Da prediction

 People keep asking me, because they know what I used to do. It's Indianapolis 500 week, and I covered it for four decades as a professional scribbler, and so of course I must know, of course I have the wisdom of the ages when it comes to predicting who's gonna win the Greatest Spectacle today, other than the rain.

"Beats me," I say. "Could be any of a dozen guys."

Everyone looks crestfallen.

"Oh, come on," they say. "Pick somebody, You've GOT to pick SOMEBODY."

In that case, I say, you could do worse than Alex Palou. Defending champion, starts on the pole, has won three of five races so far on the IndyCar circuit as he pursues his fourth straight title. The Dominator.

Everyone nods.

"Palou," they say. "Well, sure."

Except ...

Except I have this weird feeling he won't be the one slamming the milk at the end today (or tomorrow).

Mainly I say this for the completely irrational reason that it's too easy -- too obvious -- to pick Alex Palou. Indy, after all, doesn't always do obvious on Memorial Day weekend. And when it's this obvious, it hardly ever happens.

Well, OK. Except when Al Unser Sr. won back-to-back in 1970 and '71 in the fabled Johnny Lightning Special. And except when Bill Vukovich won in 1953 and '54. And except when Wilbur Shaw won in the Boyle Maserati in 1939 and '40 ... and when Rick Mears won all those times for Roger Penske ... and when Simon Pagenaud won from the pole in 2019 ... 

Like I said: Irrational.

Except ...

Except that weird feeling won't go away.

It's the feeling I get sometimes when I think this is a year when Indy gets quirky on us, which it's fairly notorious for doing on occasion. How else to explain Mario Andretti only winning the 500 once in 29 starts? Or Lloyd Ruby and Michael Andretti never winning? Or Scott Dixon winning just once, or Ted Horn finishing in the top four, like, every damn year, but never finishing first?

So, no, I'm not picking Palou. I'm also not picking Pato O'Ward, who starts on the outside of Row 2 and has finished second, second and third in three of the last four 500s. He's going to win this race someday. If it's this year, well, that would figure. But I don't think it will be.

Dixon, back there in Row 4? Maybe. Two-time winner Takuma Sato, who led a race-high 51 laps last year and starts on the outside of Row 5? Always up there. Ditto Santino Ferrucci, Marcus Ericsson, two-time winner Josef Newgarden, four-time champ Helio Castroneves.

Ditto Conor Daly.

Who starts in the middle of Row 3 and could very well win this today (or tomorrow), after leading 13 laps and finishing eighth last year for Juncos Hollinger Racing. He's the hometown boy, from just up the road in Noblesville. Makes him a sexy pick for a lot of people.

Me?

Well ...

Well, try this name on for size: David Malukas.

He's a 24-yearold from Chicago who qualified seventh and finished second last year for A.J. Foyt, and now he has Will Power's old ride with Penske. Stuck it on the outside of the front row in qualifying, during which he drove with a calm efficiency that reminded you a little  (OK, so, reminded me a little) of a young Rick Mears. I know, crazy, right?

Know what's crazier?

I think this is a David Malukas kind of year. Write it down.

In pencil, at least.

A real 'dogfight

 The weather was gray, damp and cool at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway yesterday, but the hot(dog)foots were tearin' around the old joint nonetheless. They were sizzlin' four wide down the long straightaways and playin' ketchup through the perilous turns, but only one mustard the wherewithal to relish the victory.

OK, OK. I'll stop.

(Maybe)

But, hey, how could you not get carried away by the second annual Wienie 500, a two-lap speedfest featuring six Oscar Mayer Wienermobiles. Buns and wienies blazed around the hallowed Brickyard at a blistering 50 mph or so, and when the condiments settled New York Dog had beaten the rest of the pack(age) to the checkers.

"Grilled those losers!" said the winning wienie pilot, Dario Frank-Eatie, who credited the radical bun-length design of his delicious ride for his late pass of runnerup Chili Dog.

OK, O-KAY. I'm stopping. Promise.

(Or not.)

Meanwhile, last year's inaugural wiener, Slaw Dog, got shuffled back in the fierce jockeying for position and finished third. Driver Wilbur Slaw filed a formal complaint post-race, claiming the rest of the field was driving "like a bunch of  ***damn Italian sausages out there."

"Wow, wonder what's got his buns so steamed?" said Chili Dog's chauffeur, Mauri Rolls, who--.

