Until the accident, a late-December respite in Vermont was the much-needed so-called battery charge for our family.
One particular ski trip was my chance to move beyond “intermediate” skiing. Out on the slopes, the sun was disappearing behind the formidable mountain. Closing out day one, I’d have four more to distinguish myself and improve my technique.
For the proverbial Last Run of the Day, Viviane and I come across a black diamond called “Superstar.” Just seeing that name gets my adrenaline pumping: strong and confident notions of red, white and blue achievement, Superman, Wonder Woman, Mark Spitz and Michael Phelps in their USA Speedos. If my run were televised, Jim McKay would be in a canary yellow blazer describing it.
Viviane is smooth and light on her skis. She describes my style as Jean-Claude Killy on the green bunny runs and Jerry Lewis on the blacks.
Today, Jerry is a no show. I haven’t gone down once. The legs feel good. It’s time to master the elements, blast past the fat part of the bell curve and enter the rarified realm of the expert skier. I am a super star.
I point a pole to the beckoning trail sign. Viviane nods, and a bad idea builds momentum with the trail’s steep decline and wind-blown moguls. (Are the scary bumps called “moguls,” because they mimic Donald Trump’s hair?)
My wife is out in front, finding her way down the difficult slope. I gather too much speed and try to cut back in a groove between slick moguls, a move that would have looked good on the chalkboard. Too bad we’re not in a classroom but sliding down an iceberg. My skis hit a rut and pull to the side. My top heavy body surges in the other direction as if launched from a circus cannon. Except my arms aren’t stoic at my sides. This is a flailing, out-of-control, agony-of-defeat cartwheel.
NASCAR drivers see crashes happening in slow motion. Wayne Gretzky once explained when he scored a goal, time slowed, and the puck appeared the size of a pizza pie, the goal as wide as the Hoover Dam. None of that here. It’s an instantaneous, oh-snap blur, white canvas screaming toward my face. Greg Louganis couldn’t have hit the surface at a more precise 90-degree angle. It sounds like chomping a mouthful of Cap’n Crunch. I bounce like a Super Ball. On the second revolution, my head smacks the rock-hard mountain like a bowling ball dropped from a roof. Finally, silence.
It is a sad reflection of our You Tube culture that laying there, thankfully breathing (albeit stunned) and reassured my skull was not split like a rotten pumpkin, I wonder if anyone on the chair lift captured my spastic circus-act flop. Please tell me no one camera-phoned this. I’m destined to be an internet laughing stock. Without royalties.
There are no cameras or giggling. I’m alone, in one piece.
This can’t be that bad. The morning papers said a Manhattan window washer survived a 47-story fall. All my digits are moving. But as the commercial says, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.
That initial crunch wasn’t the give of snow. It something in my shoulder breaking.
My wife kept her wits and balance, which kind of describes our marriage, and had pulled to a stop below. The grade is too steep for her to come up. All is OK, no worries, I reassure her with a sprightly lefty Super Star-like thumbs up, confidently gesturing like a downed lineman pinned to the stretcher as he's carted off the field to the crowd's roar of sympathetic approval and relief the game will again resume. Yet I do not feel confident and am rather worried. The covenant of marriage allows making claims to your life partner that you do not believe. She tells passing skiers following her gaze up the mountain, “Oh, he’s fine. He’s just catching his breath.”
All I can do is flash a dumb smile and that thumbs-up with the arm I can move.
“Baby, just put your skis on and ski on down!” she urges.
Maybe an expert skier could do that. I’m an eternal intermediate, forever checking that middle box on the rental line, a reckless overachiever who flirted with bragging rights for super-stardom beyond his proficiency and paid the price. The run couldn’t have been named “Devil’s Emergency Room” to scare me away? I try to stand, but the shoulder is shot. I slide on my bottom across the slippery surface, faster and faster down the steep hill. This is not going to end well. I dig boot heels into the ice, and lurch to a stop.
The mountain is quiet, save my gasping. I lean on my good shoulder and crawl, inches at a time, across the mountain, toward the woods. Isn’t that where animals go to die?
Someone, it’s a ski instructor, is waving his poles and shouting down from the lift. “Do you need me to radio for help?”
Up there, I’ve looked down at the meek humiliation of the daring and the clumsy, those unfortunate injured skiers who are strapped in and carted away on the Red Cross sled. Yeah, call it in. Now I’ll know how it feels to be present for your own funeral procession. Like driving a stock car at the track in Charlotte, which had different ending of hearty slaps on the back and a framed photo on fake marble, I’ll check off another bucket-list experience.
Viviane says they closed Superstar after my crash. Too treacherous; an out-of-control intermediate from the city was nearly killed. My fast-fading manhood is revived. Yes, it was the ferocious mountain, not me. Mother Nature won today’s battle, the war is mine. I am a superstar…until I find out Viviane was conjuring a well-meaning fib, something a married woman says with noble intentions but nary a shred of truth.
The doctor examining me says he’ll take x-rays but it looks like a broken collar bone. “What do you do for a living?” he asks, sounding not that interested.
“I’m with NASCAR,” I tell him. He smiles, makes eye contact for the first time, and asks if Jimmie Johnson is going to win a third championship.
In the mirror, I basically have no right shoulder. The disappearance of a frequently used body part is sickening. My arm is dangling low like an ape’s, the shoulder having apparently said, hasta la vista. The surrounding skin is already yellowish green. I want to puke.
“This looks pretty bad. Do I need surgery?”
“I don’t think so,” he says. “I want to know this. Earnhardt moving to Hendrick: is that going to change the competitive balance in the sport? I mean, Dale Jr., Gordon, Johnson – that’s like a Murderers Row or the Purple People eaters. What a lineup! They’re gonna dominate!”
I’m in starting to shiver, slipping into shock maybe. The dull pain is starting to spread to my chest. I’m wondering if they’ll screw rods into my body like some of the drivers I’ve talked to, or if I’ll be limping around like the Hunchback of NASCAR in New York.
“Do I have to stay in the hospital?” I ask.
“We’ll fix you up here, and you’ll be out in just a few. There’s quite a separation in the bone break. You must have hit pretty hard. Hey, I’ve seen some hard hits in NASCAR this year. I couldn’t believe Gordon walked away from that lick in Pocono. How about those HANS devices and new softer walls? They’re really making NASCAR much safer.”
“This hurts a lot. How long will the pain last?”
“Oh, it’s like any bone break,” the doctor says. “We’ll give you some strong medication. Did you know Dale Senior broke his collarbone at Talladega, the car just flipping like crazy, and then he drove the next week with that broken collarbone?”
“Yes, he actually won the pole and the race. Watkins Glen. Road course. Toughest course to drive, I’d imagine, with a painful injury like that. Doctor, I’m on the first day of a five-day vacation. Do I have to go home? We can get back to New York in about five hours.”
“It’s up to you. Frankly, you’ll at first be uncomfortable wherever you are. You can stay in the lodge. Hey, speaking of New York, that track NASCAR was building is not going to happen?”
This dance goes on until the doc gives me a sling and bottle of horse pills. He tells me to see an orthopedic surgeon back in New York. “I’d bet that doctor will want to operate. If I were you, I’d avoid surgery. You could place one end of your collar bone on one side of the room, and the other end on the other side, and the bones will find each other. The collar bone is a truly amazing thing. You should be OK in a few months.”
He was right. I got better. (The collarbone can find anything; too bad it couldn't go work for the goverment and find Amelia Earhardt.)
I was in tip-top shape but then gruesomely rolled an ankle at Texas Motor Speedway. What used to be a jutting ankle bone at the bottom of my skinny chicken leg soon resembled the kind of plump tomato my grandmother would have proudly thrown in the pot for Sunday’s sauce. You hit 40, and you become spastic. Your body grows hair in odd places and progressively falls apart. TV commercials offer electronic devices to alert the authorities when you become incapacitated.
I can accept that. Harder to deal with is how I’d viewed those who get hurt on business trips as losers. I’m in that club, too. Not exactly on the bucket list.
Each NASCAR track has a well-staffed mini-hospital in the infield. It’s meant for drivers, not clumsy, aging, accident-prone PR people. I hobble to the Infield Care Center for an ace bandage and a tape job. I’m hosting media, will be on the ankle all day, and need to stabilize it. The Speedway doctor won’t tape me without taking x-rays. Sure enough, the tip of the fibia is broken.
The doc shows the film – a chunk the shape of India floating beneath the shin bone. The kind, gentle and efficient folks in the Infield Care Center strap on a metal boot, hand me crutches, and suggest I see an orthopedic specialist back home.
“I know,” I say. “I bet they’ll want to operate.”
The busted ankle brings out the best in service companies. Avis fetches my car at the hotel, no charge. Continental bumps me to first class with curb-to-gate wheelchair service. I make a mental note to fake an injury before a future trip. In light of recent events, pretending won’t be necessary.
I return to New York to see another doctor. You can guess what happens when he hears I was hurt at a NASCAR race. The orthopedic surgeon at St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village secretly wishes he were Tony Stewart’s jack man:
Clumsy PR Guy: So, it’s broken. Bummer. But there’s no ligament damage, right?
Doctor: No, none. What amazes me is how fast those drivers go when they are so close to one another. Extraordinary, isn’t it.
Clumsy PR Guy: What about the tendons?
Doctor: The tendons are fine. You don’t have to worry about that. They say it’s the roar of the cars and the whole massive feel of it. You go to a race, and you are just blown away and hooked.
Clumsy PR Guy: I have been elevating the leg and keeping ice on the ankle. How long should I do that?
Doctor: As long as needed. I hear NASCAR is still looking at building a track in the New York area. Jersey? Near the Meadowlands? Out on the Island? No, no, Staten Island. Yes, that’s it. Is it true? That would be great. That sport really needs to be here in New York.
Clumsy PR Guy: Unfortunately, there’s not enough political support, and that’s not gonna work out. Listen, getting back to me and the ankle, I imagine there’s some sort of physical therapy ahead?
Doctor: You will absolutely need rehab. We can make a recommendation – plenty of good places. It really seems to be a sport that has caught on like wildfire. I have a friend at ABC, who was a big skeptic but is now completely sold on it. They show your races, right?
Clumsy PR Guy: Yes, ABC is a partner, and NASCAR is very popular. I sit at a computer all day. My main exercise is hitting the send button on email. So I like to run at night. When will I be jogging again?
Doctor: Should be a few months. Just between you and me, it gets pretty wild at some of those tracks, huh? What’s it like?
Clumsy PR Guy: It’s fun. The fans are a panic. I writing a book on them. There’s a fan who took the NASCAR flag to the top of Mt. Everest. Another guy walks around at the track naked except for a Goodyear tire and Tom Sawyer straw hat. Come to think of it, he walks a lot, and I’ll be walking a lot. I can do that with the cast you’ll give me? No crutches?
Doctor: Yes, of course. I don’t understand Staten Island. Why didn’t they just didn’t go buy the land at Grumman airport out on the Island? It’s totally available.
This is a top ankle and knee guy in New York magazine’s list of the city’s best doctors. He’s in demand and hard to reach. I was able to see him instantly. You see, his assistant is a Sprint phone-carrying NASCAR fan. She saw “NASCAR” on my email requesting an appointment. I was promptly slotted in. Getting my first preference for follow up appointments was a snap. I just had to answer a few questions about what Dale Jr. was like, and does he really have a girlfriend?
Who says they don't love NASCAR in New York?
For more stories like these, Andrew Giangola’s critically acclaimed book, THE WEEKEND STARTS ON WEDNESDAY, is available online and wherever fine books (and some crappy ones) are sold.
Showing posts with label NASCAR. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NASCAR. Show all posts
Friday, December 9, 2011
Sunday, November 20, 2011
The Other Side of Smoke
When little Spencer Roy was 6, he wanted a tattoo. Not one of those temporary Cracker Jack ones. No, he asked for a real tattoo – needles in flesh. A Tony Stewart tattoo.
That was, of course, out of the question. There are laws. But the boy’s mom, Stephanie, had an idea. She watched every NASCAR race at home with Spencer, and Tony was her driver, too. Mother and son named their cat, “Tony Stewart.” The family’s pet fish is “Tony Stewart.” Step out of their shower, and your wet feet meet a Tony Stewart bath mat. You don’t have to be a mentalist to guess Stephanie’s computer password. Then there are the Tony Stewart cars and cups and flags and stickers throughout the house.
Considering the various and sundry ways the Tony Stewart name infests the Roy’s home, the idea of branding a family member’s skin “Tony Stewart” wasn’t so outlandish. Maybe Stephanie, as an agent representing the Roy clan, would get the tattoo.
A race was coming up a Martinsville, Virginia, Stephanie’s home track. The Roanoke mom knew Tony would be doing an autograph session in the Salem Civic Center. She showed up, inched to the front of the line, and offered her bicep. This wasn’t the first time Stewart had been asked to sign a body part. He laid pen to flesh with big, confident strokes – a John Hancock with verve and flourish, the kind of assuredly bold signature you’d expect from a driver Stephanie and Spencer love because “he will move your butt out of the way or put you into the wall if he has to.”
Stephanie found a phone book and a tattoo parlor. For forty bucks and a little bit of sting she could again show how far she’d go for the boy suffering a serious heart condition who she loves so much. It took about 20 minutes to make Tony’s signature permanent. Stephanie had to keep hitting the brakes she was driving so fast to get home. Little Spencer was just tickled pink. To this day, he’ll gleefully lift his mom’s shirt sleeve to show total strangers the tattoo of the only driver in NASCAR who matters.
Six years later at Richmond International Speedway, courtesy of “Make A Wish,” a wonderful organization helping children with life-threatening medical conditions, Spencer got his chance to meet the driver on his mother’s arm.
