That one year, I flew out to Sioux Falls for the Summit League basketball tournament, on account of IPFW had a real shot at winning and reaching Basketball God's Country, aka the NCAA Tournament.
(The Mastodons didn't. Came close. Lost by three in the title game to North Dakota State when a kid named Taylor Braun went all hero ball on them in the last three minutes.)
Anyway ... Sioux Falls wasn't the edge of forever, but it felt like it. Ten minutes or so west of the city the countryside opened up and it was Great Plains Central. The Badlands were out there somewhere. Mt. Rushmore. North Dakota was to the north; Nebraska and Oklahoma were to the south, Colorado and the Rockies to the west.
In other words: It did not feel like home.
Home is where what is now Purdue Fort Wayne -- forget the blue-and-white; you'll get black-and-old-gold now and like it -- will be going next July.
Home is the Horizon League, an address that's been making all kinds of sense for at least five years and finally will be PFW's address. School and conference officials announced the move yesterday, to an unspoken chorus of "It's about time." The Horizon League, after all, is Cleveland State and Detroit Mercy and Wright State and Illinois-Chicago, IUPUI and Northern Kentucky and Oakland (Mich.). It's a Midwest league. It's what the Summit League used to be -- much of the Horizon League are Summit League alums -- before it packed up and moved west.
The Summit League is now the Dakotas and Colorado and Oklahoma and Nebraska. It's a Great Plains league. It's a football league, particularly if you're North Dakota State and South Dakota State, a couple of perennial FCS powers. It's no place for a non-football-playing regional campus stuck out there on an island a six-hour bus ride east of the next easternmost Summit League school (Western Illinois).
I don't know how the travel budget alone didn't take down the whole IPFW/PFW athletic department, these past few years. So from that standpoint alone, moving back in with its Midwest pals will be an immediate boon to the operating ledger.
Otherwise, culturally and geographically, the Horizon is home. There are four other regional schools in the league. It does not play football, and its headquarters is in Indianapolis. Old rivalries with IUPUI, Oakland, Northern Kentucky will be renewed, and there won't be any more road trips to the edge of forever.
Detroit and Chicago are three hours away. Dayton, home of Wright State, is two-and-a-half. Cleveland's three-and-a-half. Indy's two. So no more Oregon Trail and wagons ho.
And now I find myself thinking about Southern Utah University, and how oddly the worm turns sometimes.
Southern Utah, once upon a time, was in the Summit League. It's located in Cedar City, Utah, and back in the day it was Purdue-Fort Wayne's doppelganger.
Just as PFW is now too far east for the Summit League's footprint, Southern Utah was too far west. Like PFW, it didn't fit. Like PFW, it was the outlier, the square peg, the one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other. So in 2012, the Thunderbirds left to join the Big Sky.
But now?
Now, Southern Utah would fit right in with the Summit League; it even plays football. And it's Purdue-Fort Wayne who no longer fits in.
Your geography lesson for today, or something.
Wednesday, August 7, 2019
Tuesday, August 6, 2019
Gamer madness
Well. I guess that settles that.
You are right, Mr. President. I confess.
Pole Position made me do it.
Pole Position or Super Mario Brothers or Fortnite, one of those evil video games that turn peace-loving young white boys into bloodthirsty mentally ill killers. Yes, that must be it. The next time some angry white guy grabs the military grade weaponry he picked up at his local big box store ("I'll take a Slim Jim ... a Red Bull ... and six AR-15s, please.")? The next time he grabs a sackful of clips and drives 600 miles to shoot up another big box store because there were too many brown people shopping there?
It won't be because he was all hopped up on the constant stream of racist paranoia being fed him by Our Only Available President and his enablers at Fox "News." Oh, no.
It'll be Call of Duty's fault.
Holy mother of pearl. Does the madness ever end?
And is there any debunked theory whose rotting corpse OOAP won't exhume to duck his own role in that madness?
Look. I get the obliviousness. I get the lack of self-awareness. No one wants to admit he or she might have played a role in what has become our No. 1 national security threat, white supremacist terrorism. No one, least of all Donald J. "Donny" Trump himself, is going to recognize the intergalactic absurdity of suddenly decrying everything he's been stoking for so many years -- and as recently as last week.
