Through the detritus of Saturday night’s upstate dirt-track disaster, the editorial postmortem of 20-year-old Kevin Ward Jr. remains open for interpretation.
As a senseless death, it seems to have made a lot of sense. In fact, it causes wonder as to why within sanctioned motor racing, such “senseless” road-raging carnage, fueled by the human condition, doesn’t occur weekly.
Testosterone and gasoline do mix, always have, often to no good end other than dead endings.
And auto racing for decades has been sold as an endeavor that romances and stokes Billy The Kid gunslingers, gunning for fame and, in Saturday’s case, lethal misfortune, Boot Hill.
And here Ward was racing near his own turf, in front of friends and family, a regional reputation to either maintain or enhance.
Such Saturday night theater, in need of an antagonist, had the perfect one: Tony Stewart. At 43, the Black Bart of auto racing, the spit-on-your-cowboy-boots legend, the tough hombre other drivers gun for or get out of his way. Stewart’s vitriolic post-race hassles, replete with accusations and fines for on- and off-track confrontations, are nearly standard.
In Western shoot-’em-up movies, when a gun-totin’, dead-eye, leather-slappin’, law-scoffin’ legend hits town, the townspeople shudder, the town’s shuttered. But when Stewart hit western New York last week, the townsfolk headed for the track. Love him or loathe him … you know how it works.
Of course, modern bad-is-good marketing strategies allowed Stewart, at least until Sunday morning, to cash in on his heel appeal — product endorsements and extra TV attention, like Bobby Knight in a flame-retardant jumpsuit.
And so, as rotten endings go, this one seemed to be a go from the start. The pieces, the people and the place were all in place.
The notion that this stuff only happens in the movies — the James Dean hot rod race scene in 1955’s “Rebel Without A Cause,” Paul Le Mat vs. Harrison Ford in 1973’s “American Graffiti” — would be great, if such movies didn’t rely on the genuine, specifically male, human condition.
Motor races of all kinds occur at the junction of Avoidable and Inevitable, where good sense and get-even meet and often collide. I don’t know enough about vehicular forensics or auto racing to know what I saw. But I know what I suspect.
I suspect that young Ward, assuming the role of upstart hometown gunslinger, wasn’t going to let Black Bart get away with it; wasn’t going to let Stewart nudge him into a wall and out of the race — not in front of his fans — without taking the next opportunity to call him out.
And so he left his walled, turned-around sprint car and stayed on the track, waiting for Stewart to come ’round, to let him know, and to show the world, at the very least his world.
And Stewart, staying in character, did what he thought he had to in service to his image and conditioning — scare the hell out of the kid, maybe spit some dirt in his face, show the kid, perhaps for a second time, who’s boss. But he hit the kid, ran into him, killed him.
One wonders: Had it been anyone else who Ward felt had forced him into that wall, intentionally or accidentally, would he have remained on the track, awaiting that driver’s return?
I suspect that both men — their machines and their macho — played a significant role in Ward’s death, thus it’s now a matter of calculating each one’s responsibility.
Regardless, Saturday night, bad didn’t bother with worse; it jumped directly to worst, an episode of death imitating art. Or so I suspect.
Look at that, an announcer offers something interesting
There’s grout, then there’s just space-filler.
Wednesday, during Nats-Mets, Mets radio’s Josh Lewin killed between-pitches time by telling us something that was at least marginally interesting.
He’d spoken before the game with home plate ump Stu Scheurwater, learning that the 6-foot-3 rookie is from Saskatchewan, yet preferred football to hockey, and that he played football with Jon Ryan, the Seahawks’ punter.
Earth-rattling? No. Interesting? Well, yeah, in relative terms. That Lewin took the initiative to chat up that night’s home plate ump was good for him and us.
On the other hand, YES’s Ken Singleton often relies on artificial additives, especially to make any stats/any time stew.
Late in Wednesday’s Yanks game in Baltimore, he reported that with Brett Gardner’s third-inning single, “he has now hit in six of his last seven games.”
Big deal? Wasn’t even a medium deal. Such close attention to stats, yet Gardner, in those seven games, was 6-for-29, .207.
Still, Singleton can be entertaining. Monday he told us O’s pitcher Brad Brach “was originally born in Freehold, N.J.”
Best hitter in baseball? Although he’s hitting .240 and hit .211 last season, that has to be the Mets’ Wilmer Flores.
In successive games facing the Nats’ Jordan Zimmermann, who this season has walked just 21 in 145 innings, and with a sensational 6.5-to-1 strikeouts/walks ratio, Flores consistently took first-pitch strikes.
Wednesday, 0-for-2 against Zimmermann after looking at first-pitch strikes, Flores faced reliever Drew Storen with the bases loaded, one out. That’s when he swung at the first pitch! He hit a weak grounder to third, the force made at home.
Rutgers price hikes a B1G deal
Be careful for what you wish. We’re hearing from longtime Rutgers football supporters who at first were psyched to have RU join the Big 10, but now find they’ll be charged a fortune for tickets. RU’s “dynamic pricing” jacks the cost to see Penn State and Michigan, but one can attend Howard-Rutgers for a fraction of the cost.
Reader David Distefano: “Once Tiger Woods didn’t make the cut, I figured there was no reason to watch the rest of the PGA Championship. Anything interesting happen?”
Don’t know, David; I figured TV coverage ended Friday, after showing Woods’ car pulling out of the parking lot.
From reader B.W.: “That ‘NFL Today’ promo with Boomer Esiason advising rookies to just be themselves. Which self is Boomer referencing, the one heard Sundays on CBS or the one heard weekdays on WFAN?”
ESPN has produced a documentary on Danny Almonte, the over-aged star of the scandalized 2001 Bronx Little League World Series team. Hey, you knew something was up when Almonte enrolled in junior high on the G.I. Bill.