Tony Stewart met Spencer and Stephanie Roy at his motor coach in the drivers and owners lot before September’s Chevy Rock and Roll 400 race. Stephanie came prepared with orange fingernails with jet black tips and the number “20” etched on. Stewart showed up wearing his orange fire suit and a big smile. He greeted Spencer with a fist bump and began to treat the boy like a long-lost friend.
Spencer flipped his program open to Tony’s page, pointing to his man.
“Who’s that goofy guy?” Tony asked. “You picked the ugliest guy in the whole book!”
Spencer laughed and turned to another photo of Tony.
“You’re laughing, but I don’t get better looking in any of these photos, do I?” he asked. “No wonder I don’t have a girlfriend.”
Stewart spent 15 minutes making Spencer crack up while signing a heap of paraphernalia handed over with assembly-line precision by his PR man Mike Arning.
Bad weather was headed for Virginia as tropical storm Hannah moved in. The 37-year-old two time NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion did a rain dance jig, attempting to ward off the precipitation so Spencer Roy would be able to see his first NASCAR race. Stewart promised the boy if he won the race, and he had every intention of doing so, he’d climb the fence at Richmond just for him. Together, they’d celebrate in Victory Lane.
A hospitality tour was waiting. Stewart’s PR man motioned to the group, reminding the driver of obligations backing up. Stewart said goodbye to Spencer, then found a way to kick start a conversation he didn’t want to end. The cycle of attempted goodbyes followed by more joking repeated itself a few times. Finally, after a series of high-fives, it was time to go.
“Remember: after the race, Victory Lane,” Stewart said as he walked away.
Spencer and Stephanie had seats directly in front of the No. 20 pit stall. Spencer was physically in Virginia but more accurately in heaven, throwing up his hand every time Tony’s race car flew went by.
The boy had been a NASCAR fan almost his entire life, and only had two drivers. First was Ernie Ervan, known to some as “Swervin’ Ervan, the driver of Philip and Georgia Gregware, who lived above the Roys and took care of Spencer for several years when Stephanie worked weekends. Phil’s nickname was “Curly,” but before Spencer could talk, he couldn’t say that. He just called Phil “Ernie.”
When the real Ernie retired from NASCAR in 1999, Spencer immediately switched allegiances to Tony Stewart. The boy’s medical condition, Prolong QT and mydocardial disease of the muscles, makes comprehending complex things difficult. While traditional learning – the Pythagorean theorum and the Magna Carta, and the arcane a + b = c equations and historical events each of us suffered through and mostly forgot – is difficult, Spencer has strong intuition and is sharp as a tack. Watching the races on TV with the Gregwares (every Sunday the families would share a home-cooked meal and the race), Spencer would pick his own driver. Spencer liked Tony Stewart’s personality, his driving style, everything about the guy.
After adopting Tony as his driver, he’d followed him on TV for years. Now he was at the track in Richmond, watching this momentous freight train of race cars zooming by, close enough to make his wheel chair shake. It felt to Spencer like the whole earth could be thrown off its axis. Could goose bumps have goose bumps on top?
Spencer wanted Tony to lead the pack. He was rooting hard, encouraging Tony to go faster and faster as the laps ticked off. Stewart had a solid car and was running up front. He was in contention. Would he take the checkers, climb the fence, and meet Spencer in Victory Lane?
As the laps wound down, it was turning into a battle between Tony and reigning NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson. The Home Depot and Lowe’s cars battled on the final laps in a thrilling bumper-to-bumper duel. They tore around the three quarter mile track, Stewart on Johnson’s bumper, Stewart moving along side on the banks, even with Johnson, enough the momentum he carried through the turns faded and his rival burst ahead on the straightaways.
The cat and mouse game continued for several thrilling laps. The crowd of more than 90,000 was on their feet. Spencer’s arm shot up each time Tony rocketed past, right on the No. 48’s tail. But this day, this race, was not to be for Spencer or Stewart. They couldn’t catch Jimmie Johnson, and Tony finished second.
Spencer was crushed. He didn’t make it to Victory Lane. He was quiet and withdrawn, not himself for an entire week. But as the days passed, who won at Richmond didn’t seem to matter as much. The end of the race faded in his mind. Spencer Roy’s weekend in Richmond holds a sharper, more intense memory that grows in prominence as other recollections fade. Spencer had met his hero, and he was larger in life than even in the boy’s grandest dreams.
That was, of course, out of the question. There are laws. But the boy’s mom, Stephanie, had an idea. She watched every NASCAR race at home with Spencer, and Tony was her driver, too. Mother and son named their cat, “Tony Stewart.” The family’s pet fish is “Tony Stewart.” Step out of their shower, and your wet feet meet a Tony Stewart bath mat. You don’t have to be a mentalist to guess Stephanie’s computer password. Then there are the Tony Stewart cars and cups and flags and stickers throughout the house.
Considering the various and sundry ways the Tony Stewart name infests the Roy’s home, the idea of branding a family member’s skin “Tony Stewart” wasn’t so outlandish. Maybe Stephanie, as an agent representing the Roy clan, would get the tattoo.
A race was coming up a Martinsville, Virginia, Stephanie’s home track. The Roanoke mom knew Tony would be doing an autograph session in the Salem Civic Center. She showed up, inched to the front of the line, and offered her bicep. This wasn’t the first time Stewart had been asked to sign a body part. He laid pen to flesh with big, confident strokes – a John Hancock with verve and flourish, the kind of assuredly bold signature you’d expect from a driver Stephanie and Spencer love because “he will move your butt out of the way or put you into the wall if he has to.”
Stephanie found a phone book and a tattoo parlor. For forty bucks and a little bit of sting she could again show how far she’d go for the boy suffering a serious heart condition who she loves so much. It took about 20 minutes to make Tony’s signature permanent. Stephanie had to keep hitting the brakes she was driving so fast to get home. Little Spencer was just tickled pink. To this day, he’ll gleefully lift his mom’s shirt sleeve to show total strangers the tattoo of the only driver in NASCAR who matters.
Six years later at Richmond International Speedway, courtesy of “Make A Wish,” a wonderful organization helping children with life-threatening medical conditions, Spencer got his chance to meet the driver on his mother’s arm.
Tony Stewart met Spencer and Stephanie Roy at his motor coach in the drivers and owners lot before September’s Chevy Rock and Roll 400 race. Stephanie came prepared with orange fingernails with jet black tips and the number “20” etched on. Stewart showed up wearing his orange fire suit and a big smile. He greeted Spencer with a fist bump and began to treat the boy like a long-lost friend.
Spencer flipped his program open to Tony’s page, pointing to his man.
“Who’s that goofy guy?” Tony asked. “You picked the ugliest guy in the whole book!”
Spencer laughed and turned to another photo of Tony.
“You’re laughing, but I don’t get better looking in any of these photos, do I?” he asked. “No wonder I don’t have a girlfriend.”
Stewart spent 15 minutes making Spencer crack up while signing a heap of paraphernalia handed over with assembly-line precision by his PR man Mike Arning.
Bad weather was headed for Virginia as tropical storm Hannah moved in. The 37-year-old two time NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion did a rain dance jig, attempting to ward off the precipitation so Spencer Roy would be able to see his first NASCAR race. Stewart promised the boy if he won the race, and he had every intention of doing so, he’d climb the fence at Richmond just for him. Together, they’d celebrate in Victory Lane.
A hospitality tour was waiting. Stewart’s PR man motioned to the group, reminding the driver of obligations backing up. Stewart said goodbye to Spencer, then found a way to kick start a conversation he didn’t want to end. The cycle of attempted goodbyes followed by more joking repeated itself a few times. Finally, after a series of high-fives, it was time to go.
“Remember: after the race, Victory Lane,” Stewart said as he walked away.
Spencer and Stephanie had seats directly in front of the No. 20 pit stall. Spencer was physically in Virginia but more accurately in heaven, throwing up his hand every time Tony’s race car flew went by.
The boy had been a NASCAR fan almost his entire life, and only had two drivers. First was Ernie Ervan, known to some as “Swervin’ Ervan, the driver of Philip and Georgia Gregware, who lived above the Roys and took care of Spencer for several years when Stephanie worked weekends. Phil’s nickname was “Curly,” but before Spencer could talk, he couldn’t say that. He just called Phil “Ernie.”
When the real Ernie retired from NASCAR in 1999, Spencer immediately switched allegiances to Tony Stewart. The boy’s medical condition, Prolong QT and mydocardial disease of the muscles, makes comprehending complex things difficult. While traditional learning – the Pythagorean theorum and the Magna Carta, and the arcane a + b = c equations and historical events each of us suffered through and mostly forgot – is difficult, Spencer has strong intuition and is sharp as a tack. Watching the races on TV with the Gregwares (every Sunday the families would share a home-cooked meal and the race), Spencer would pick his own driver. Spencer liked Tony Stewart’s personality, his driving style, everything about the guy.
After adopting Tony as his driver, he’d followed him on TV for years. Now he was at the track in Richmond, watching this momentous freight train of race cars zooming by, close enough to make his wheel chair shake. It felt to Spencer like the whole earth could be thrown off its axis. Could goose bumps have goose bumps on top?
Spencer wanted Tony to lead the pack. He was rooting hard, encouraging Tony to go faster and faster as the laps ticked off. Stewart had a solid car and was running up front. He was in contention. Would he take the checkers, climb the fence, and meet Spencer in Victory Lane?
As the laps wound down, it was turning into a battle between Tony and reigning NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson. The Home Depot and Lowe’s cars battled on the final laps in a thrilling bumper-to-bumper duel. They tore around the three quarter mile track, Stewart on Johnson’s bumper, Stewart moving along side on the banks, even with Johnson, enough the momentum he carried through the turns faded and his rival burst ahead on the straightaways.
The cat and mouse game continued for several thrilling laps. The crowd of more than 90,000 was on their feet. Spencer’s arm shot up each time Tony rocketed past, right on the No. 48’s tail. But this day, this race, was not to be for Spencer or Stewart. They couldn’t catch Jimmie Johnson, and Tony finished second.
Spencer was crushed. He didn’t make it to Victory Lane. He was quiet and withdrawn, not himself for an entire week. But as the days passed, who won at Richmond didn’t seem to matter as much. The end of the race faded in his mind. Spencer Roy’s weekend in Richmond holds a sharper, more intense memory that grows in prominence as other recollections fade. Spencer had met his hero, and he was larger in life than even in the boy’s grandest dreams.
Friday, July 8, 2011
Houston, We Have Fan
COL. DOUG HURLEY IS PILOTING THE SPACE SHUTTLE ATLANTIS, WHICH LIFTED OFF THIS MORNING EN ROUTE TO THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION. DOUG WAS ALSO AT THE CONTROLS FOR THE ENDEAVOUR FLIGHT. TODAY'S LAUNCH MARKS THE FINAL MISSION OF THE 30-YEAR U.S. SPACE SHUTTLE PROGRAM. HERE IS DOUG'S CHAPTER IN THE WEEKEND STARTS ON WEDNESDAY:
It’s not unusual for a NASCAR fan unable to tune to a race – maybe he’s on the job or waiting to get root canal – to sneak a quick online update. One fan, Doug Hurley, a Colonel in the Marine Corps, got his NASCAR fix at work on a laptop computer in a unique place – 250 miles above the earth moving at 17,500 mph in zero gravity.
Hurley, the pilot of Space Shuttle Endeavor, hadn’t missed a race in eight years since being introduced to NASCAR at Watkins Glen and feeling a rush of excitement he could only call “indescribable.” He wasn’t going to let a small thing like manning the controls of the most complex machine ever built get in the way of finding out how Joey Logano did at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
“It’s not a very well-kept secret at NASA that I’m a pretty big NASCAR fan,” Hurley says. The second line of his official NASA biography states, “Recreational interests include hunting, cycling and attending as many NASCAR races as possible.”
While training in Star City, Russia with cosmonauts preparing to work on the International Space Station, the Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel watched NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races on the Armed Forces television network deep into the night. On board the Endeavor, he took DVD copies to two of the most notable races in the history of stock car racing – the 1979 and 1998 Daytona 500s. He’s lobbying to have these classic races included in the permanent library on board the International Space Station.
Hurley grew up in Apalachin, NY, a town so small it had no stoplight. On cloudless nights, he’d gaze at the wide sky, densely speckled with the twinkling lights of stars from galaxies billions of miles away. Doug was only two years old when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, but remembers news clips of Sky Lab missions sandwiched between the Saturday morning cartoons.
“As a young boy, you think, ‘Wow, that would be pretty neat to go there and do that,’” he said.
He liked what the military stood for and to help pay for college enrolled in the Navy ROTC, program at Tulane University. During college, he spent a week at a Navy jet base in Jacksonville and got to ride in a fighter plane.
“That was the defining moment. I knew what I wanted to do.” Hurley excelled as a Naval Aviator and a test pilot. He was the first Marine pilot to fly the F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet.
Despite his fondness for speed, Hurley never paid much attention to NASCAR, even though he’d lived 45 minutes south of the road course at Watkins Glen. That changed when his cousin Nanette began dating Greg Zipadelli, then Tony Stewart’s crew chief for Joe Gibbs Racing. Nan and Doug had spent many holidays and summers together as kids and remained close as adults. He jumped at her invitation to watch the race from Zippy’s pit stall at the Glen.
“From the moment I heard the first engine roar to life, I was unequivocally, unbelievably, completely and totally hooked on the sport,” Hurley said. Since then, he’s attended more than 20 races and holds season tickets at Texas Motor Speedway.
Nanette and Zipadelli are now married with three kids, but Tony and the crew chief he called “the big brother I never had” have parted ways. After a stellar decade with the No. 20 Home Depot car, including two NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championships, Stewart left Joe Gibbs Racing following the 2008 season to form his own team, becoming the most successful driver-owner in NASCAR since Alan Kulwicki won the title in 1992. The separation was a tough, emotional time for Zippy.