But the video game dodge is especially laughable, if indeed any thinking human being can summon a laugh at this point. Not only has its connection to real-world violence indeed long been debunked, it's especially absurd given that there's an entire sport devoted to it now.
The Blob has always been skeptical of e-sports, but that is mostly because it's reached full Old Man Shouting At Clouds citizenship. It's hard for me to regard as sports an activity you can engage in while crushing a bag of Doritos. But that's just me.
Thing is, e-sports is big business now. Lots of cash is on the line in all the big national events. But if you follow OOAP's line of reasoning, such as it is, e-sports should be banned. Because they're incubating an entire generation of psychopathic hollow-eyed killing machines.
This, of course, is ridiculous. To my knowledge, no serious professional gamer has yet gone a killing spree because he could not longer distinguish between video games and real life. Not even less-serious gamers have.
My son, for instance, spends a lot of his downtime in the summer killing Japanese and Germans and insurgents. Oh, not for real, of course. He does it playing his many versions of Call of Duty. In a given summer he'll wipe out entire battalions.
Yet I have no fear that someday he'll do it for real. Partly this is because he's immune to the gun culture; he's never really cared for firearms. Mostly it's because he's not an idiot, and knows the difference between right and wrong.
Also, he doesn't watch Fox "News." Or OOAP.
I consider this a sign of superior intelligence, frankly.
I only wish I could find an old Pole Position game. I'd kick his butt.
You are right, Mr. President. I confess.
Pole Position made me do it.
Pole Position or Super Mario Brothers or Fortnite, one of those evil video games that turn peace-loving young white boys into bloodthirsty mentally ill killers. Yes, that must be it. The next time some angry white guy grabs the military grade weaponry he picked up at his local big box store ("I'll take a Slim Jim ... a Red Bull ... and six AR-15s, please.")? The next time he grabs a sackful of clips and drives 600 miles to shoot up another big box store because there were too many brown people shopping there?
It won't be because he was all hopped up on the constant stream of racist paranoia being fed him by Our Only Available President and his enablers at Fox "News." Oh, no.
It'll be Call of Duty's fault.
Holy mother of pearl. Does the madness ever end?
And is there any debunked theory whose rotting corpse OOAP won't exhume to duck his own role in that madness?
Look. I get the obliviousness. I get the lack of self-awareness. No one wants to admit he or she might have played a role in what has become our No. 1 national security threat, white supremacist terrorism. No one, least of all Donald J. "Donny" Trump himself, is going to recognize the intergalactic absurdity of suddenly decrying everything he's been stoking for so many years -- and as recently as last week.
But the video game dodge is especially laughable, if indeed any thinking human being can summon a laugh at this point. Not only has its connection to real-world violence indeed long been debunked, it's especially absurd given that there's an entire sport devoted to it now.
The Blob has always been skeptical of e-sports, but that is mostly because it's reached full Old Man Shouting At Clouds citizenship. It's hard for me to regard as sports an activity you can engage in while crushing a bag of Doritos. But that's just me.
Thing is, e-sports is big business now. Lots of cash is on the line in all the big national events. But if you follow OOAP's line of reasoning, such as it is, e-sports should be banned. Because they're incubating an entire generation of psychopathic hollow-eyed killing machines.
This, of course, is ridiculous. To my knowledge, no serious professional gamer has yet gone a killing spree because he could not longer distinguish between video games and real life. Not even less-serious gamers have.
My son, for instance, spends a lot of his downtime in the summer killing Japanese and Germans and insurgents. Oh, not for real, of course. He does it playing his many versions of Call of Duty. In a given summer he'll wipe out entire battalions.
Yet I have no fear that someday he'll do it for real. Partly this is because he's immune to the gun culture; he's never really cared for firearms. Mostly it's because he's not an idiot, and knows the difference between right and wrong.
Also, he doesn't watch Fox "News." Or OOAP.
I consider this a sign of superior intelligence, frankly.
I only wish I could find an old Pole Position game. I'd kick his butt.