Hey. What are you doing with that Guilden's Spicy Brown?

Put it down. I mean it. PUT IT DOW--

Shock and awe

 You never think the leadfoots are gonna go out like this. There's your home truth for today.

There's your home truth now that Kyle Busch is gone, at 41, not in some metal-shredding Big One at Talladega or Daytona but from something too small to see with the naked eye. Died three days before the Coca-Cola 600, his next gig. Died of what for now is only being called a "severe illness" that first sent him to the hospital yesterday morning, and then ended his life a few hours later.

Deadly Virus Or Something Kills The One They Called "Rowdy": Now there's a shocker of a headline for you.

It's a shocker, first of all, because when a race driver gets tagged with a nickname like Rowdy, it's not usually because he's a gentleman on the racetrack. It's because he's a purebred SOB with a big mouth and an even bigger ability to drive the wheels off anything you put him in.

That was Kyle Busch to a fare-thee-well when he came into NASCAR at 19 -- he actually drove in a truck race when he was just 16, finishing ninth -- and if the years and a wife and family killed off the punk in him, it didn't file down his edges completely. Just a couple of weeks before his death, in fact, he was going back and forth with his crew chief about some on-track outrage or other, and when his crew chief suggested he re-focus on the job at hand, Rowdy sneered, "OK, pysch major."

And then suggested the crew chief put a bag of ice on his crotch to calm his ass down.

That was vintage Kyle Busch, and if you didn't like it, well, you could just sit on it and spin. Busch couldn't have cared less. He actually courted the crowd's disfavor on occasion, gesturing the boo-birds to bring it louder after he'd won one race or another.

And there were a lot of those one-race-or-anothers. Because you can't talk about the shock of Kyle Busch's passing without also talking about the awe of his talent.

He won in every iteration of NASCAR, and no one did it better. No one has ever won more than the 234 races he won in the series top three tiers, and his 63 Cup wins are ninth alltime. He's the only driver ever to win 100 races in the NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts series, and his 69 wins in the truck series also is the most alltime.

He won two Cup titles for Joe Gibbs, made the Chase at 19, and won the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis back-to-back in 2015 and 2016. And if he'd ever decided to show up at Indy in May, he likely might have won the 500, too. He was that good.

And the rest of it?

Hell, that was just old-school NASCAR, when the good ol' boys used to put one another into the fences (and occasionally through or over them) in pursuit of the checkers. And then settled any and all disputes with their fists when the racin' was done.

Now, Kyle Busch was not a good ol' boy, except in spirit. He grew up in Las Vegas, a light year away from the Deep South hollers where NASCAR was born. But he did some dispute-settling of his own, too, on occasion.

As Joey Logano could attest.

 A guy like that, you figure, isn't going to die in bed. Although a couple of weeks ago at Watkins Glen, Busch did request medical assistance -- a "shot", actually -- upon finishing the Cup race. Which makes you wonder if whatever killed him was already working on him then.

And yet ...

And yet, he raced again last weekend at Dover. Won the truck race for Spire Motorsports, then finished 17th in the Cup All-Star race for his regular employer, Richard Childress.

Oh, and that race at Watkins Glen?

Despite clearly being in dire straits physically, he finished eighth.

That was Kyle Busch.

A writer's rant

 Read the other day that a writer on one of Sports Illustrated's platforms got nailed for using artificial intelligence to plagiarize part of some betting piece or other, and here came my Curmudgeonly Old Writer Guy, roaring from his cave. 

I cannot help this. It's who I am. It's probably who I was at 31 instead of 71, come to think of it.

And so I shake my head and grumble and wonder what Dan Jenkins would think this. Or Frank Deford. Or Curry Kirkpatrick or Gary Smith or any of the other SI legends from back in the day.

I'm thinking they wouldn't think too kindly of it. I'm thinking they'd think, one, AI is a cheat for a writerly sort, and lazy, and, by the way, so is plagiarism. In fact if you can't come up with a better way to say something than whomever it is you're plagiarizing, you're not much of a writer and should probably take up a different profession, like arc-welding.

I think that's what the legends would think because that's what I think. Not that I was ever a legend or anything close to it.

What I am is guy who did the sportswriting thing for 40 years, and the idea of stealing someone else's words -- at least without quotation marks and attribution -- would never have occurred to me. This was arrogance, mostly; I figured I usually could express something better in my own way, so why would I bother with someone else's way?