“Loyalty is a big thing with Zippy, and he decided to stay with Joe Gibbs, who gave him a huge opportunity. That’s where his heart was.”
Most No. 20 fans also guided by their loyalty simply followed Stewart to this new No. 14 ride. Hurley stuck with Zippy and his new driver, teenage phenom Joey Logano, nicknamed “Sliced Bread,” as in “the greatest thing since…”
“Joey is amazingly grounded for a person his age facing tremendous challenges and responsibility,” Hurley said. “If you compare him to Zippy or me, we were selected for our jobs – Greg as crew chief and me into the astronaut program – in our early ‘30s. Joey is 19 and handling the pressure of big-time auto racing very well. At the outset, there was skepticism about his abilities in a Cup ride, but his true talent quickly became apparent. NASCAR banned testing for 2009, which was the right move to save costs, but it hurt newer guys like Joey. And then you have him going into a new car much different than the NASCAR Nationwide Series cars he was driving. Considering all that, he’s figuring out a lot of things pretty quickly. Joey’s been blessed with tremendous talent and the help of a core group of guys who have been with Zippy from the beginning. He and Zippy have been a great team, which they proved when Joey became the youngest driver ever to win a Sprint Cup Series race at New Hampshire in 2009. Joey battled hard all day and Zippy made a great call to win the race. I’m predicting Joey is going to do very well in the ears to come. Plus, he is just a super nice guy. He’s got solid support from his parents, and it shows.”
Hurley, who is 42 and favors the flat-top hair style reminiscent of the flight directors and fly boys chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff, sees many parallels between the sport he loves to watch from the pit stall and his own job strapped into a rocket soaring toward the wide blue yonder. “My background is as a fighter pilot, so the speed, the adrenaline rush, the eye-hand coordination is somewhat similar. A big part of the excitement for me is getting so close to the action. Fans can feel a bit of that, sitting off the turn with the cars coming right at you. They can get some of that speed adrenaline rush a fighter pilot feels.”
In some ways, NASCAR drivers face tougher challenges than astronauts, Hurley says. It’s a surprising perspective from a decorated Navy test pilot snapped up by the astronaut development program as soon as he was eligible, a four-time recipient of the NASA Superior Accomplishment Award who helped orchestrate the mind-boggling tasks of an upside down rendezvous with the International Space station, five space walks, the replacement of half dozen 250-pound batteries in the unforgiving blackness of space, and the transfer home of a Japanese astronaut.
“The biggest difference is NASCAR is much more in the public eye than what we do as astronauts and what I did as a fighter pilot,” he said. “When we launch shuttles into space, of course that’s highly publicized, but months of training are largely done without constant scrutiny. NASCAR drivers live in the limelight virtually year-round. Being in a dangerous, high-pressure environment, it’s not easy to manage outside eyes prying in.”
There are obviously many differences between astronauts and race car drivers. Flirting with danger – the lurking, unpredictable set of unseen circumstances that can snuff a life out in a blink – is not one of them.
Hurley was avidly following NASCAR when drivers Adam Petty, Kenny Irwin, and Dale Earnhardt Sr. were killed over a nine month period from 2000 to 2001. He personally strapped the STS 107 crew into the Space Shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated upon re-entry over the southwestern United States in 2003.
“Nothing prepares you for losing seven friends in an instant on a national scale,” he said. “NASA had a tough decision after the loss of the Columbia just as NASCAR had a tough decision after losing its most famous and maybe greatest driver. Where do you go? What do you do? The right answer is you fly again, and you race next week. You just make sure you’ve learned from the previous events so it won’t happen again.
“The danger of what we do is always in the back of my mind. But I think human space flight is better from the Columbia accident, despite losing seven people who can never be replaced. It’s the same with NASCAR. We lost Dale Earnhardt Sr., and will never get him back. But some very positive things came from that tragedy. The sport made significant improvements to the cars and tracks and has never been safer.
“What happened with Dale and the Columbia are eerily similar. We’d seen foam fall off the Shuttle for years. We tolerated it. NASCAR had some bad accidents that seemed like freak occurrences. It took a huge event in both cases to bring about productive change – losing the most famous driver in what looked like an innocuous crash and the Shuttle burning up over Texas after a piece of foam dislodged. But some pretty smart people worked hard to fix the problems. And we’re much safer as a result.”
Just as NASCAR is seeking expansion opportunities, so is NASA. Missions are being planned for the U.S. to return to the moon and possibly beyond to Mars. Perhaps one of our own remarkable fans will be at the controls. Whatever is next for Doug Hurley, all of NASCAR Nation wishes him “Godspeed.”
It’s not unusual for a NASCAR fan unable to tune to a race – maybe he’s on the job or waiting to get root canal – to sneak a quick online update. One fan, Doug Hurley, a Colonel in the Marine Corps, got his NASCAR fix at work on a laptop computer in a unique place – 250 miles above the earth moving at 17,500 mph in zero gravity.
Hurley, the pilot of Space Shuttle Endeavor, hadn’t missed a race in eight years since being introduced to NASCAR at Watkins Glen and feeling a rush of excitement he could only call “indescribable.” He wasn’t going to let a small thing like manning the controls of the most complex machine ever built get in the way of finding out how Joey Logano did at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
“It’s not a very well-kept secret at NASA that I’m a pretty big NASCAR fan,” Hurley says. The second line of his official NASA biography states, “Recreational interests include hunting, cycling and attending as many NASCAR races as possible.”
While training in Star City, Russia with cosmonauts preparing to work on the International Space Station, the Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel watched NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races on the Armed Forces television network deep into the night. On board the Endeavor, he took DVD copies to two of the most notable races in the history of stock car racing – the 1979 and 1998 Daytona 500s. He’s lobbying to have these classic races included in the permanent library on board the International Space Station.
Hurley grew up in Apalachin, NY, a town so small it had no stoplight. On cloudless nights, he’d gaze at the wide sky, densely speckled with the twinkling lights of stars from galaxies billions of miles away. Doug was only two years old when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, but remembers news clips of Sky Lab missions sandwiched between the Saturday morning cartoons.
“As a young boy, you think, ‘Wow, that would be pretty neat to go there and do that,’” he said.
He liked what the military stood for and to help pay for college enrolled in the Navy ROTC, program at Tulane University. During college, he spent a week at a Navy jet base in Jacksonville and got to ride in a fighter plane.
“That was the defining moment. I knew what I wanted to do.” Hurley excelled as a Naval Aviator and a test pilot. He was the first Marine pilot to fly the F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet.
Despite his fondness for speed, Hurley never paid much attention to NASCAR, even though he’d lived 45 minutes south of the road course at Watkins Glen. That changed when his cousin Nanette began dating Greg Zipadelli, then Tony Stewart’s crew chief for Joe Gibbs Racing. Nan and Doug had spent many holidays and summers together as kids and remained close as adults. He jumped at her invitation to watch the race from Zippy’s pit stall at the Glen.
“From the moment I heard the first engine roar to life, I was unequivocally, unbelievably, completely and totally hooked on the sport,” Hurley said. Since then, he’s attended more than 20 races and holds season tickets at Texas Motor Speedway.
Nanette and Zipadelli are now married with three kids, but Tony and the crew chief he called “the big brother I never had” have parted ways. After a stellar decade with the No. 20 Home Depot car, including two NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championships, Stewart left Joe Gibbs Racing following the 2008 season to form his own team, becoming the most successful driver-owner in NASCAR since Alan Kulwicki won the title in 1992. The separation was a tough, emotional time for Zippy.
“Loyalty is a big thing with Zippy, and he decided to stay with Joe Gibbs, who gave him a huge opportunity. That’s where his heart was.”
Most No. 20 fans also guided by their loyalty simply followed Stewart to this new No. 14 ride. Hurley stuck with Zippy and his new driver, teenage phenom Joey Logano, nicknamed “Sliced Bread,” as in “the greatest thing since…”
“Joey is amazingly grounded for a person his age facing tremendous challenges and responsibility,” Hurley said. “If you compare him to Zippy or me, we were selected for our jobs – Greg as crew chief and me into the astronaut program – in our early ‘30s. Joey is 19 and handling the pressure of big-time auto racing very well. At the outset, there was skepticism about his abilities in a Cup ride, but his true talent quickly became apparent. NASCAR banned testing for 2009, which was the right move to save costs, but it hurt newer guys like Joey. And then you have him going into a new car much different than the NASCAR Nationwide Series cars he was driving. Considering all that, he’s figuring out a lot of things pretty quickly. Joey’s been blessed with tremendous talent and the help of a core group of guys who have been with Zippy from the beginning. He and Zippy have been a great team, which they proved when Joey became the youngest driver ever to win a Sprint Cup Series race at New Hampshire in 2009. Joey battled hard all day and Zippy made a great call to win the race. I’m predicting Joey is going to do very well in the ears to come. Plus, he is just a super nice guy. He’s got solid support from his parents, and it shows.”
Hurley, who is 42 and favors the flat-top hair style reminiscent of the flight directors and fly boys chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff, sees many parallels between the sport he loves to watch from the pit stall and his own job strapped into a rocket soaring toward the wide blue yonder. “My background is as a fighter pilot, so the speed, the adrenaline rush, the eye-hand coordination is somewhat similar. A big part of the excitement for me is getting so close to the action. Fans can feel a bit of that, sitting off the turn with the cars coming right at you. They can get some of that speed adrenaline rush a fighter pilot feels.”
In some ways, NASCAR drivers face tougher challenges than astronauts, Hurley says. It’s a surprising perspective from a decorated Navy test pilot snapped up by the astronaut development program as soon as he was eligible, a four-time recipient of the NASA Superior Accomplishment Award who helped orchestrate the mind-boggling tasks of an upside down rendezvous with the International Space station, five space walks, the replacement of half dozen 250-pound batteries in the unforgiving blackness of space, and the transfer home of a Japanese astronaut.
“The biggest difference is NASCAR is much more in the public eye than what we do as astronauts and what I did as a fighter pilot,” he said. “When we launch shuttles into space, of course that’s highly publicized, but months of training are largely done without constant scrutiny. NASCAR drivers live in the limelight virtually year-round. Being in a dangerous, high-pressure environment, it’s not easy to manage outside eyes prying in.”
There are obviously many differences between astronauts and race car drivers. Flirting with danger – the lurking, unpredictable set of unseen circumstances that can snuff a life out in a blink – is not one of them.
Hurley was avidly following NASCAR when drivers Adam Petty, Kenny Irwin, and Dale Earnhardt Sr. were killed over a nine month period from 2000 to 2001. He personally strapped the STS 107 crew into the Space Shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated upon re-entry over the southwestern United States in 2003.
“Nothing prepares you for losing seven friends in an instant on a national scale,” he said. “NASA had a tough decision after the loss of the Columbia just as NASCAR had a tough decision after losing its most famous and maybe greatest driver. Where do you go? What do you do? The right answer is you fly again, and you race next week. You just make sure you’ve learned from the previous events so it won’t happen again.
“The danger of what we do is always in the back of my mind. But I think human space flight is better from the Columbia accident, despite losing seven people who can never be replaced. It’s the same with NASCAR. We lost Dale Earnhardt Sr., and will never get him back. But some very positive things came from that tragedy. The sport made significant improvements to the cars and tracks and has never been safer.
“What happened with Dale and the Columbia are eerily similar. We’d seen foam fall off the Shuttle for years. We tolerated it. NASCAR had some bad accidents that seemed like freak occurrences. It took a huge event in both cases to bring about productive change – losing the most famous driver in what looked like an innocuous crash and the Shuttle burning up over Texas after a piece of foam dislodged. But some pretty smart people worked hard to fix the problems. And we’re much safer as a result.”
Just as NASCAR is seeking expansion opportunities, so is NASA. Missions are being planned for the U.S. to return to the moon and possibly beyond to Mars. Perhaps one of our own remarkable fans will be at the controls. Whatever is next for Doug Hurley, all of NASCAR Nation wishes him “Godspeed.”
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Goodbye but not Farewell (or something like that)
Ranking life's bittersweet days, this one, my final day at NASCAR, easily shoots to #1 with a bullet.
After eight-plus seasons helping to tell the NASCAR story, I've accepted a great opportunity as VP, Strategic Communications for IMG College.
As you may know, college sports are booming – with radiological meltdown to the left of us, wars to the right, our President even found time to fill out his Brackets. This is a chance to take a leadership role with a fast-growing organization transforming the business of college sports. Being Italian, I fully respect an offer not to be refused.
I'm about as excited as one can get nowadays without the authorities being alerted and the building sealed off.
It's not easy to leave NASCAR, especially amid a thrilling season that has 'em cheering in the press boxes. I genuinely love our sport (jeez, their sport in a few hours); heck, I slept with the fans in their converted school buses and wrote a book about it!
From my first race in 2003 at Talladega (hallelujuah, can it be scripted any better), I've smoked the proverbial exhaust and savored every hit. I am blessed to have been surrounded by extraordinary people who may have talked a bit funny to this New Yorker (and me to them as well) but who leave a mark nonetheless.
NASCAR was not a Dickensian gig: It was the best of times, it was the best of times.
There is no breed quite like NASCAR fans. Show me another place on earth with as many empty beer bottles and as few fights as a NASCAR race.
One fan contributing to that heap of empties -- now recycled at an impressive rate, mind you -- calls me "Lucky Dog." The source of my good fortune is the mere fact I work for NASCAR.
He's right about the nickname. Everyone who works in this industry owns it, too, contributing to a continually unfolding great American entreprenerial success story that happens to bring joy to millions.