Sunday, August 4, 2019
Killing fields
This is no morning to visit Sportsball World, by the Blob's lights. If you came looking for that -- if you came looking for some light-hearted banter about how the Yankees and Red Sox play one another every week these days -- you might as well leave now. I personally don't give a damn.
See, I can't help you today. I can't put on the happy face for you, toss around witticisms like rose petals, crack frivolously about frivolous pursuits.
I can't do this because there are 20 people dead in El Paso at the hands of a white supremacist parroting many of Our Only Available President's talking points. I can't do this because there are nine people dead in Dayton, bodies strewn about an American street on a summer night as if it were Omaha Beach on D-Day. So I can't be Jolly Old St. Nick today. It would feel obscene.
Look. This is not going to be another anti-gun screed; I'm not anti-gun, as I've made abundantly clear many times. So don't accuse me of politicizing tragedy, the way our lackey politicians and our lackey president undoubtedly will of anyone who suggests maybe it's time we at least tried to make it a smidge harder for the insane and the aggrieved to arm themselves like Army Rangers.
I'm one of those anyones. That doesn't make me anti-gun. It merely makes me sane. But I've given up trying to talk sense to the gun fetishists who think I'm the crazy one, and who have elevated the Second Amendment to religious canon.
Fine, boys and girls. And congratulations. You've got the country you always wanted.
Although good luck surviving your next trip to Walmart.
A score of people didn't yesterday in Texas, a state where packing heat is as natural as breathing. There apparently were people packing in that Walmart yesterday, according to witnesses. Yet no one took out the shooter with a couple of well-placed hero rounds, like they do in the movies. This is because real life isn't the movies.
In real life, people freeze in those situations. In real life, with chaos happening in real time, sorting out what exactly is going on is a lot harder than it is in the movies. And in Texas, where so many real people find it necessary to strap on a Glock-9 for trips to the mall ...
Well. Maybe, in all the chaos, it was hard tell who were the "good guys with guns," and who weren't.
I don't know. I only know I'm sick of it all.
I'm sick of this Slaughter of the Week culture created for us by cowed politicians and powerful special interest lobbies.
I'm sick of thoughts and prayers, not because they're inappropriate -- they're always appropriate in the wake of these tragedies -- but because the thoughts and prayers are never backed up by action. Which ultimately makes them as hollow as reeds.
I'm sick of living in a country where I'm told by the gun lobby and its bought politicians that the answer to aggrieved white men with guns -- and lately it's almost always aggrieved white men with guns, the real terrorists attacking America these days -- is to stock up on guns myself. Which of course is the whole point.
Slaughters of the Week are good for business, you see. The more slaughters there are, the more Americans are frightened into thinking buying a gun is not a discretionary purchase, but a staple. Like gas or groceries.
I'm sick of that. And I'm sick of our Demagogue in Chief telling me -- OK, not me; I'm white -- that if I am sick of it, I can just go back where I came from.
Well. I'm not going anywhere. Or, actually, I am.
I'm going to the grocery. I'm going to the mall. I'm going to the movies, to a restaurant, to a concert, to church if I choose to do so. And I'm not going armed. The rest of you want to turn America into the wild West, have at it. I'm not playin'.
And to the American terrorists shooting up America and trying to make me think twice about going to the aforementioned places?
To hell with you. Come at me. And to hell with the lobbyists and their political toadies who've made us think twice, and who suggest we should all just buy a gun if we don't like that.
Thoughts and prayers for those of who don't, I guess. Word has it they're great at stopping bullets.
See, I can't help you today. I can't put on the happy face for you, toss around witticisms like rose petals, crack frivolously about frivolous pursuits.
I can't do this because there are 20 people dead in El Paso at the hands of a white supremacist parroting many of Our Only Available President's talking points. I can't do this because there are nine people dead in Dayton, bodies strewn about an American street on a summer night as if it were Omaha Beach on D-Day. So I can't be Jolly Old St. Nick today. It would feel obscene.
Look. This is not going to be another anti-gun screed; I'm not anti-gun, as I've made abundantly clear many times. So don't accuse me of politicizing tragedy, the way our lackey politicians and our lackey president undoubtedly will of anyone who suggests maybe it's time we at least tried to make it a smidge harder for the insane and the aggrieved to arm themselves like Army Rangers.
