the front row and has won four times in just 37 IndyCar starts. Or maybe VeeKay, who starts on the outside of the front row and won the Grand Prix of Indianapolis earlier this month, or O'Ward, the only one of the kids to win on an oval so far this year.

Of course, I won't pick any of those guys.

Of course, I'll pick the Jedi Master, even though hardly anyone wins the 500 from the pole anymore.

I'll pick him because, well, he's Scott Dixon, and he's led 452 laps lifetime in the 500, including 111 last year. Also, he last won this in 2008, so he's way past due, and in the 13 years since he's finished in the top five six times and in the top 10 eight times.

Also-also, in the only two oval races this season, he finished first and fourth and led 369 of a possible 460 laps.

Which can only mean one thing, of course.

Enjoy the milk, Marco.

Olympian obstinance

 The Tokyo Olympics kick off in less than two months, unless they don't. Sharper bettors than the Blob (and they're all sharper, frankly) must be thinking it's even money at this point.

I say this because some 80 percent of the Japanese people are clamoring to pull the plug on the Games, on account of like almost every Olympic Games ever, they're likely to be a financial black hole. Also, the Bastard Plague.

Which right now is experiencing a comeback surge in Japan, where hardly anyone has been vaccinated. It's gotten so bad the U.S. issued a Level-4 travel advisory for Japan -- which essentially means "Don't go there." And almost every major health professional in the world (including Japan) is expressing deep concern about going ahead with the Games.

Also, the other day, one of Japan's leading newspapers -- Asahi Shimbun, which is also a local sponsor of the Games -- called on Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to cancel them, joining a number of other prominent Japanese businesses.

The CEO of Rakuten, Japan's leading e-commerce company, even called the Games "a suicide mission."

So, to recap: The Japanese people, the smartest medical minds in the world. the nation's business community and even some of the sponsors are dead set against going ahead with the Tokyo Olympics. 

So who's in favor of it?

Well, the IOC of course, which would conduct the Games inside reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl if the money was right. The plan is to put the whole business in a bubble, and the host country can just shut up about it. 

"None of the folks involved in the planning and the execution of the Games is considering cancellation," IOC member Dick Pound told Selina Wang of CNN the other day. "That's essentially off the table."

Greed has always been one of the leading causes of tone deafness, and the IOC has never been any more immune to it than any other grasping corporate entity. Go back almost 50 years, for instance, and you can hear echoes of Pound's clueless words in the words of then-IOC chairman Avery Brundage, who in Munich in 1972 refused to allow even the murder of 11 Israeli athletes to interrupt the Games.

"The Games must go on," he declared.

And when did he declare this?

Why, at the memorial service for the murdered Israelis, of course. The next day, the Games did go on. No decent mourning period allowed, apparently.

No consideration, either, for the feelings of medical professionals, the citizens of the host country and even some of the sponsors 49 years later.

Some things. Never. Change.

The Old and the Restless

 And now today's episode in that ongoing daytime drama, The Pack Is Slack, which also is  known in some quarters as The Crybabyin' of Aaron. Take your pick, there are two distinct camps here.

One says the Green Bay Packers have bought, by noodle-brained increments, the now-open disgruntlement of their Hall of Fame quarterback.

The other says Aaron Rodgers is a big fat whiner and he should shut up and play, because the Packers are paying him lots of stackable coin to do so.

Taken as a whole it's The Old and the Restless, and in the latest installment, Rodgers did an interview with Kenny Mayne in which he aired all his gripes with the Packers. Then he decided not to show up for an OTA which he wasn't required to attend anyway.

Or at least that's the way "voluntary" is defined in the Blob's dictionary.

In spite of that, this became an Issue, and compelled Packers coach Matt LaFleur and some of Rodgers' teammates to face a flurry of hungry media questions about it. They all said what you'd expect them to say, which is that they all consider Rodgers a vital part of the team because he's one of the greatest ever to play his position, and they're all wishing him well and hope he comes back to them soon.

The mean little cynic who lives inside the Blob interprets this Media Availability Speak in a slightly different way.

LaFleur: Dammit, Packer Front Office, quit jackin' the guy around. You're messin' with my season prep.

Selected Teammates Of Rodgers: Dammit, Packer Front Office, quit jackin' the guy around. You're messin' with our (potential) playoff bonuses.

Now, I'm sure there are other Selected Teammates who are just as mightily torqued at Rodgers, too. But I have a feeling most of them are in the other camp, and probably the reason I feel that way is because I'm in the other camp, too.

I think the Packers have brought all this turmoil on themselves. And the reason I think that  is they've spent the last decade or so treating their Hall of Fame quarterback -- the franchise, not to put too fine a point on it -- like just another guy.

It's not just that they drafted his potential replacement a couple of years ago without giving him the courtesy of a heads-up. It's that they did the same thing when they got rid of his quarterback coach and some of his favorite receivers. And that they keep drafting defensive players instead of receivers and other assorted offensive upgrades.

This leads one to the obvious conclusion that they've taken Rodgers for granted all these years. Paid him well, but taken him for granted.

After awhile that might tend to make a guy resentful. Not to say bitter.

I don't blame Rodgers at all for being both, if he in fact is. He's looking around at the way other franchises treat their franchise quarterbacks -- check out the dough the Chiefs have spent to keep Patrick Mahomes surrounded by weapons and a stout O-line, for instance -- and then he's looking at what the Packers have been doing all these years, and it's got to sting.

He's still under contract to Green Bay, so eventually he'll play, I'm guessing. But when the contract runs out,  it would serve the Packers right if he'd wind up taking snaps for division rival Minnesota, the way Brett Favre once did. Or even worse, the Bears, once they've ruined Justin Fields the way they always ruin young quarterbacks.

Rodgers of the Bears.

Now that would sting.