I will always treasure my Lucky Dog status. My enthusiasm for the sport won't ever wane. I will continue to root for the courageous drivers and hard-working people who bring this immensely enjoyable traveling circus to millions every week for 10-month stretch.
In the meantime, to those partners, colleagues, and media members who have heard this news and have written or called to playfully declare that I am a "jerk," "ass", "peckerhead" or various other body parts that shall go unmentioned, thank you, I am flattered. I will miss you, too. I sincerely hope we can stay in touch, particularly if you owe me money.
As of April 25, I can be reached at andrew.giangola@imgworld.com
I wish each of you, and everyone involved in this wonderful sport, and those who watch, good health and continued success.
As the great Warren Zevon said, Enjoy every sandwich.
Andrew Giangola
Gaby Giangola's horror novel, CYANIDE SMILE is available on lulu.com. Just click:
http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/cyanide-smile/9918315
After eight-plus seasons helping to tell the NASCAR story, I've accepted a great opportunity as VP, Strategic Communications for IMG College.
As you may know, college sports are booming – with radiological meltdown to the left of us, wars to the right, our President even found time to fill out his Brackets. This is a chance to take a leadership role with a fast-growing organization transforming the business of college sports. Being Italian, I fully respect an offer not to be refused.
I'm about as excited as one can get nowadays without the authorities being alerted and the building sealed off.
It's not easy to leave NASCAR, especially amid a thrilling season that has 'em cheering in the press boxes. I genuinely love our sport (jeez, their sport in a few hours); heck, I slept with the fans in their converted school buses and wrote a book about it!
From my first race in 2003 at Talladega (hallelujuah, can it be scripted any better), I've smoked the proverbial exhaust and savored every hit. I am blessed to have been surrounded by extraordinary people who may have talked a bit funny to this New Yorker (and me to them as well) but who leave a mark nonetheless.
NASCAR was not a Dickensian gig: It was the best of times, it was the best of times.
There is no breed quite like NASCAR fans. Show me another place on earth with as many empty beer bottles and as few fights as a NASCAR race.
One fan contributing to that heap of empties -- now recycled at an impressive rate, mind you -- calls me "Lucky Dog." The source of my good fortune is the mere fact I work for NASCAR.
He's right about the nickname. Everyone who works in this industry owns it, too, contributing to a continually unfolding great American entreprenerial success story that happens to bring joy to millions.
I will always treasure my Lucky Dog status. My enthusiasm for the sport won't ever wane. I will continue to root for the courageous drivers and hard-working people who bring this immensely enjoyable traveling circus to millions every week for 10-month stretch.
In the meantime, to those partners, colleagues, and media members who have heard this news and have written or called to playfully declare that I am a "jerk," "ass", "peckerhead" or various other body parts that shall go unmentioned, thank you, I am flattered. I will miss you, too. I sincerely hope we can stay in touch, particularly if you owe me money.
As of April 25, I can be reached at andrew.giangola@imgworld.com
I wish each of you, and everyone involved in this wonderful sport, and those who watch, good health and continued success.
As the great Warren Zevon said, Enjoy every sandwich.
Andrew Giangola
Gaby Giangola's horror novel, CYANIDE SMILE is available on lulu.com. Just click:
http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/cyanide-smile/9918315
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Nursing Junior to a Championship
Some people live to save the world.
Barbie Robbins lives for Dale Earnhardt Jr.
Once time, Junior wrecked and was shaken up. Barbie, who was at home, thousands of miles from the race, put on a nurse’s outfit. She wanted to channel healing vibes to her number-one driver.
Every morning, the 49-year-old Californian wakes up underneath a collage of Dale Jr. photographs pasted above her bed. Before shedding her No. 88 pajamas, Barbie bee-lines to the computer to vote for her man in the NASCAR Most Popular Driver contest. She punches up her MySpace page, checks the guest book for new NASCAR friends and gazes at the latest Dale Jr. photos posted.
In one shot, the driver is sleeping peacefully in his race car. Thought bubbles, like those in cartoons, rise from his head to a superimposed cloud framing Barbie’s smiling face. A photo of Dale’s car speeding past the start-finish line has the caption, “Junior looks at Barbie.” A shot showing Junior with chin on clenched fist, deep in thought, is captioned, “Hmmm…should I call Barbie?” A photo of Junior appearing surprised is tagged, “Is that Barbie?” In another one, NASCAR’s biggest star is with fellow driver Tony Stewart who exclaims “Look Dale, there she is again. I think Barbie is stalking you!”
Barbie sends daily notes on the life and times of Dale Jr. to dozens of friends met on the web. On race day, members of the virtual club sit with their laptops in front of the TV telecast, typing bulletins to one another. If Junior is rammed by another driver, Barbie will fire off sailor-worthy cusses. She’s known online, and among many in the physical world, as “Junior’s Baby 8 Girl.” Some in her San Diego neighborhood call her “NASCAR Chick.”
Most days, she puts on a Dale Jr. t-shirt, which had been ironed and carefully set out the night before. She selects a Dale Jr. hat. There’s a set rotation – on Sunday night, shirts and hats are matched to days of the week. She has been unable to find Junior Under ‘Roos and will take any leads offered. At the corner store in her San Diego neighborhood, the counterman catches a glance of her NASCAR garb and long Stevie Wonder-style braids and invariably shouts, “Hey, NASCAR Chick!”
Barbie Robbins, formerly of Chicago, Illinois and a nondescript civilian life, now of San Diego, California and a minor celebrity in her neighborhood and Auto Club Speedway 104 miles due north, became Junior’s Baby 8 Girl after seeing the driver in a TV interview.
The attraction was mystical and instantaneous. The Sicilians, as any fan of “The Godfather” knows, have a term for such otherworldly instant connections: “The Thunderbolt.” The thunderbolt is deeper and more complex than what Americans might call “love at first sight.” This is not puppy dogs and floating hearts. The thunderbolt is serious, life-altering destiny not to be messed with.
In Sicily, the Thunderbolt is called, “lu lampu.”
In San Diego, Barbie Robbins told the TV screen, “Damn, he fine!”
The hour she first believed, she watched Dale Junior answer the reporter’s questions, slightly impatient, index finger prone to reach up and clean his ear, a plain spoken North Carolina boy saying “y’all” and “ain’t” whenever he darn well pleased, a regular dude of unkempt rugged good looks who’d rather be hunting or fishing than facing questions about the so-called Earnhardt family legacy.
Barbie saw beautiful unvarnished authenticity in a glossed-up world populated with too many candy-ass pretty boys, and was zapped by the thunderbolt. She started tuning to NASCAR races to see the free-spirited cowboy ride. He was courageous and could drive that car. He had his own chocolate bar. She hates chocolate. It was the sweetest candy she’d ever tasted.
Junior’s Baby 8 Girl is never to be bothered on Sunday even during family emergencies, always eager to display the Dale Junior tattoo covering one shoulder blade and to speak wistfully about the “Junior Nation” one coming to the other. She never shies from a chance to promote the individual who is the object of many of her waking thoughts and desires. And some while she’s asleep. Ask Barbie about her life, and she’ll flatly tell you, “It’s all about Junior!” There’s a twinkle in her lagoon-green eyes, and she’s not joking.
Junior’s Baby 8 Girl wasn’t the kind of woman to go trawling for celebrities occupying a central position in her life. It was out of character for her to feel an intimate connection to any pop culture icon – those distant figures of tabloid renown captured and co-oped by the media to sate the public’s insatiable appetite for unconsummated fantasy, tart gossip and computer wallpaper.
The possibility of Barbie connecting with a NASCAR driver was more remote. It wasn’t because most African American women in Southern California have little in common with the front men of a sport rooted in Carolina moonshine. It’s just that while Barbie had watched Indy Car with cousins, she wasn’t much of a race fan. She wasn’t opposed to it. Racing was cool, but there were so many other things to do on a Sunday afternoon. Beside, she actually prefers connecting with people personally in the flesh, over a Bud Light and a Newport, rather than plumbing the lives of public figures through supermarket checkout magazines.
Then came the lu lampu. She didn’t plan it. No one asks for the thunderbolt. Now there’s an unmistakable connection, a spooky empathy at play.
“When Dale Junior does an interview, and I see he’s sad, it makes me sad,” Barbie said. “I will pick up on his moods and will really feel the same way.”
After Dale Jr. left the team formed by his father – which after Senior’s passing was run by his step mother Teresa – to join the NASCAR powerhouse Hendrick Motorsports, Barbie noticed the driver was relaxed, freed from the politics and pressure of the family business. The days following his shocking move from Dale Earnhardt Inc. to join Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson at a new team brought relief to the driver and his biggest fan.
“Watching Junior talking about his new team in the press conference, you could just see how happy and excited he was. And so was I.” As she likes to say in her emails, “Life is Gr88t!!!!”
Even cocooned in her car on the freeways of California, Junior Baby 8 Girl is identified by a batch of Dale Jr. bumper stickers drawing odd looks. “Sometimes on the highway, a driver will pull alongside. He’s seen my Dale Jr. stickers. The look on his face, says, ‘That is not her car.’ Yes, it’s my car, and I’m a NASCAR fan! I’m a redneck with a permanent tan! But when I get to the track, I’m just another race fan, fitting right in. I’m probably the most crazy fan, like an Energizer bunny but doing all I can to not jump over that fence and grab onto Dale Jr.’s car. But I’m still just a fan. Every other NASCAR fan I’ve met has been awesome. They don’t care if I’m black, pink or orange. I’m not into black or white. I’m into Green. Number 88 green! That’s all that matters”
Getting close to the driver of the number 88 green car is the weekend’s main goal. “I have my Junior Station set up where I lay out my hoochie outfits, oops, I mean respectful, family friendly NASCAR-themed clothing,” she says. To look her best, Junior’s Baby 8 Girl sits for eight hours to get her hair specially braided. Getting ready for the drive north, she cranks up Jackie Wilson’s “Baby Workout.”
Grilled foods are wrapped in foil. The ice chest is filled with Bud Light. Most of the beer will come back, since NASCAR fans offer theirs to her all weekend. “NASCAR tailgating rocks,” she said. “Oh my god, two times a year, drinking beer at 8 a.m., it’s the only way to party. Those other so called big sports events have nada on NASCAR.”
She loves seeing the new crop of Dale Junior t-shirts and having her picture taken in his colors. She once bought a bunch of new tees in the parking lot and began dancing for fans snapping her picture. She didn’t know it, but the goods were illegal knock-offs. The police snuck up and busted the counterfeiter. Nearby at her SUV, Junior’s Baby 8 Girl was posing in her new wares. She explained it was her car, she bought the shirts not to sell but for herself as she is the biggest Junior fan. She said the photos were not to encourage the sale of illegal merchandise but to promote her favorite driver. No, she was not being compensated.
Yes, she does this at all the races. Yes, OK, it’s a little over the top. No, she’s not kidding about all this.
The cops shook their heads and pulled away.
She’s found a niche, making dozens of friends at the track, on a first name basis with Auto Club Speedway President Gillian Zucker, a familiar face to some of the team crews. Yet still feels on the outside, nose pressed against the glass. Myriad web sites, fan magazines, TV and satellite radio coverage bring fans their NASCAR fix whenever they want. But not all the time, any time. Life beckons. There’s a job to go to, assignments looming, appointments to make, groceries to buy, a boy to raise. Thankfully, her son drinks the NASCAR Kool-Aid, too, and they’ve not missed a single race at Auto Club Speedway since 1998. Pit passes bring them close to the drivers. At one race, Junior nearly bumped into them before the drivers’ introductions.
“I reached out and touched Junior for a hot second, rubbed his arm, spoke to him,” she said. “I said, ‘I want a hug,’ just to let him know, ‘Dude, I love ya, I’m always loyal, dedicated and right there with ya.’ His smile was priceless.” Telling this story, her eyes filled with tears.
Try to squeeze Peyton Manning’s shoulder before a game. You’ll be handcuffed and thrown in jail. The chance to get up close is what Junior’s Baby 8 Girl likes most about the sport. But as near as she can get to the drivers, it’s only twice a year. When race weekends start, and she’s at work punching information into the computer, there’s no way to know what’s going on in the race shop and at the track. The data entry position is a job, not a career. Her dream is employment at NASCAR, winding up on the inside, a life with no barriers to knowing what’s happening with Dale Junior exactly when it’s happening. She brings her resume to each race she attends. You never know.
At work cut off from NASCAR on a Friday afternoon can make a fan like Barbie very frustrated. She sometimes has a premonition, like before the race at Talladega. She felt something wrong and snuck a peak at the internet. Dale had blown a tire during a practice run and crashed. A feeling of dread washed over her.
The online NASCAR network kicked into gear. Friends with jobs allowing them to follow NASCAR on SPEED or Sirius sent news. Junior was fine – checked out in the infield care center and released, walking to the garage to set up the backup car.
This time, Barbie could leave the nurse’s outfit in the closet.
-- Published with permission from THE WEEKEND STARTS ON WEDNESDAY: True Stories of Remarkable NASCAR Fans by Andrew Giangola (Motorbooks, 2010) --
Barbie Robbins lives for Dale Earnhardt Jr.
Once time, Junior wrecked and was shaken up. Barbie, who was at home, thousands of miles from the race, put on a nurse’s outfit. She wanted to channel healing vibes to her number-one driver.
Every morning, the 49-year-old Californian wakes up underneath a collage of Dale Jr. photographs pasted above her bed. Before shedding her No. 88 pajamas, Barbie bee-lines to the computer to vote for her man in the NASCAR Most Popular Driver contest. She punches up her MySpace page, checks the guest book for new NASCAR friends and gazes at the latest Dale Jr. photos posted.