I'm one of those anyones. That doesn't make me anti-gun. It merely makes me sane. But I've given up trying to talk sense to the gun fetishists who think I'm the crazy one, and who have elevated the Second Amendment to religious canon.
Fine, boys and girls. And congratulations. You've got the country you always wanted.
Although good luck surviving your next trip to Walmart.
A score of people didn't yesterday in Texas, a state where packing heat is as natural as breathing. There apparently were people packing in that Walmart yesterday, according to witnesses. Yet no one took out the shooter with a couple of well-placed hero rounds, like they do in the movies. This is because real life isn't the movies.
In real life, people freeze in those situations. In real life, with chaos happening in real time, sorting out what exactly is going on is a lot harder than it is in the movies. And in Texas, where so many real people find it necessary to strap on a Glock-9 for trips to the mall ...
Well. Maybe, in all the chaos, it was hard tell who were the "good guys with guns," and who weren't.
I don't know. I only know I'm sick of it all.
I'm sick of this Slaughter of the Week culture created for us by cowed politicians and powerful special interest lobbies.
I'm sick of thoughts and prayers, not because they're inappropriate -- they're always appropriate in the wake of these tragedies -- but because the thoughts and prayers are never backed up by action. Which ultimately makes them as hollow as reeds.
I'm sick of living in a country where I'm told by the gun lobby and its bought politicians that the answer to aggrieved white men with guns -- and lately it's almost always aggrieved white men with guns, the real terrorists attacking America these days -- is to stock up on guns myself. Which of course is the whole point.
Slaughters of the Week are good for business, you see. The more slaughters there are, the more Americans are frightened into thinking buying a gun is not a discretionary purchase, but a staple. Like gas or groceries.
I'm sick of that. And I'm sick of our Demagogue in Chief telling me -- OK, not me; I'm white -- that if I am sick of it, I can just go back where I came from.
Well. I'm not going anywhere. Or, actually, I am.
I'm going to the grocery. I'm going to the mall. I'm going to the movies, to a restaurant, to a concert, to church if I choose to do so. And I'm not going armed. The rest of you want to turn America into the wild West, have at it. I'm not playin'.
And to the American terrorists shooting up America and trying to make me think twice about going to the aforementioned places?
To hell with you. Come at me. And to hell with the lobbyists and their political toadies who've made us think twice, and who suggest we should all just buy a gun if we don't like that.
Thoughts and prayers for those of who don't, I guess. Word has it they're great at stopping bullets.
More reefer madness
Or, in this case, PED madness.
Remember the other day, when the Blob made sport of the En Eff Ell's uneven-handedness in doling out punishment, particularly in regards to PED use ("Bad! Very bad!") versus domestic violence ("Wait ... is there video? No? OK, then.")
It's how Tyreek Hill basically skated on allegedly punching his toddler while Golden Tate got a four-game rip because, essentially, he and his wife were trying to get pregnant. Apparently there was some sort of no-no magic bean in the fertility drug Tate was taking, and, even though he alerted league authorities that it might cause him to show red, he got a sitdown, anyway.
Because, after all, a fertility drug could be a gateway to harder drugs. Today you're just trying to get pregnant; tomorrow you're mainlining Secretariat's DNA.
Pure silliness, I know. But you think that's something? That's nothing.
For even more silliness, we go to Los Angeles, where running back Steven Jackson, who hasn't played in the NFL since 2015, signed a symbolic one-day deal with the Rams so he could retire a Ram. After all, Jackson played the majority of his career with the Rams, and is the franchise's all-time leading rusher.
Nice little gesture, then. Nifty little training camp tidbit.
Except.
Except for the fact that, after signing, he got a summons from the league to take a drug test.
No, I'm not making that up. They really wanted him to come in and pee in a cup before he officially retired.
Jackson politely declined, for the excellent reason that the whole notion was numbingly stupid. And to his credit, he even had a sense of humor about it, joking on Twitter that perhaps the league had heard about him summiting Mt. Kilimanjaro.