And besides ... it's lazy, like I said. And not nearly as much fun.

As for AI, well, that's lazy squared. And if you're a writer -- the sort of oddball who glories in the written word -- you know AI can't write, anyway. This is because the human brain is infinitely more complex, and every human brain is different. We're all informed by different life experiences, and it's those life experiences that enable us to produce words and images unique to us. The associations we make are ours alone.

AI?

All AI can do is reproduce whatever you tell it to. That's why what it spits out is so wretchedly pro forma. Skynet may live, but it can't write for doody.

Or at least, that's what I tell the young minds I find myself surrounded by these days.

In my retirement, see, I've taken up teaching creative writing for an organization called the Unity Performing Arts Foundation in my hometown, and it's been a revelation. First of all, the students are mostly middle-schoolers to young high-schoolers, and I'd forgotten what kids that age are like. And, second, I'm amazed (and a bit envious at times) at how adept some of them are with the written word at their age.

And so, periodically, I haul Curmudgeonly Old Writer Guy from his cave and rant my little rant about AI. It can, I point out, be a useful tool. But it can't express your thoughts and feelings -- your creativity -- better than you can. All that is yours, and yours alone.

It's why, when I try to coax one of my shy ones to read for the class what they've written, I always say a variation of this: "Come on. Have pride in your work, because you should. It's your work, after all, and no one else's. Don't be afraid to share it."

I almost never add, "And don't ever let AI within a light year of it."

I don't have to. I mean, how many times have they heard that sermon from the old dude?

To Cav not

 So I'm looking up at the TV a few skinny minutes before 9 o'clock last night, and, oh, look, it's the Cleveland Cavaliers and New York Knicks in Game 1 of the NBA Eastern Conference finals, and, wow, the Cavs are up 15 with three minutes to play in the third quarter, and this is HUGE, because they're playing in Madison Square Garden and the Knicks have just been rolling through the playoffs so far ...

I'm sorry, what?

Will this sentence eventually have a period in it?

OK, fine. Here's your period. Three of them, in fact.

Now where was I?

Oh, yeah, right: The Cavs. Rolling themselves. Moving the basketball like a metronome. About to erase homecourt advantage for the previously indomitable Knickerbockers.

And then ...

If you live in Cleveland, you might want to stop reading now.

That's because the Cavaliers' lead was up to 22 points with 8:19 to play in the fourth quarter, and now it was not just a win but a certified freaking blowout. Except ...

Except over on the Knicks' bench, head coach Mike Brown and his assistants noticed something.

What they noticed was James Harden was bouncing the ball an awful lot for the Cavs, as he tends to do. They also noticed his age (36). And they also noticed the age of their own bucket-filler, 29-year-old Jalen Brunson.

That's seven years of fresher legs, if you're keeping score at home.

And so, right about then, the Knicks told Brunson to start attacking Harden offensively. And suddenly the 22-point deficit began to melt like an ice cube on an August sidewalk. And before long the Knicks had outscored Harden and the Cavs 44-11 -- 44-11! -- the rest of the fourth quarter and overtime, and Cleveland's blowout became a shocking 115-109 win for New York.

In that same span, the Cavs shot 29.4 percent, missing six of their seven shots in overtime.

Harden was 1-for-6.

And Brunson?

Scored 16 of his game-high 38 in the fourth quarter and OT.

You could call that a choke job of epic proportions by the Cavaliers. Or, you could be nice and call it an equally epic comeback by the Knicks.

Me?

I prefer to call it a horrendous pun, as is my wont.

To Cav ... and then, to Cav not.

I'll be here all week, folks.

Dark influencers

 (Departing once more from the normal Blobosphere  to talk about non-Sportsball stuff. Standard protocols apply.)

Couple of sick f**** (excuse the potty mouth) attacked a mosque in San Diego yesterday, killing three people in a burst of gunfire, and God forgive me. My first reaction was not horror or shock or even a weary sigh at the perfidy of these days, but the following: Yep. Knew this was comin'.

Knew this was comin', because the fringiest of the lunatic fringies have been stoking the fire on antisocial media, ranting about the "Muslim horde" (hat tip to Secretary of Defense Sir Pete the Lionhearted Hegseth for that 12th-century gem) that's INVADING AMERICA and trying to turn a CHRISTIAN NATION into another Islamic hellscape ruled by Sharia Law. Lord knows from what stinking sewer lint-brains like these crawl, but they're suddenly everywhere.