In one shot, the driver is sleeping peacefully in his race car. Thought bubbles, like those in cartoons, rise from his head to a superimposed cloud framing Barbie’s smiling face. A photo of Dale’s car speeding past the start-finish line has the caption, “Junior looks at Barbie.” A shot showing Junior with chin on clenched fist, deep in thought, is captioned, “Hmmm…should I call Barbie?” A photo of Junior appearing surprised is tagged, “Is that Barbie?” In another one, NASCAR’s biggest star is with fellow driver Tony Stewart who exclaims “Look Dale, there she is again. I think Barbie is stalking you!”
Barbie sends daily notes on the life and times of Dale Jr. to dozens of friends met on the web. On race day, members of the virtual club sit with their laptops in front of the TV telecast, typing bulletins to one another. If Junior is rammed by another driver, Barbie will fire off sailor-worthy cusses. She’s known online, and among many in the physical world, as “Junior’s Baby 8 Girl.” Some in her San Diego neighborhood call her “NASCAR Chick.”
Most days, she puts on a Dale Jr. t-shirt, which had been ironed and carefully set out the night before. She selects a Dale Jr. hat. There’s a set rotation – on Sunday night, shirts and hats are matched to days of the week. She has been unable to find Junior Under ‘Roos and will take any leads offered. At the corner store in her San Diego neighborhood, the counterman catches a glance of her NASCAR garb and long Stevie Wonder-style braids and invariably shouts, “Hey, NASCAR Chick!”
Barbie Robbins, formerly of Chicago, Illinois and a nondescript civilian life, now of San Diego, California and a minor celebrity in her neighborhood and Auto Club Speedway 104 miles due north, became Junior’s Baby 8 Girl after seeing the driver in a TV interview.
The attraction was mystical and instantaneous. The Sicilians, as any fan of “The Godfather” knows, have a term for such otherworldly instant connections: “The Thunderbolt.” The thunderbolt is deeper and more complex than what Americans might call “love at first sight.” This is not puppy dogs and floating hearts. The thunderbolt is serious, life-altering destiny not to be messed with.
In Sicily, the Thunderbolt is called, “lu lampu.”
In San Diego, Barbie Robbins told the TV screen, “Damn, he fine!”
The hour she first believed, she watched Dale Junior answer the reporter’s questions, slightly impatient, index finger prone to reach up and clean his ear, a plain spoken North Carolina boy saying “y’all” and “ain’t” whenever he darn well pleased, a regular dude of unkempt rugged good looks who’d rather be hunting or fishing than facing questions about the so-called Earnhardt family legacy.
Barbie saw beautiful unvarnished authenticity in a glossed-up world populated with too many candy-ass pretty boys, and was zapped by the thunderbolt. She started tuning to NASCAR races to see the free-spirited cowboy ride. He was courageous and could drive that car. He had his own chocolate bar. She hates chocolate. It was the sweetest candy she’d ever tasted.
Junior’s Baby 8 Girl is never to be bothered on Sunday even during family emergencies, always eager to display the Dale Junior tattoo covering one shoulder blade and to speak wistfully about the “Junior Nation” one coming to the other. She never shies from a chance to promote the individual who is the object of many of her waking thoughts and desires. And some while she’s asleep. Ask Barbie about her life, and she’ll flatly tell you, “It’s all about Junior!” There’s a twinkle in her lagoon-green eyes, and she’s not joking.
Junior’s Baby 8 Girl wasn’t the kind of woman to go trawling for celebrities occupying a central position in her life. It was out of character for her to feel an intimate connection to any pop culture icon – those distant figures of tabloid renown captured and co-oped by the media to sate the public’s insatiable appetite for unconsummated fantasy, tart gossip and computer wallpaper.
The possibility of Barbie connecting with a NASCAR driver was more remote. It wasn’t because most African American women in Southern California have little in common with the front men of a sport rooted in Carolina moonshine. It’s just that while Barbie had watched Indy Car with cousins, she wasn’t much of a race fan. She wasn’t opposed to it. Racing was cool, but there were so many other things to do on a Sunday afternoon. Beside, she actually prefers connecting with people personally in the flesh, over a Bud Light and a Newport, rather than plumbing the lives of public figures through supermarket checkout magazines.
Then came the lu lampu. She didn’t plan it. No one asks for the thunderbolt. Now there’s an unmistakable connection, a spooky empathy at play.
“When Dale Junior does an interview, and I see he’s sad, it makes me sad,” Barbie said. “I will pick up on his moods and will really feel the same way.”
After Dale Jr. left the team formed by his father – which after Senior’s passing was run by his step mother Teresa – to join the NASCAR powerhouse Hendrick Motorsports, Barbie noticed the driver was relaxed, freed from the politics and pressure of the family business. The days following his shocking move from Dale Earnhardt Inc. to join Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson at a new team brought relief to the driver and his biggest fan.
“Watching Junior talking about his new team in the press conference, you could just see how happy and excited he was. And so was I.” As she likes to say in her emails, “Life is Gr88t!!!!”
Even cocooned in her car on the freeways of California, Junior Baby 8 Girl is identified by a batch of Dale Jr. bumper stickers drawing odd looks. “Sometimes on the highway, a driver will pull alongside. He’s seen my Dale Jr. stickers. The look on his face, says, ‘That is not her car.’ Yes, it’s my car, and I’m a NASCAR fan! I’m a redneck with a permanent tan! But when I get to the track, I’m just another race fan, fitting right in. I’m probably the most crazy fan, like an Energizer bunny but doing all I can to not jump over that fence and grab onto Dale Jr.’s car. But I’m still just a fan. Every other NASCAR fan I’ve met has been awesome. They don’t care if I’m black, pink or orange. I’m not into black or white. I’m into Green. Number 88 green! That’s all that matters”
Getting close to the driver of the number 88 green car is the weekend’s main goal. “I have my Junior Station set up where I lay out my hoochie outfits, oops, I mean respectful, family friendly NASCAR-themed clothing,” she says. To look her best, Junior’s Baby 8 Girl sits for eight hours to get her hair specially braided. Getting ready for the drive north, she cranks up Jackie Wilson’s “Baby Workout.”
Grilled foods are wrapped in foil. The ice chest is filled with Bud Light. Most of the beer will come back, since NASCAR fans offer theirs to her all weekend. “NASCAR tailgating rocks,” she said. “Oh my god, two times a year, drinking beer at 8 a.m., it’s the only way to party. Those other so called big sports events have nada on NASCAR.”
She loves seeing the new crop of Dale Junior t-shirts and having her picture taken in his colors. She once bought a bunch of new tees in the parking lot and began dancing for fans snapping her picture. She didn’t know it, but the goods were illegal knock-offs. The police snuck up and busted the counterfeiter. Nearby at her SUV, Junior’s Baby 8 Girl was posing in her new wares. She explained it was her car, she bought the shirts not to sell but for herself as she is the biggest Junior fan. She said the photos were not to encourage the sale of illegal merchandise but to promote her favorite driver. No, she was not being compensated.
Yes, she does this at all the races. Yes, OK, it’s a little over the top. No, she’s not kidding about all this.
The cops shook their heads and pulled away.
She’s found a niche, making dozens of friends at the track, on a first name basis with Auto Club Speedway President Gillian Zucker, a familiar face to some of the team crews. Yet still feels on the outside, nose pressed against the glass. Myriad web sites, fan magazines, TV and satellite radio coverage bring fans their NASCAR fix whenever they want. But not all the time, any time. Life beckons. There’s a job to go to, assignments looming, appointments to make, groceries to buy, a boy to raise. Thankfully, her son drinks the NASCAR Kool-Aid, too, and they’ve not missed a single race at Auto Club Speedway since 1998. Pit passes bring them close to the drivers. At one race, Junior nearly bumped into them before the drivers’ introductions.
“I reached out and touched Junior for a hot second, rubbed his arm, spoke to him,” she said. “I said, ‘I want a hug,’ just to let him know, ‘Dude, I love ya, I’m always loyal, dedicated and right there with ya.’ His smile was priceless.” Telling this story, her eyes filled with tears.
Try to squeeze Peyton Manning’s shoulder before a game. You’ll be handcuffed and thrown in jail. The chance to get up close is what Junior’s Baby 8 Girl likes most about the sport. But as near as she can get to the drivers, it’s only twice a year. When race weekends start, and she’s at work punching information into the computer, there’s no way to know what’s going on in the race shop and at the track. The data entry position is a job, not a career. Her dream is employment at NASCAR, winding up on the inside, a life with no barriers to knowing what’s happening with Dale Junior exactly when it’s happening. She brings her resume to each race she attends. You never know.
At work cut off from NASCAR on a Friday afternoon can make a fan like Barbie very frustrated. She sometimes has a premonition, like before the race at Talladega. She felt something wrong and snuck a peak at the internet. Dale had blown a tire during a practice run and crashed. A feeling of dread washed over her.
The online NASCAR network kicked into gear. Friends with jobs allowing them to follow NASCAR on SPEED or Sirius sent news. Junior was fine – checked out in the infield care center and released, walking to the garage to set up the backup car.
This time, Barbie could leave the nurse’s outfit in the closet.
-- Published with permission from THE WEEKEND STARTS ON WEDNESDAY: True Stories of Remarkable NASCAR Fans by Andrew Giangola (Motorbooks, 2010) --
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
What Would Morgan Shepherd Say to Charlie Sheen
If you can forget for a moment his five innocent children, Charlie Sheen’s televised national meltdown makes for riveting entertainment.
(How absolutely nutty must wife number three be if CHARLIE gets custody of the kids? He admits to ingesting more drugs than humanly possible and claims to be an extra-terrestrial warlock with an extraordinary brain, Adonis DNA and Tiger blood. And the crazier wife more dangerous to the kids? What must she be like? Extra-extra terrestrial?)
Now, one of my all-time favorite movies is NETWORK. As today's major networks suck on Charlie's teet for unpasteurized Rant Milk that translates into easy ratings, you can see a lot of Martin Sheen's son in Peter Finch’s stark-raving-mad television character.
Charlie, too, is mad as hell; at what, who knows, because surrounded by his "Goddesses" in an oversized home filled, he says, with peace and love and good food, he also claims to be a winner. In fact, a bi-winner! (Charlie’s answer when asked by ABC's 20/20 if he’s bi-polar.)
I’m glued to all of it, checking Twitter by the hour to see if @CharlieSheen has posted.
I need a break, and a shower, and something to uplift my spirit and restore faith in all that is decent and good in people who are of this world and have human blood, and go home to one woman, and won't likely be carted away to the hospital any time soon for ingesting a briefcase full of cocaine with half the cast of Debbie Does Dallas.
I got what I needed, and it came from an unlikely source, NASCAR driver Morgan Shepherd, who is the polar opposite of Sheen, most notably in his faith and humility and charitable nature.
Morgan went to Sin City and put on his Superman outfit.
I'm going to rip the story right from Faith Motorsports, because they tell it so well --
“Shepherd catches shoplifter: Most NASCAR drivers don't come to mind when you think of Las Vegas crimefighters, but then again, most NASCAR drivers aren't 69-year-old Morgan Shepherd.
The veteran of 44 NASCAR seasons was getting out of his rental car in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart store Monday evening just minutes away from Las Vegas Motor Speedway just as three men burst from the store's entrance with security forces trailing behind. Thats when Shepherd, a daily jogger and fitness perfectionist, sprang into action.
"I just got out and took off after them," Shepherd said. "I caught one of them just as they were getting ready to hop a little wall at the end of the parking lot. I yanked him down and got on top of him."
Shepherd said in a matter of seconds a Las Vegas police officer pitched the ageless NASCAR driver a pair and handcuffs and continued pursuit of the other two suspects, along with the store's security force.
"I cuffed him and sat on top of him," Shepherd said. "The police department officers showed up and asked if I could hold him a while longer while they ran down the others. I told them he wasn't going anywhere."
Shepherd said while the young shoplifter pleaded with him to let him go and about the possibility of going to jail, Shepherd used the time to lecture the youth about his poor choices. (Faith Motorsports)(3-1-2011)
(How absolutely nutty must wife number three be if CHARLIE gets custody of the kids? He admits to ingesting more drugs than humanly possible and claims to be an extra-terrestrial warlock with an extraordinary brain, Adonis DNA and Tiger blood. And the crazier wife more dangerous to the kids? What must she be like? Extra-extra terrestrial?)
Now, one of my all-time favorite movies is NETWORK. As today's major networks suck on Charlie's teet for unpasteurized Rant Milk that translates into easy ratings, you can see a lot of Martin Sheen's son in Peter Finch’s stark-raving-mad television character.
Charlie, too, is mad as hell; at what, who knows, because surrounded by his "Goddesses" in an oversized home filled, he says, with peace and love and good food, he also claims to be a winner. In fact, a bi-winner! (Charlie’s answer when asked by ABC's 20/20 if he’s bi-polar.)
I’m glued to all of it, checking Twitter by the hour to see if @CharlieSheen has posted.
I need a break, and a shower, and something to uplift my spirit and restore faith in all that is decent and good in people who are of this world and have human blood, and go home to one woman, and won't likely be carted away to the hospital any time soon for ingesting a briefcase full of cocaine with half the cast of Debbie Does Dallas.
I got what I needed, and it came from an unlikely source, NASCAR driver Morgan Shepherd, who is the polar opposite of Sheen, most notably in his faith and humility and charitable nature.
Morgan went to Sin City and put on his Superman outfit.
I'm going to rip the story right from Faith Motorsports, because they tell it so well --
“Shepherd catches shoplifter: Most NASCAR drivers don't come to mind when you think of Las Vegas crimefighters, but then again, most NASCAR drivers aren't 69-year-old Morgan Shepherd.