Of course, if there's video of that ...
Remember the other day, when the Blob made sport of the En Eff Ell's uneven-handedness in doling out punishment, particularly in regards to PED use ("Bad! Very bad!") versus domestic violence ("Wait ... is there video? No? OK, then.")
It's how Tyreek Hill basically skated on allegedly punching his toddler while Golden Tate got a four-game rip because, essentially, he and his wife were trying to get pregnant. Apparently there was some sort of no-no magic bean in the fertility drug Tate was taking, and, even though he alerted league authorities that it might cause him to show red, he got a sitdown, anyway.
Because, after all, a fertility drug could be a gateway to harder drugs. Today you're just trying to get pregnant; tomorrow you're mainlining Secretariat's DNA.
Pure silliness, I know. But you think that's something? That's nothing.
For even more silliness, we go to Los Angeles, where running back Steven Jackson, who hasn't played in the NFL since 2015, signed a symbolic one-day deal with the Rams so he could retire a Ram. After all, Jackson played the majority of his career with the Rams, and is the franchise's all-time leading rusher.
Nice little gesture, then. Nifty little training camp tidbit.
Except.
Except for the fact that, after signing, he got a summons from the league to take a drug test.
No, I'm not making that up. They really wanted him to come in and pee in a cup before he officially retired.
Jackson politely declined, for the excellent reason that the whole notion was numbingly stupid. And to his credit, he even had a sense of humor about it, joking on Twitter that perhaps the league had heard about him summiting Mt. Kilimanjaro.
Of course, if there's video of that ...
Saturday, August 3, 2019
By any other name(s)
It used to be so easy, back in the day. Dale Earnhardt was the smirking dark lord in the black No. 3. Jeff Gordon was your daughter's date for the junior prom. Mark Martin was the wizened little guy who looked like he was 105 years old and subsisted on apples and air.
And the Brickyard 400?
It was the Brickyard 400. That's it. Nothing else.
Now?
Well, I saw an Indianapolis Motor Speedway online ad hawking tickets to this year's Brickyard 400, only it wasn't the Brickyard 400. It was something called the "Big Machine Vodka 400 at the Brickyard, powered by Florida Georgia Line." Takes you almost as long to spit out the entire official name as it does to run the thing.
Plus it has more syllables than there'll be fans in the stands, if the recent trend continues.
Such irony in that, or something. What started out as the plain old Brickyard 400 drew north of 250,00 future Trumpalinas, until everyone discovered it was the Tournament of Roses parade with faster floats. Now it's the "Big Machine Vodka 400 at the Brickyard, powered by Florida Georgia Line," and it's a good day if 50,000 show up for it. The longer the name, the emptier it gets.
And if you're wondering here what the hell Big Machine Vodka is ... well, I did some digging. In other words, I Googled it.
Seems Big Machine Vodka is distilled in downtown Nashville, in a complex that occasionally also serves as an event center. According to the promotional copy, Big Machine Vodka is "25x distilled, 3x platinum filtered. The smoothest tasting vodka, period!"
Which goes absolutely nowhere in explaining why I've never heard of it. Or you, either, I'm guessing.
Oh. And if you're wondering how the Brickyard 400 is powered by a couple of country-and-western musicians ...
Beats me. Maybe it has something to do with their amp setup.
And the Brickyard 400?
It was the Brickyard 400. That's it. Nothing else.
Now?
Well, I saw an Indianapolis Motor Speedway online ad hawking tickets to this year's Brickyard 400, only it wasn't the Brickyard 400. It was something called the "Big Machine Vodka 400 at the Brickyard, powered by Florida Georgia Line." Takes you almost as long to spit out the entire official name as it does to run the thing.
Plus it has more syllables than there'll be fans in the stands, if the recent trend continues.
Such irony in that, or something. What started out as the plain old Brickyard 400 drew north of 250,00 future Trumpalinas, until everyone discovered it was the Tournament of Roses parade with faster floats. Now it's the "Big Machine Vodka 400 at the Brickyard, powered by Florida Georgia Line," and it's a good day if 50,000 show up for it. The longer the name, the emptier it gets.