It's their contention -- and even that of some of our elected boneheads, like that idiot Tommy Tuberville -- that Muslims are evil incarnate and don't belong here, and never mind that freedom-of-religion thing. The First Amendment, they claim, doesn't apply to Islam, because Islam is anathema to American culture and wants only to subjugate it. 

Even though Muslims have been part of the American fabric since the founding. Even though the Muslims I know are a lot more interested in Mohammed Salah and Liverpool subjugating Aston Villa or Arsenal than subjugating America.

No matter. Bigotry has no time for reality, and it's out there every day -- sent out into the online biosphere by beyond-hard-right webheads we've come to know as "influencers."

Being an elderly American hopelessly afflicted with terminal fogey-ism, I can't tell you what an influencer is, exactly. I can't tell you how or why certain people become influencers. From what I can tell, all it takes is a cellphone, a fondness for using it to film your every personal interaction every second of the day, and the massive narcissism it takes to do that.

After which, in some cases, you start up a website where you can share the ravings of your diseased mind with the similarly afflicted. With no consequences whatsoever, because words, apparently, are only words.

Except, in this case, three people are dead. And the two suspects, both teenagers, are dead from apparent self-inflicted gunshot wounds. 

To repeat: Teenagers.

Who cruise the Great And Terrible Interwhatsis 24/7. And who, let's face, seem to be particularly drawn to "influencers."

Mind you, this is not to say all the anti-Muslim poison out there right now triggered these particular teenagers. But I'm not saying it didn't, either. Words do matter sometimes, after all. And it's not like America doesn't have a long and ugly history of hate-stoking; go back to the 1840s, for instance, and the influx of Irish from the Great Famine prompted that era's "influencers" to rail that these Catholic heathen were coming to America to turn us all into Papists.

Stroll on down the timeline, and you'll find similar hysteria leveled at every succeeding wave of immigrants. The Chinese were diseased and incorrigibly foreign; Eastern Europeans were anarchists to the man: Italians were all criminal gangsters; and so on, and so on.

Always has to be an Other in the land of the free, I guess. And now it's the Muslims' turn.

To America's shame.

The Great Inescapable

 Hey, what am I? Chopped liver?

-- Tuesday

Well, you can't blame ol' second-day-of-the-week for being miffed. The Nash-unal FOOT-ball League now has targeted every other day of the week for anointing, but not Tuesday? What's up with that? 

This upon the release of the NFL schedule last week, in which the league announced it would not only play games on Sunday, Monday, Thursday and sometimes Saturday, but on Wednesdays and Fridays, too. So that's six days out of seven the NFL will come flying off the edge into our living rooms, with only Tuesday left to sit around with its hand out.

What is up with that?

I mean, heck, you wanna flood the zone, flood the zone, dammit. If you're gonna crap on high school football by scheduling games on Friday nights, might as well take it all the way to the house, right?

Don't just schedule games on Thanksgiving Eve, a new wrinkle this year that brings Wednesday into play. Schedule a couple of Thanksgiving Eve Eve games, too. Call it the NFL Tuesday Night Two-fer or something.

After all, what's so all-fired special about Wednesday? With Tuesday you at least get tacos. With Wednesday you get ... what? Hump Day Ham Loaf? Boy, howdy.

Oh, I'm sure, in the fullness of time, the League will bring Tuesday into the NFL family of days. It is, let's not forget, the Great Inescapable, or at least aspires to be so. With an expanded European slate this season, NFL Sundays will now be a literal morning, noon and night proposition. And then Monday night! And Thursday Night Football! And now not just Thanksgiving but Thanksgiving Eve, and Christmas Day, too!

Coming soon: The NFL Presents The Night Before Christmas. Best hustle off to bed, boys and girls, or Santa will leave Jets-vs.-Titans in your stocking.

The cautionary tale in all this, of course, is that the NFL risks doing what wildly successful sports monoliths have done since time immemorial: Overreach. To be sure, it sounds silly right now to say the Shield might be perilously close to red-lining market saturation. The public's hunger for its product remains insatiable -- or at least it seems that way.

And so, for now, how-high-is-up remains an open question. And Tuesday awaits.

Pissed off. Feeling abandoned. Bearing tacos.