The veteran of 44 NASCAR seasons was getting out of his rental car in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart store Monday evening just minutes away from Las Vegas Motor Speedway just as three men burst from the store's entrance with security forces trailing behind. Thats when Shepherd, a daily jogger and fitness perfectionist, sprang into action.
"I just got out and took off after them," Shepherd said. "I caught one of them just as they were getting ready to hop a little wall at the end of the parking lot. I yanked him down and got on top of him."
Shepherd said in a matter of seconds a Las Vegas police officer pitched the ageless NASCAR driver a pair and handcuffs and continued pursuit of the other two suspects, along with the store's security force.
"I cuffed him and sat on top of him," Shepherd said. "The police department officers showed up and asked if I could hold him a while longer while they ran down the others. I told them he wasn't going anywhere."
Shepherd said while the young shoplifter pleaded with him to let him go and about the possibility of going to jail, Shepherd used the time to lecture the youth about his poor choices. (Faith Motorsports)(3-1-2011)
What Would Morgan Shepherd Say to Charlie Sheen?
Charle's not bi-polar. He's a bi-winner, he says!
I'm going to rip the story right from Faith Motorsports, because they tell it so well --
Shepherd catches shoplifter: Most NASCAR drivers don't come to mind when you think of Las Vegas crimefighters, but then again, most NASCAR drivers aren't 69-year-old Morgan Shepherd.
The veteran of 44 NASCAR seasons was getting out of his rental car in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart store Monday evening just minutes away from Las Vegas Motor Speedway just as three men burst from the store's entrance with security forces trailing behind. Thats when Shepherd, a daily jogger and fitness perfectionist, sprang into action.
"I just got out and took off after them," Shepherd said. "I caught one of them just as they were getting ready to hop a little wall at the end of the parking lot. I yanked him down and got on top of him." Shepherd said in a matter of seconds a Las Vegas police officer pitched the ageless NASCAR driver a pair and handcuffs and continued pursuit of the other two suspects, along with the store's security force.
"I cuffed him and sat on top of him," Shepherd said. "The police department officers showed up and asked if I could hold him a while longer while they ran down the others. I told them he wasn't going anywhere."
Shepherd said while the young shoplifter pleaded with him to let him go and about the possibility of going to jail, Shepherd used the time to lecture the youth about his poor choices. (Faith Motorsports)(3-1-2011)
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Cookin’ on the High Side with Mario Batali and Rachael Ray
It’s 3 a.m. at Texas Motor Speedway, and Mario Batali’s red pony tail is flapping in the breeze. He’s gunning a golf cart over an uneven gravel road carving through the track’s throbbing shantytown of RVs, trailers, motor homes, and repainted school buses.
“We’re on a mission to find the real Americana,” Batali says, and he’s taking his good pal along for the ride. On the back of the zigzagging cart, a laughing Rachael
Ray is blowing kisses to fans shouting, “We love you Rachael!”
Packed into the infield are thousands of camping and recreational vehicles of varied shapes, sizes and payment schemes. Some are hitched to huge cylindrical metal smokers cooking sizzling slabs of choice American beef, which catches the attention of the super chefs driving past converted old school buses with crushed velvet sofas bolted onto the roof and sleek new Prevost motor coaches that require a jumbo mortgage.
The cart’s headlights catch the reflection of silver beads hanging from the horns of a wildebeest’s head which is mounted to a school bus painted silver to resemble a 40-foot long Coors Light can.
The beads are everywhere. Fans whooping it up in all directions are awash in them – glittering strands of silver, ruby, pearl, aquamarine, cherry cola, emerald green. Some are the size of marbles, others as big as golf balls. A life-size John Wayne cutout is adorned with several strands. Gold ones for the Duke, who is standing in front of scaffolding three stories high with a jerrybuilt viewing platform up top along with a bright neon sign proclaiming, “The Redneck Taj Mahal.”
Across the way, “Sweet Home Alabama,” the one tune that from the opening guitar lick can take a juiced-up assemblage of fans into blissed-out nirvana, is blasting from a cooler equipped with giant speakers. A dozen young men and women are swirling around the amazing cooler-slash-boom box. They’re engaged in a sort of rhythmic tribal dance, slowly wind milling their arms as if swimming leisurely through the smoky balmy Texas night.
The state of innovation in America may be declining overall, but an impressive spirit of can-do invention is on display throughout Texas Motor Speedway. A host of creative contraptions like the spindly erector-set village of scaffolding, the juke box producing southern rock and cold beer, and the smokers made from rusty underground propane tanks are helping fans view the track, cook, dance, play music, and dispense adult beverages. An enterprising fan will probably one day invent a device that does all of the above in one contraption you can hook to your Ford F-10 and tow to the races.
At the helm of the golf cart, Batali, a gregarious man with a heavy foot and military-strength RADAR for locating a good time regardless of the hour, veers down a road doglegging to the left. He drives a few hundred feet and instinctually pulls up to a western saloon. It’s an ingeniously constructed replica of a dusty storefront, the kind of plywood structure you’d see on a Hollywood lot with a hand-painted sign announcing, Me Til Monday Saloon.
“Me till Tuesday,” Batali says.
Rachael Ray doesn’t hear that because she’s off the cart before her good friend and sometime partner in crime brings it to a halt. The insanely popular chef, award-winning TV talk show host, magazine publisher, cookware entrepreneur and best-selling author busts through swinging saloon-style western doors onto an elevated black-and-white tiled dance floor.
In the middle of the floor, the object of everyone’s attention, the thing that dominates a scene with plenty of side-show diversions of eye-candy, is a gleaming stripper’s pole.
Rachael Ray marvels at the silver pole.
It seems to rise improbably from the floor, but after a moment’s reflection you can’t imagine the Me Til Monday Saloon or the raceway without it.
Rachael eyes the DJ booth and the giddy beaded dancing women and the rough-edged, crew-cut boys intent on their affection, and she exclaims in a raspy whiskey-and-sandpaper voice that’s fading fast, “We’re in the middle of a race track! These people know how to bring it!”
“Raych, the infield is the heartbeat of NASCAR,” Batali shouts. “We happen to be in the geometric center.”
This comes from experience. Batali has been to nearly 50 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races since Rich Bodmer, a friend from The Sporting News, brought him to an event at Dover International Speedway.
The globally renowned uber-chef, who darts in and out of Greenwich Village traffic on his Vespa, immediately “fell in love” with the speed of the sport, along with the drama-laden cat-and-mouse games drivers and crew chiefs will play to outfox the other teams.
Batali has been known to bend the rules – of what a restaurant should serve and how a restauranteur should act. He takes off-putting parts like beef cheeks and squab liver, and from the seemingly inedible cast-offs makes incredibly delicious dishes served in restaurants cranking rock and roll music way too loud. He wears shorts in the winter.
When you’re with Batali, the notion that some rules apply exclusively to other people starts to make sense.
It’s no surprise his favorite driver-crew chief tandem is Johnson and Chad Knaus, the duo in the garage known to be most adept for taking periodic expeditions into the gray areas in NASCAR’s black-and-white rule book.
But the combination of creative wits at war and creative techniques to push cars to breathtaking speeds was only part of the sport’s appeal to Batali.
NASCAR is famous for its multiple-day tailgaters, and the chef, who had recently returned from Spain where he and another famous fabulous New York running mate, Gwyneth Paltrow, shot a highly rated PBS series, Spain on the Road Again, naturally wanted to assess the foods of NASCAR and its fans as well.
“I got to Dover and expected hot dogs and hamburgers,” he said. “What I saw and tasted was surprising and delicious. The fans were making crab soup, crab cakes, crab stuffing, pasta with crabs, and lasagna with crabs. These were almost luxury food items being made right in the camp grounds. It was a real eye opener.”
Batali next went to Pocono Raceway, New Hampshire Motor Speedway, Talladega Super Speedway, and Texas Motor Speedway. He found delightful regional variations and hard-core race fans doubling as “obsessive foodies.” He saw each track expressing the region’s food. In Pocono, they were cooking venison and quail.
At New Hampshire, it was lobster and chowder. In Texas, beef and brisket were all the rage, and at one camp site, he saw an entire steer on a spit, barbecued for 48 hours then carved with a giant sword and served on white bread.
“That, my friend, is impressive, and you see that kind of cooking creativity all over the circuit. I like to say, NASCAR is a microcosm of the James Beard Society. It’s like going to a three-day rock concert with great food – Woodstock meets Mad Max meets the Super Bowl meets the Iowa State Fair. I’ve gone to a lot of sporting events, and I will tell you NASCAR fans are not only having more fun, they’re also eating better than fans in other sports.”
Batali has seven strong-selling cookbooks, and the NASCAR experience motivated him to write one of them, Mario Tailgates NASCAR Style, the first major cookbook attached to the sport. Batali developed recipes like Eggs in Hell, Speedway Guacamole, Restrictor Plate Chili, and Brickyard Barbecued Game Hens to capture the taste, texture and smells of the racing culture. The second-generation Italian-American boy from Seattle who went to high school in Spain is now as comfortable and familiar in tapping the cuisines of Renaissance Tuscan aristocracy and modern day Spanish field workers as he is in channeling the cooking styles of NASCAR fans in the campgrounds of races across America.
“I see myself as an interpreter of 3,000 years of cultural and gastronomic history,” Batali said. “I’m blessed because I don’t have to come up with too much that’s new and revolutionary. I’m someone who explains to people how they can make dishes that have been part of other cultures for many, many years.”
He happens to be very good at it. Batali’s record in “Iron Chef,” a televised 60-minute cooking competition among the world’s top chefs, is an astounding 31 wins and three losses. While the taste of food is subjective, and cynics would contend critics can be bought and swayed, that kind of winning record against the titans of the culinary world suggests Batali may be the best chef on the planet.
So when Texas Motor Speedway pitched him on the “Asphalt Chef,” a culinary battle at the race track pairing top chefs with NASCAR drivers, Batali accepted, and roped in his friends Rachael Ray and Tim Love, a meat-loving Texan who favors cowboy hats, western shirts, dusty boots and Crown Royal whiskey.
Love is no cooking slouch; he grills a mean rattlesnake, has an Iron Chef victory to his credit as well, and he’s well known in the Lone Star State.
But his celebrity Q factor is nowhere close to that of Batali, who has the rare distinction of being able to truthfully open a conversation by saying, “When I was on Oprah…” Yet in pop culture awareness, Batali is still a notch below Rachael Ray. Through her food and talk shows, lifestyle magazine and products now including a personal brand of dog food, Ray exists in the upper echelon of celebrity, able to elicit shrieks and tears from grown men and women through merely showing up in a public place. The dogs probably recognize her, too.
The Asphalt Chef competition was held next to a large pool in the shape of Texas below the condominiums overlooking Turn 2 of Texas Motor Speedway. Track executives have completely lost their minds, said people who comment on these kind of things when the announcement was made about new luxury condominiums to be built at the speedway. Today, the condos are worth more than a million dollars each.
While a band played light Texas blues and well-heeled corporate guests and friends of the speedway settled into their chairs at the Lone Star Clubhouse, the cooks were told the secret ingredient – hot chili peppers.
A 20-minute time clock was activated, and the teams scrambled for their ingredients, fired up the grills, and began chopping and marinating. Batali was paired with Juan Pablo Montoya, the Formula One superstar who had shocked the motorsports world by jumping to NASCAR. Montoya looks sharp in his chef’s smock, though he’s not smiling, probably because he hates to lose, whether it’s the Daytona 500 or tiddlywinks, and who wants to get up in front of a group of rich people, out of your element, not only losing but appearing foolish in the process. Juan’s eyes are locked in concentration on a pepper he’s slicing.
Rachael Ray was matched with Carl Edwards, who informed his partner he doesn’t grill, can barely prepare toast, and pulls the cheese off his pizza as part of a health kick ruling out nearly all foods outside of soup. “Carl tells me all this with a big smile on his face as if it’s good for our team,” Rachael later explains.
Tim Love, toting a bottle of Crown Royal, cooked with fellow Texan Bobby Labonte. The duo’s rib eye steak marinated in Coca-Cola with shrimp, cannoli beans, basil and chili peppers drew strong reviews. Bobby earned extra points for working his sponsor into the recipe.
The judges swallowed any concerns that blood from a grater-induced cut on Carl’s finger might have made it into his team’s dish. There had been a catch can at the bottom of the grater Carl didn’t see. The driver was grinding the cheese with a strong sense of purpose but nothing came out. So he ground the cheese faster and harder. Carl is one determined dude, and he finally just bore right into his finger. The judges overlooked that and thoroughly enjoyed Carl and Rachael’s chili and spicy quesadillas, heavy on the onion and garlic.
But Mario and Juan Pablo ruled the night. Their winning dish was an impressively presented Vietnamese-Colombian surf and turf consisting of a flank steak with red curry and a summer roll featuring Napa cabbage with shrimp, chili peppers, scallions and cilantro cooked in orange juice.
Batali denied that the dish’s fancy name and multitude of ingredients contributed to yet another Iron Chef triumph. “Juan Pablo and I won for three simple reasons,” he said in accepting a faux gold medal for his efforts. “Tim was drinkin’, Carl was bleedin’ and we were cookin’.”
Despite Edwards’ cheese-grating mishap, the professional cooks were impressed by the NASCAR drivers’ determination and sportsmanship. “These guys are not just danger mavens. They’re cool, and they’re real people, not like many celebrities today,” Batali said. “I don’t care where you live or how much money you earn, I judge anyone by two things. First is your attitude toward food – the ability to enjoy and share delicious things. Second is the way you treat busboys. I look at a lot of celebrities and they don’t make the cut by that standard. NASCAR drivers do.”
Human decency, generosity and community spirit are traits also shared by the hundreds of NASCAR fans Batali has met. His late-night jaunt with Rachael Ray in Texas reminded him of exploring the infield at Talladega at a time way past most folks’ bed time.