And if you're wondering here what the hell Big Machine Vodka is ... well, I did some digging. In other words, I Googled it.
Seems Big Machine Vodka is distilled in downtown Nashville, in a complex that occasionally also serves as an event center. According to the promotional copy, Big Machine Vodka is "25x distilled, 3x platinum filtered. The smoothest tasting vodka, period!"
Which goes absolutely nowhere in explaining why I've never heard of it. Or you, either, I'm guessing.
Oh. And if you're wondering how the Brickyard 400 is powered by a couple of country-and-western musicians ...
Beats me. Maybe it has something to do with their amp setup.
Friday, August 2, 2019
Losers, throwin' down
And now it's time for another update in that wildly popular Blob feature, The Battle for the Cel--
("Oooh, no. No, no-no-no-no-no," you're saying.)
--lar, in which the Blob's cruddy Pittsburgh Pir--
("STOP IT! Just STOP IT!")
--ates have reached new levels of stupendous cruddiness, settling in a comfortable 3 1/2 games behind the not-quite-as-cruddy Reds, with a 47-61 record that includes losses in ni--
("La-la-la-la-la, I'm not listening, I'm not listening!")
--ne of their last 10 games.
So they're solidly winning the Battle, with two months left in the season. And they can fight, too!
Also throw at people's heads, which accounts for the fighting.
It seems Our Lads and those scurvy Reds don't like each other much, perhaps because each sees their own innate cruddiness reflected in the other. And so, because they don't play baseball very well, and because Our Lads, again, like to throw at people's heads, they got into another bench-clearing brawl the other night.
Of course, "bench-clearing brawl" does not have quite the same meaning in baseball as it does in, say, hockey. This bench-clearing brawl, for instance, followed all the basic tenets of baseball fights: Two or three combatant wading into one another, and everyone else sort of milling around pulling guys off other guys and trying to look involved while actually just trying not to get hurt.
Still, Major Baseball League takes a dim view of this sort of thing. Which is why it handed down 40 games of suspensions for the latest fracas, led by Pirates pitcher Keone Kela, who got 10 games for (do we really need to repeat this?) throwing at the Reds' Derek Dietrich's head. Pirate teammate Jose Osuna got five games and Bucs manager Clint Hurdle got two, which suggest MLB thinks Our Lads instigated the whole thing, even though the Reds have (or had) Yasiel Puig.
The Blob's totally unbiased take on this is that Joe Torre, MLB's head suspension-hander-outer, likes Cincinnati more than he likes Pittsburgh. Maybe it's the Hudepohl beer.
In any case, the Blob cries foul. Do not disagree.
I'll throw at your head.
("Oooh, no. No, no-no-no-no-no," you're saying.)
--lar, in which the Blob's cruddy Pittsburgh Pir--
("STOP IT! Just STOP IT!")
--ates have reached new levels of stupendous cruddiness, settling in a comfortable 3 1/2 games behind the not-quite-as-cruddy Reds, with a 47-61 record that includes losses in ni--
("La-la-la-la-la, I'm not listening, I'm not listening!")
--ne of their last 10 games.
So they're solidly winning the Battle, with two months left in the season. And they can fight, too!
Also throw at people's heads, which accounts for the fighting.
It seems Our Lads and those scurvy Reds don't like each other much, perhaps because each sees their own innate cruddiness reflected in the other. And so, because they don't play baseball very well, and because Our Lads, again, like to throw at people's heads, they got into another bench-clearing brawl the other night.
Of course, "bench-clearing brawl" does not have quite the same meaning in baseball as it does in, say, hockey. This bench-clearing brawl, for instance, followed all the basic tenets of baseball fights: Two or three combatant wading into one another, and everyone else sort of milling around pulling guys off other guys and trying to look involved while actually just trying not to get hurt.
Still, Major Baseball League takes a dim view of this sort of thing. Which is why it handed down 40 games of suspensions for the latest fracas, led by Pirates pitcher Keone Kela, who got 10 games for (do we really need to repeat this?) throwing at the Reds' Derek Dietrich's head. Pirate teammate Jose Osuna got five games and Bucs manager Clint Hurdle got two, which suggest MLB thinks Our Lads instigated the whole thing, even though the Reds have (or had) Yasiel Puig.
