Wednesday, May 18, 2005
The Loss of a Sports Fan to NASCAR
Loss is a part of life — unfortunately, a part that no one can escape.
This past weekend, I lost a sports fan who was a good friend of mine. He is one of my closest friends in the sports media world, and I will always have the many great memories from our friendship. Sometimes I find myself lying awake at night, wondering if things would have been different if he didn't decide to make the trip to Richmond, VA this past weekend for that fateful NASCAR race. Naturally, since he was lost Saturday, the shock of what happened still hasn't set in. I know that someday I will have to come to terms with it — my friend is now a NASCAR fan.
I met Joe Lull ("The Joe Lull Show" is 8-10 AM EST Monday through Friday on SportsTalkCleveland.com) over a year ago when I began helping him with his then small-time sports talk radio show. He was just starting out in the business, but was determined to make a name for himself. When I first met him, he was an average Joe. He wasn't perfect as the Cleveland native (strike one) was a huge Cavs, Browns (strike two), and Indians (strike three) fan, but his love of sports made him an all right guy.
In my mind, Joe was a model sports fan. He was great to talk sports with over a cold one, he was a loyal fan who knew his stuff, and he was a good guy to watch a game with. He wasn't much of a bandwagon fan (outside of his random allegiances with the Carolina Panthers and the New York Yankees, but before you condemn him as a bandwagon fan, remember, he willingly supports all three major sports teams in Cleveland, if he really was a bandwagon fan, he would've been smart enough to sever all Cleveland ties immediately) and he was a smart sports fan — meaning he was able to appreciate the greatness of playoff hockey.
I lost Joe when he decided to go with a mutual friend of ours, his former co-host (a recent NASCAR convert himself), to a NASCAR race. The next time I saw him, he was wearing a Rusty Wallace Miller Lite hat. This came as a great shock to me because he always wears his Yankees lid, even during their embarrassment at the start of the season. Now, after everyone has been kicking the Yankees while they were down, they are on a nine-game tear, and Joe decided to forgo the Yanks hat for a (gasp) ... NASCAR hat. I immediately had to assess how bad the situation was.
"Who won the Civil war?" I asked.
"The North," he replied. Check one.
"Are you attracted to girls that don't have a full complement of teeth?" I asked next.
"Nope," he said. Check two.
"Is NASCAR a sport?" I asked next, bracing myself for the worst.
"Yeah, it is. NASCAR rules, man," he said. My heart sank. Time of Joe's death as a sports fan: 6:30 PM EST, May 17, 2005.
Joe was the second friend I lost to NASCAR in the past year, and the shocking thing about the fall of Joe is that he detested NASCAR before he went to a race. This seems to happen to a ton of people — they go to one race and immediately transform into diehards. Even back in my days as a young off-ice official in the old International Hockey League, older officials would tell me that once you go to a race, you will never be the same.
I didn't chronicle Joe's descent into the dark side for my own amusement. I did it because I don't want his sports fan death to be in vain. His tale can serve as a warning for anyone heading to a NASCAR race for the first time: make sure you know what you are getting yourself into.
It's not that I have anything against NASCAR or the fans, I'm sure they are good people. Heck, I even call some of them my friends (only because it's a term I throw around loosely, which explains my friendship with the Subway worker that assembles my lunch every day). I even plan to take in a race myself sometime in the next year, only because I want to give it a fair shake. I have no doubt that it's a great spectator event, and I understand that it's popular. My only problem is that it is not a sport.
Joe tried several arguments with me about why NASCAR is a sport, mainly trying to explain that a sport is anything that combines an amount of skill with an amount of endurance. That is a definition I just cannot buy. According to Joe's definition, why aren't video gamers considered athletes? They need skill and endurance to win those day-long tournaments.
What about the "BattleBot" guys? They build and then wage war with their own robots — they control a machine with skill and endurance, just like a NASCAR driver. Somehow, I don't think I'll see "SportsCenter" recapping the epic victory of Diesector the wheel robot's upset win in the "BattleBot" super heavyweight division.
To me, a sport is something that, among other things, requires a decent amount of athletic ability. NASCAR requires very little. I guess another reason I don't consider NASCAR a sport is because fans can't partake in the game itself. I can play golf or hockey with my friends, toss a baseball or football or play a pickup game of basketball. Can I go outside and play NASCAR?
If Joe is good at anything, it's arguing, so I was expecting him to put up a convincing fight for NASCAR. It was his next argument that proved to me that Joe the sports fan whom I knew was truly gone. I will try to remember him as he was. Joe's next argument consisted merely of "yeah, well, whatever, NASCAR rules."
Touché.
Mark Chalifoux is also a weekly columnist for SportsFan Magazine. His columns appear every Tuesday on Sports Central. You can e-mail Mark at [email protected].