“Some fans had created a whole bar scene with a parquet wooden floor and Tikki lamps. They’d ring a bell and serve gumbo to anyone who wanted it. Anyone! I love that about these fans everywhere you go on the circuit. They epitomize the essence of good cooking: making something delicious and sharing it with your friends.”
Just as a friend introduced Mario to NASCAR, he was able to sell his good friend Rachael Ray on the sport. “I sincerely had the best time of my life at the track,” Ray said in the shred of her voice remaining. “I’m just upset it took me 40 years to discover all this. I’ll be back.”
Mario Batali and Rachael Ray are world-famous figures, wealthy beyond the dreams of most NASCAR fans. Yet, they are celebrities of the people. In the morning, they arrived at the racetrack in a private helicopter. But by nightfall, they were among the fans, passing good jokes and even better bottles of wine, and tearing it up in a golf cart on the way to the most extraordinary western saloon imaginable. They found the geometric center of the sport and are now proudly part of it.
Published with permission from The Weekend Starts on Wednesday: True Stories of Remarkable NASCAR Fans (Motorbooks), which is available on amazon.com and wherever fine (and ridiculously insipid) books are sold.
“We’re on a mission to find the real Americana,” Batali says, and he’s taking his good pal along for the ride. On the back of the zigzagging cart, a laughing Rachael
Ray is blowing kisses to fans shouting, “We love you Rachael!”
Packed into the infield are thousands of camping and recreational vehicles of varied shapes, sizes and payment schemes. Some are hitched to huge cylindrical metal smokers cooking sizzling slabs of choice American beef, which catches the attention of the super chefs driving past converted old school buses with crushed velvet sofas bolted onto the roof and sleek new Prevost motor coaches that require a jumbo mortgage.
The cart’s headlights catch the reflection of silver beads hanging from the horns of a wildebeest’s head which is mounted to a school bus painted silver to resemble a 40-foot long Coors Light can.
The beads are everywhere. Fans whooping it up in all directions are awash in them – glittering strands of silver, ruby, pearl, aquamarine, cherry cola, emerald green. Some are the size of marbles, others as big as golf balls. A life-size John Wayne cutout is adorned with several strands. Gold ones for the Duke, who is standing in front of scaffolding three stories high with a jerrybuilt viewing platform up top along with a bright neon sign proclaiming, “The Redneck Taj Mahal.”
Across the way, “Sweet Home Alabama,” the one tune that from the opening guitar lick can take a juiced-up assemblage of fans into blissed-out nirvana, is blasting from a cooler equipped with giant speakers. A dozen young men and women are swirling around the amazing cooler-slash-boom box. They’re engaged in a sort of rhythmic tribal dance, slowly wind milling their arms as if swimming leisurely through the smoky balmy Texas night.
The state of innovation in America may be declining overall, but an impressive spirit of can-do invention is on display throughout Texas Motor Speedway. A host of creative contraptions like the spindly erector-set village of scaffolding, the juke box producing southern rock and cold beer, and the smokers made from rusty underground propane tanks are helping fans view the track, cook, dance, play music, and dispense adult beverages. An enterprising fan will probably one day invent a device that does all of the above in one contraption you can hook to your Ford F-10 and tow to the races.
At the helm of the golf cart, Batali, a gregarious man with a heavy foot and military-strength RADAR for locating a good time regardless of the hour, veers down a road doglegging to the left. He drives a few hundred feet and instinctually pulls up to a western saloon. It’s an ingeniously constructed replica of a dusty storefront, the kind of plywood structure you’d see on a Hollywood lot with a hand-painted sign announcing, Me Til Monday Saloon.
“Me till Tuesday,” Batali says.
Rachael Ray doesn’t hear that because she’s off the cart before her good friend and sometime partner in crime brings it to a halt. The insanely popular chef, award-winning TV talk show host, magazine publisher, cookware entrepreneur and best-selling author busts through swinging saloon-style western doors onto an elevated black-and-white tiled dance floor.
In the middle of the floor, the object of everyone’s attention, the thing that dominates a scene with plenty of side-show diversions of eye-candy, is a gleaming stripper’s pole.
Rachael Ray marvels at the silver pole.
It seems to rise improbably from the floor, but after a moment’s reflection you can’t imagine the Me Til Monday Saloon or the raceway without it.
Rachael eyes the DJ booth and the giddy beaded dancing women and the rough-edged, crew-cut boys intent on their affection, and she exclaims in a raspy whiskey-and-sandpaper voice that’s fading fast, “We’re in the middle of a race track! These people know how to bring it!”
“Raych, the infield is the heartbeat of NASCAR,” Batali shouts. “We happen to be in the geometric center.”
This comes from experience. Batali has been to nearly 50 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races since Rich Bodmer, a friend from The Sporting News, brought him to an event at Dover International Speedway.
The globally renowned uber-chef, who darts in and out of Greenwich Village traffic on his Vespa, immediately “fell in love” with the speed of the sport, along with the drama-laden cat-and-mouse games drivers and crew chiefs will play to outfox the other teams.
Batali has been known to bend the rules – of what a restaurant should serve and how a restauranteur should act. He takes off-putting parts like beef cheeks and squab liver, and from the seemingly inedible cast-offs makes incredibly delicious dishes served in restaurants cranking rock and roll music way too loud. He wears shorts in the winter.
When you’re with Batali, the notion that some rules apply exclusively to other people starts to make sense.
It’s no surprise his favorite driver-crew chief tandem is Johnson and Chad Knaus, the duo in the garage known to be most adept for taking periodic expeditions into the gray areas in NASCAR’s black-and-white rule book.
But the combination of creative wits at war and creative techniques to push cars to breathtaking speeds was only part of the sport’s appeal to Batali.
NASCAR is famous for its multiple-day tailgaters, and the chef, who had recently returned from Spain where he and another famous fabulous New York running mate, Gwyneth Paltrow, shot a highly rated PBS series, Spain on the Road Again, naturally wanted to assess the foods of NASCAR and its fans as well.
“I got to Dover and expected hot dogs and hamburgers,” he said. “What I saw and tasted was surprising and delicious. The fans were making crab soup, crab cakes, crab stuffing, pasta with crabs, and lasagna with crabs. These were almost luxury food items being made right in the camp grounds. It was a real eye opener.”
Batali next went to Pocono Raceway, New Hampshire Motor Speedway, Talladega Super Speedway, and Texas Motor Speedway. He found delightful regional variations and hard-core race fans doubling as “obsessive foodies.” He saw each track expressing the region’s food. In Pocono, they were cooking venison and quail.
At New Hampshire, it was lobster and chowder. In Texas, beef and brisket were all the rage, and at one camp site, he saw an entire steer on a spit, barbecued for 48 hours then carved with a giant sword and served on white bread.
“That, my friend, is impressive, and you see that kind of cooking creativity all over the circuit. I like to say, NASCAR is a microcosm of the James Beard Society. It’s like going to a three-day rock concert with great food – Woodstock meets Mad Max meets the Super Bowl meets the Iowa State Fair. I’ve gone to a lot of sporting events, and I will tell you NASCAR fans are not only having more fun, they’re also eating better than fans in other sports.”
Batali has seven strong-selling cookbooks, and the NASCAR experience motivated him to write one of them, Mario Tailgates NASCAR Style, the first major cookbook attached to the sport. Batali developed recipes like Eggs in Hell, Speedway Guacamole, Restrictor Plate Chili, and Brickyard Barbecued Game Hens to capture the taste, texture and smells of the racing culture. The second-generation Italian-American boy from Seattle who went to high school in Spain is now as comfortable and familiar in tapping the cuisines of Renaissance Tuscan aristocracy and modern day Spanish field workers as he is in channeling the cooking styles of NASCAR fans in the campgrounds of races across America.
“I see myself as an interpreter of 3,000 years of cultural and gastronomic history,” Batali said. “I’m blessed because I don’t have to come up with too much that’s new and revolutionary. I’m someone who explains to people how they can make dishes that have been part of other cultures for many, many years.”
He happens to be very good at it. Batali’s record in “Iron Chef,” a televised 60-minute cooking competition among the world’s top chefs, is an astounding 31 wins and three losses. While the taste of food is subjective, and cynics would contend critics can be bought and swayed, that kind of winning record against the titans of the culinary world suggests Batali may be the best chef on the planet.
So when Texas Motor Speedway pitched him on the “Asphalt Chef,” a culinary battle at the race track pairing top chefs with NASCAR drivers, Batali accepted, and roped in his friends Rachael Ray and Tim Love, a meat-loving Texan who favors cowboy hats, western shirts, dusty boots and Crown Royal whiskey.
Love is no cooking slouch; he grills a mean rattlesnake, has an Iron Chef victory to his credit as well, and he’s well known in the Lone Star State.
But his celebrity Q factor is nowhere close to that of Batali, who has the rare distinction of being able to truthfully open a conversation by saying, “When I was on Oprah…” Yet in pop culture awareness, Batali is still a notch below Rachael Ray. Through her food and talk shows, lifestyle magazine and products now including a personal brand of dog food, Ray exists in the upper echelon of celebrity, able to elicit shrieks and tears from grown men and women through merely showing up in a public place. The dogs probably recognize her, too.
The Asphalt Chef competition was held next to a large pool in the shape of Texas below the condominiums overlooking Turn 2 of Texas Motor Speedway. Track executives have completely lost their minds, said people who comment on these kind of things when the announcement was made about new luxury condominiums to be built at the speedway. Today, the condos are worth more than a million dollars each.
While a band played light Texas blues and well-heeled corporate guests and friends of the speedway settled into their chairs at the Lone Star Clubhouse, the cooks were told the secret ingredient – hot chili peppers.
A 20-minute time clock was activated, and the teams scrambled for their ingredients, fired up the grills, and began chopping and marinating. Batali was paired with Juan Pablo Montoya, the Formula One superstar who had shocked the motorsports world by jumping to NASCAR. Montoya looks sharp in his chef’s smock, though he’s not smiling, probably because he hates to lose, whether it’s the Daytona 500 or tiddlywinks, and who wants to get up in front of a group of rich people, out of your element, not only losing but appearing foolish in the process. Juan’s eyes are locked in concentration on a pepper he’s slicing.
Rachael Ray was matched with Carl Edwards, who informed his partner he doesn’t grill, can barely prepare toast, and pulls the cheese off his pizza as part of a health kick ruling out nearly all foods outside of soup. “Carl tells me all this with a big smile on his face as if it’s good for our team,” Rachael later explains.
Tim Love, toting a bottle of Crown Royal, cooked with fellow Texan Bobby Labonte. The duo’s rib eye steak marinated in Coca-Cola with shrimp, cannoli beans, basil and chili peppers drew strong reviews. Bobby earned extra points for working his sponsor into the recipe.
The judges swallowed any concerns that blood from a grater-induced cut on Carl’s finger might have made it into his team’s dish. There had been a catch can at the bottom of the grater Carl didn’t see. The driver was grinding the cheese with a strong sense of purpose but nothing came out. So he ground the cheese faster and harder. Carl is one determined dude, and he finally just bore right into his finger. The judges overlooked that and thoroughly enjoyed Carl and Rachael’s chili and spicy quesadillas, heavy on the onion and garlic.
But Mario and Juan Pablo ruled the night. Their winning dish was an impressively presented Vietnamese-Colombian surf and turf consisting of a flank steak with red curry and a summer roll featuring Napa cabbage with shrimp, chili peppers, scallions and cilantro cooked in orange juice.
Batali denied that the dish’s fancy name and multitude of ingredients contributed to yet another Iron Chef triumph. “Juan Pablo and I won for three simple reasons,” he said in accepting a faux gold medal for his efforts. “Tim was drinkin’, Carl was bleedin’ and we were cookin’.”
Despite Edwards’ cheese-grating mishap, the professional cooks were impressed by the NASCAR drivers’ determination and sportsmanship. “These guys are not just danger mavens. They’re cool, and they’re real people, not like many celebrities today,” Batali said. “I don’t care where you live or how much money you earn, I judge anyone by two things. First is your attitude toward food – the ability to enjoy and share delicious things. Second is the way you treat busboys. I look at a lot of celebrities and they don’t make the cut by that standard. NASCAR drivers do.”
Human decency, generosity and community spirit are traits also shared by the hundreds of NASCAR fans Batali has met. His late-night jaunt with Rachael Ray in Texas reminded him of exploring the infield at Talladega at a time way past most folks’ bed time.
“Some fans had created a whole bar scene with a parquet wooden floor and Tikki lamps. They’d ring a bell and serve gumbo to anyone who wanted it. Anyone! I love that about these fans everywhere you go on the circuit. They epitomize the essence of good cooking: making something delicious and sharing it with your friends.”
Just as a friend introduced Mario to NASCAR, he was able to sell his good friend Rachael Ray on the sport. “I sincerely had the best time of my life at the track,” Ray said in the shred of her voice remaining. “I’m just upset it took me 40 years to discover all this. I’ll be back.”
Mario Batali and Rachael Ray are world-famous figures, wealthy beyond the dreams of most NASCAR fans. Yet, they are celebrities of the people. In the morning, they arrived at the racetrack in a private helicopter. But by nightfall, they were among the fans, passing good jokes and even better bottles of wine, and tearing it up in a golf cart on the way to the most extraordinary western saloon imaginable. They found the geometric center of the sport and are now proudly part of it.
Published with permission from The Weekend Starts on Wednesday: True Stories of Remarkable NASCAR Fans (Motorbooks), which is available on amazon.com and wherever fine (and ridiculously insipid) books are sold.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Smoke Wins and So Does Spencer Roy
It’s fitting that as the traveling circus stops in Richmond this weekend we hear from Stephanie Roy, the Tony Stewart-loving mom whose son Spencer spent a memorable Make a Wish with the two-time NASCAR champ at Richmond International Raceway, chronicled in The Weekend Starts on Wednesday.