The Blob's totally unbiased take on this is that Joe Torre, MLB's head suspension-hander-outer, likes Cincinnati more than he likes Pittsburgh. Maybe it's the Hudepohl beer.
In any case, the Blob cries foul. Do not disagree.
I'll throw at your head.
Thursday, August 1, 2019
Smoked
Tony Stewart got caught on video taking a swing at a particularly obnoxious heckler the other night, and here's the remarkable thing about that: It did not become a thing.
Oh, it indeed showed up in USA Today and some other publications, but no one called the cops and NASCAR, ever image-conscious until image-consciousness started hurting the gate, has thus far not requested an apology tour from one of its marquee team owners. This seems like a rare outbreak of sanity in an America in which every little thing becomes a, you know, thing.
This time, the general consensus is that the heckler had it coming when Smoke went all Smokin' Joe on him, to loud and profane hell-yeahing from the fans for whom he was signing autographs. It may not be the sort of behavior you want to see from your car owners if you're NASCAR, but allowances must occasionally be made.
Smoke, after all, is Smoke, and always will be. And everyone seems to understand this.
Which is not to say he should go around throwing right hooks at hecklers, no matter how deserving of it they are. This one, for instance, was heckling Stewart because his engine blew after just one lap in a sprint car race in Minnesota, where all this occurred. Why that earned Stewart some trash-talking is a mystery known only to our heckler.
Now, the Blob will admit to some bias here. I've talked to Stewart a number of times. I like the man. He's a no bullspit guy in a frequently bullspit world. And his outlandish success at the top levels of his sport never chased him away from his roots.
How many other guys like him regularly go back to the local dirt tracks from which he sprang, racing on Saturday nights in Flyspeck, Iowa, just because he still likes to hang with the guys who scrape together every dime they've got to go racing? He even bought one of those places -- Eldora over in Rossburg, Ohio, a sweet little dirt bullring set down pretty much in the middle of nowhere.
Smoke's kind of place. Smoke's kind of people.
And taking a swing at some tool?
Not the first time he's done something like that; you can ask any number of drivers and motorsport writers with whom he's gotten into, shall we say, altercations. Probably won't be the last.
As he himself would no doubt say: Deal with it.
Oh, it indeed showed up in USA Today and some other publications, but no one called the cops and NASCAR, ever image-conscious until image-consciousness started hurting the gate, has thus far not requested an apology tour from one of its marquee team owners. This seems like a rare outbreak of sanity in an America in which every little thing becomes a, you know, thing.
This time, the general consensus is that the heckler had it coming when Smoke went all Smokin' Joe on him, to loud and profane hell-yeahing from the fans for whom he was signing autographs. It may not be the sort of behavior you want to see from your car owners if you're NASCAR, but allowances must occasionally be made.
Smoke, after all, is Smoke, and always will be. And everyone seems to understand this.
Which is not to say he should go around throwing right hooks at hecklers, no matter how deserving of it they are. This one, for instance, was heckling Stewart because his engine blew after just one lap in a sprint car race in Minnesota, where all this occurred. Why that earned Stewart some trash-talking is a mystery known only to our heckler.
Now, the Blob will admit to some bias here. I've talked to Stewart a number of times. I like the man. He's a no bullspit guy in a frequently bullspit world. And his outlandish success at the top levels of his sport never chased him away from his roots.
How many other guys like him regularly go back to the local dirt tracks from which he sprang, racing on Saturday nights in Flyspeck, Iowa, just because he still likes to hang with the guys who scrape together every dime they've got to go racing? He even bought one of those places -- Eldora over in Rossburg, Ohio, a sweet little dirt bullring set down pretty much in the middle of nowhere.
Smoke's kind of place. Smoke's kind of people.
And taking a swing at some tool?
Not the first time he's done something like that; you can ask any number of drivers and motorsport writers with whom he's gotten into, shall we say, altercations. Probably won't be the last.
As he himself would no doubt say: Deal with it.
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