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.