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His Philosophy

Dale Earnhardt's death is to North Carolina and NASCAR what the death of Mario Lemeiux would be to western PA and the NHL. Earnhardt dying on the final lap of the Daytona 500 is like Lemeiux dying in the final minute of the final game of the Stanley Cup Championship. Weeks later, fans are still mourning and tributing on the news, saying "Y'all, Day-oll was the bist, y'all", just like they'd be saying "Yinz, Mare-yo wuz the best, yinz" up in western PA. One more comparison: Just as Lemeiux gave IronCity-guzzling yinzers a reason to exist through post-SuperSteelers hell, then saved the Penguins, Earnhardt gave Busch-guzzling rednecks a reason to exist, in part by making NASCAR more dangerous, therefore exciting, by driving like a maniac, sideswipin' and clippin' dudes like he was at the bumper cars in Kennywood.

A man who made a sport where you drive a car 500 miles in a circle at speeds of 180 mph even more dangerous is a man with balls, gentlemen.

I don't know much about auto racing. It's boring to me. I like demolition derbies though, because it takes everything fun about auto racing and makes it a sport. It's all wrecks. I went to my first demo derby about 2 years ago at the Indiana County Fair in Indiana, PA. I think it was the first time I found something that was as exciting to me as watching a live rock 'n' roll band. It was loud, because there are no mufflers. Dirt and metal were flying everywhere, including into the crowd, which consisted mostly of low-income rural folk and their children. Talk about mullets galore! Stuff flying into the crowd made it dangerous. Cars were catching on fire. That also made it dangerous. All the participants wore for safety were second hand crash helmets. They had several derbies: First one with big cars. Then one with little cars, like Chevettes and Accords. Then the women folk came out and crashed into each other for a while. Man, that cracked me up. The car that was the last still running was declared the winner. The victor victoriously stood above all the wreckage and raised his hand in victory, looking like Rambo after he killed a buncha commie-nazis.

I saw the movie Gladiator the day Earnhardt died. Talk about a coinkidink! The reason I think it's a coincidence is because auto racing and demo derbies remind me of Roman gladiator matches. Only most of the time, the cars die, rather than the gladiators. But in the past 6 months in the sport of auto racing, 4 of the gladiators, called drivers, have died along with their cars. They were taken to human pit stops, called hospitals, and were worked on by human mechanics, called doctors. The human mechanics couldn't fix the gladiators, so they were sent to human junkyards called morgues.

But do I think auto racing should end or become safer? Hell no! Safe? Who the hell wants safe? Professional Badass Dale Earnhardt certainly wouldn't have wanted it that way. I don't think he would've worn a helmet if it wasn't a rule. It's just a racin' deal.

America is the kingdom of the world. When Rome was the kingdom of the world, did Rome want gladiators to wear padding and fight each other with oversized Q-Tips? No. We want blood! We want blood! Nobody cares about baseball anymore. You know why? Not dangerous enough. We need danger. You know why? America hasn't seen any action in the past 30 years. We're Americans, we need a challenge. Iraq? Yeah right. We loved baseball when we were going through depression and world wars and we didn't have cures for everything and life wasn't so easy and people got enough action and danger in real life that they didn't need to take it into their leisure time.

You know what I like about pro-wrestling? Texas death cage barbed wire "I quit" matches. Fuck yeah. I don't give a shit who that hopeless geek McMahn is screwin'. What the hell's with that soap opera shit anyway these days? Where's Bobby "The Brain" Heenan to say, "Women don't belong in wrestling, they belong in the kitchen." I don't really watch a lot of pro-grappling these days, although my compadres do. But lemmie just say, thank the Lord for Mick Foley. Remember when Tully Blanchard and Magnum T.A. had an "I quit" match, and Magnum T.A. took a sharp piece of a wooden chair, and stabbed it into Tully Blanchard's head, and all this blood started pouring out, like freakin' Niagra Falls in Hell?!?!?! Remember that shit?!?!?! YEAH!!!

Calming down, I question, what the hell is this fascination with destruction, blood, death, danger? Certainly, we could solve many a conflict with, say, a refreshing game of chess. Certainly, we could become involved in the spectation of sports and leisure such as hacky sack (where everybody wins), croquet, and posie-skipping. What's with all this violent, deadly competition?

It has something to do with a false sense of power. When you go home from being a spectator to bloodletting, something inside of your brain makes you feel like you've entered a war zone and came out safe. The only other way you're going to see that kind of carnage is if your IN it. You feel immortal, because you feel like you've experienced something "larger than life." And you have a war story to tell, and people listen.

I think people race cars because they want to feel immortal, because they know there's a chance they could die every time they climb into that mo-chine, and every time they finish, they escape death one more time. And it FEELS good to win. It's like a damn drug. There's nothing like your team winning. A few weeks ago here in Chapel Hill, some pampered frat kids with names like Hugh Davenport III and Trevor Randolph were so happy UNC won against Duke in basketball they flipped over some unfortunate chick's car. (Now they could face time in the klink for felony rioting - ah ha.)

Also, sports gives you an all or none, cut and dry situation that doesn't happen much in real life. You win or lose, and you got the game to prove it. Average joes like the yinzers and rednecks I mentioned, or like me for that matter, don't live dangerously romantic lives, and live through sports heros and teams. If MY team loses, then I'm pissed. If MY team wins, then I win - I'm with 'em, I cheated death, WE are the champions my friend… (It also works with bands, when the band makes crappy music, like Metallica did, the fans get pissed - why? Because that was MY BAND, dude! Why are they being so crappy?) When the Steelers do something, I don't say "they", I say "we"… like "We scored, we won, we suck, we don't know how to run offense." I'm also involved in the coaching: "We should run the damn ball, Stewart can't throw, why aren't we running on first down?" I ask Mr. Cowher. He never listens to me. Then they lose.

When the sport is more dangerous, when the stakes are closer to life and death, it makes the win a helluva lot more intense, and the heros a helluva lot larger than life, and it takes the fans that live through these heroes on a more intense journey, and makes 'em forget about how boring life can and how inevitable death is. . . until someone like Dale Earnhardt dies. Then for a second it makes people think, "Hmmmm, maybe we've gone too far. Maybe we've fucked up somewhere. Maybe Dale is, after all, a mortal being, who when pricked, bleeds, dude. Whoa."