Stephanie had previously taken a big one for the team by getting Smoke’s tattoo on her arm. Spencer had asked to be branded with his favorite driver, but he was just a young boy. So mom caught Smoke at an autograph signing, got him to plant one on her bicept, found a nearby tattoo parlor, and made Tony’s signature permanent, all before dinner time, suprising her delighted son to no end.
Well, following Smoke’s big momentum-building win in the red Office Depot Chevy last weekend in Atlanta, Stephanie wrote to us with good news. Here is her email:
I wanted to let everyone know that we were all sooo excited to see Tony win Sunday nite; it was AWESOME!! And also, that we got some important information yesterday.
When Spencer was at Duke University Hospital in May 2008, they took some samples from him to be tested. Two years later, we’ve now gotten the results back.
Spencer has been diagnosed with Timothy Syndrome, a very rare form of long Qt syndrome.
They only know of 20 people in the whole world with this, and Spencer makes 21.
After reading everything about it and talking with his doctors, this has been one of the answers we've been looking for throughout 14 years of Spencer’s life...and it happened to come immediately following Smoke's win in Hotlanta.. I think that is what is making this so ironic: Smoke gets a win that was long over due, and we get questions answered that have been long over due.
We still have a long road ahead. But Spencer is a very strong-willed young man and will not let anything slow him down. He started high school yesterday, all dressed out his new Tony shirt and hat looking good!
When he got home, I asked how his first day went, and if he learned anything.
His response was, "OMG there are sooo many girls."
I cracked up laughing. Then he announced, "Yep and I’m goin’ to ask one out"
"Oh," I responded. "Do you know her name?"
"No," he says. "Not yet."
So as you can see, he still loves the ladies....just like Tony. Hahaha
If you get a chance, please let Tony know we were all excited for him on Sunday, and we’ve had a great start to the week as well.
So there you have it. Please, if anyone sees Smoke at the track this weekend, let him know about his and our friend Spencer Roy’s good news. Maybe Smoke will even lend a line for Spencer to use to get that date. Good luck, Spence!
Stephanie had previously taken a big one for the team by getting Smoke’s tattoo on her arm. Spencer had asked to be branded with his favorite driver, but he was just a young boy. So mom caught Smoke at an autograph signing, got him to plant one on her bicept, found a nearby tattoo parlor, and made Tony’s signature permanent, all before dinner time, suprising her delighted son to no end.
Well, following Smoke’s big momentum-building win in the red Office Depot Chevy last weekend in Atlanta, Stephanie wrote to us with good news. Here is her email:
I wanted to let everyone know that we were all sooo excited to see Tony win Sunday nite; it was AWESOME!! And also, that we got some important information yesterday.
When Spencer was at Duke University Hospital in May 2008, they took some samples from him to be tested. Two years later, we’ve now gotten the results back.
Spencer has been diagnosed with Timothy Syndrome, a very rare form of long Qt syndrome.
They only know of 20 people in the whole world with this, and Spencer makes 21.
After reading everything about it and talking with his doctors, this has been one of the answers we've been looking for throughout 14 years of Spencer’s life...and it happened to come immediately following Smoke's win in Hotlanta.. I think that is what is making this so ironic: Smoke gets a win that was long over due, and we get questions answered that have been long over due.
We still have a long road ahead. But Spencer is a very strong-willed young man and will not let anything slow him down. He started high school yesterday, all dressed out his new Tony shirt and hat looking good!
When he got home, I asked how his first day went, and if he learned anything.
His response was, "OMG there are sooo many girls."
I cracked up laughing. Then he announced, "Yep and I’m goin’ to ask one out"
"Oh," I responded. "Do you know her name?"
"No," he says. "Not yet."
So as you can see, he still loves the ladies....just like Tony. Hahaha
If you get a chance, please let Tony know we were all excited for him on Sunday, and we’ve had a great start to the week as well.
So there you have it. Please, if anyone sees Smoke at the track this weekend, let him know about his and our friend Spencer Roy’s good news. Maybe Smoke will even lend a line for Spencer to use to get that date. Good luck, Spence!
Monday, September 6, 2010
Holy Bidet! Holiday Disptach from Venice
Oh, the irony.
For long-awaited vacation, NASCAR guy goes to Venice, the city without cars.
Yep, there are zero automobiles in the stunning lagoon city the Italians built on the Adriatic to fend off the Barbarians.
But that's where our family went on summer holiday. To get around this town, you walk, or board a Gondola, Water Taxi, or the Vaporetto, those ubiquitous water buses cruising the canals. Get sick, and there are ambulance speedboats.
(For taking my break in a city without streets or cars, please allow me to extend fast apologies to Bill France Sr., Bill France Jr., Curtis Turner, Joe Weatherly, Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt Sr., Darrell Waltrip, Tony Stewart, Kyle Busch and Jim Hunter, my favorite personalities in this sport, for their plain-spokeness, torpedoes-be-damned vision, and attitudes unaffected by the winds of political correctness.)
Venice's architectural treasure trove of well-preserved medievel buildings flush against the winding grid of canals will remove your breath. "Epic," as the kids say on Facebook.
At every turn, there's another unexpected find. You can't take a bad picture. Just point the camera, press the button, and you've got a postcard.
Suffice it to say, Venice is like nothing you've seen. Just go there someday, if you can.
As a personal plus, the apartment we lived in for a week, allowing me to discover my true inner Guido, had a bidet. And that alone is life altering. (Cue Mad Man's Don Draper describing daisys and a soft summer breeze.)
Depite Venezia's wondrous, historic ambiance, the soaring chapels and countless mask shops (Gaby bought one to wear when she plays bass on stage), the restaurants with aloof waiters who deliberately puff their cigarettes before sauntering over to present the check, the gondola captains in black trousers and striped shirts favoring their romantic cargo with Italian songs, etc. etc., my favorite Venician moment wasn't soaking in any of that, or slurping pasta lathered in black squid ink, or watching glassblowers ply their ancient trade, or waking up to the clang-gong-dong, clang-gong-dong bells atop the churches outside our bedroom, or any of the continual unexpected glimpses of beauty everywhere.
No, this trip, the enduring memory was relaxing in the town square's local cafe, sipping Venezian Cappuccino. A lithe Italian girl in a tight mini-skirt struts by, her four-inch stilleto heels clacking against the old stones, and Gaby declares: "Is that a HOOKER?"
My daughter's voice -- a mixture of childish innocence and hard-boiled mean-streets-of-New York City skepticism -- booming off tiles set hundreds of years ago in this unique city of my home country, made the whole trip worth it.
For long-awaited vacation, NASCAR guy goes to Venice, the city without cars.
Yep, there are zero automobiles in the stunning lagoon city the Italians built on the Adriatic to fend off the Barbarians.
But that's where our family went on summer holiday. To get around this town, you walk, or board a Gondola, Water Taxi, or the Vaporetto, those ubiquitous water buses cruising the canals. Get sick, and there are ambulance speedboats.
(For taking my break in a city without streets or cars, please allow me to extend fast apologies to Bill France Sr., Bill France Jr., Curtis Turner, Joe Weatherly, Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt Sr., Darrell Waltrip, Tony Stewart, Kyle Busch and Jim Hunter, my favorite personalities in this sport, for their plain-spokeness, torpedoes-be-damned vision, and attitudes unaffected by the winds of political correctness.)
Venice's architectural treasure trove of well-preserved medievel buildings flush against the winding grid of canals will remove your breath. "Epic," as the kids say on Facebook.
At every turn, there's another unexpected find. You can't take a bad picture. Just point the camera, press the button, and you've got a postcard.
Suffice it to say, Venice is like nothing you've seen. Just go there someday, if you can.
As a personal plus, the apartment we lived in for a week, allowing me to discover my true inner Guido, had a bidet. And that alone is life altering. (Cue Mad Man's Don Draper describing daisys and a soft summer breeze.)
Depite Venezia's wondrous, historic ambiance, the soaring chapels and countless mask shops (Gaby bought one to wear when she plays bass on stage), the restaurants with aloof waiters who deliberately puff their cigarettes before sauntering over to present the check, the gondola captains in black trousers and striped shirts favoring their romantic cargo with Italian songs, etc. etc., my favorite Venician moment wasn't soaking in any of that, or slurping pasta lathered in black squid ink, or watching glassblowers ply their ancient trade, or waking up to the clang-gong-dong, clang-gong-dong bells atop the churches outside our bedroom, or any of the continual unexpected glimpses of beauty everywhere.
No, this trip, the enduring memory was relaxing in the town square's local cafe, sipping Venezian Cappuccino. A lithe Italian girl in a tight mini-skirt struts by, her four-inch stilleto heels clacking against the old stones, and Gaby declares: "Is that a HOOKER?"
My daughter's voice -- a mixture of childish innocence and hard-boiled mean-streets-of-New York City skepticism -- booming off tiles set hundreds of years ago in this unique city of my home country, made the whole trip worth it.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Papa Was A Rolling Stone
Strange things, often unexplainable, happen on the road.
That one morning, a peculiar email text message came in from an unfamiliar phone number. Actually, several will arrive.
The first asks, you’ve had something 2 eat?
I am in North Carolina, mobile, time pressed, bummed there’s no room for a quick stop at Chick-fil-A. And I’m pissed at myself for not printing decent directions for all the driving to NASCAR race shops that will be done today.
Normal people just erase. But I never met an email I didn't like. There is a tidal pull to respond.
(Confession: Like a true addict, I’m now replying to just about every incoming note. Even spam. Those, I answer with a customized phony “automated out of the office” response. For example, a course offered on civility and manners in the workplace warranted a rude, profanity-laced tirade. The growing collection of my responses is not for the faint of heart, a family audience, or appropriate to this particular story.)
Another text comes in:
I hope you’ve had something 2 eat?
It’s an innocent and caring question saying so much with so little. Uncharacteristically, I don’t find the time to try to be clever. I simply type “no,” and click “send.
Minutes later, the person behind this strange number asks:
Did u put clothes out fr laundry?
Huh? The number means nothing to me. It’s 917, my wife’s mobile phone exchange, but clearly not Viviane (who routinely throws my dirty crap into the machine without the need to text about it, which I’m thankful for).
I reckon I know what’s going on: this is a woman believing she’s texting her husband or significant other.
Wait.
How do you know that? It could be a beautiful Soho art dealer texting her grad school roommate-slash–secret lover from a glass-enclosed high-rise office with the Central Park view. But, why even consider a woman? We all do laundry. How utterly early ‘60’s-Don Draper to go assuming. Perhaps it’s a torn son, texting a slowly fading father losing his mind to Alzheimer’s or the effects of mercury poisoning from a lifetime of lunchtime tuna fish, or whatever reason is behind the shutdown of a brain. Shoot, it could be anyone; how can you possibly guess who?
I’m with the The Wall Street Journal in the middle of an impressive shop tour at Hendrick Motor Sports. You could eat off the freaking floor, it’s so clean. They have 113 people on the payroll solely to build race car engines. There are talented guys standing at built-from-the-floor machinery, manufacturing parts from raw aluminum. They make their own pistons here in this sprawling complex off Papa Joe Hendrick Blvd. Who makes pistons from scratch nowadays? Shouldn't they come on a ship in a box from an outfit across the Pacific Ocean paying their people $2 a week?
You step into another building spacey as a gymnasium and guys are twisting metal bars to build chassis from the ground up. They’re working on spic-and-span tables they built. In another room, they’re constructing carbon fiber driver seats, precisely tuned to the contour and preference of each driver’s particular rear end. The feel is very important; more than one NASCAR star has noted you actually drive with your ass. In another room, they’re artfully shaping and wrapping silver sheet metal onto cars. More guys are behind thick glass windows running dynos to check the freshly made motors' horsepower.
Lining the walls, are straight rows of gleaming engines - a tight intestinal mix of metal and wires and hoses and belts - proudly labeled “Hendrick Motorsports” on the heads. Young guys outside in oppressive 98-degree heat are being video taped running pit stops, the car squealing to a stop just like Sunday in front of 160,000 screaming fans, air guns whining, seven intent men scrambling over the faux retaining wall to change four fat tires and dump a canister of fuel in less than 14 seconds.
Back inside, computers are everywhere. Except the nerdy Banana Republic-outfitted people you’d expect aren’t running them. Next to one laptop sits a 16-ounce water bottle, filled with thick brown fluid. An abnormal bulge in the lower lip above the soul patch of the dude tapping data into the nearby module provides the clue. Yes, Nancy Drew, that is Spittle! Someday, when Congress really gets rolling, repeatedly expectorating on the job will be considered sexual harassment. But until that dreaded day, have at ‘em, boys!
Indeed, in this War Games-like computer room next to the heralded million-dollar “seven post” rig, which through the window you see shaking the crap out of a No. 5 Kellogg's Chevrolet on hydraulic pads replicating the race track, another data inputter is diligently filling his bottle with Skoal spit. (Copenhagen spit is much darker; Skoal is frothier).
This is something I can not escape. Whenever I hear the song, “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” I think of Papa Joe Hendrick. And vice versa. There is no logic to this. Wherever he laid his hat, was not Papa Joe’s home. But body chemicals have aligned. Synapses are wired. The die is cast, and the papas melded. Uncontrolled thoughts haunt me.
We continue this overwhelmingly impressive tour of the extraordinarily impressive operation begat by Papa Joe. I’m no Tech-head. But this is cool stuff. There is no way another patriarch, Bill France, Sr., could have imagined the sport he created six decades ago would become this weighty, professional, significant. It is to be reckoned with. Amid the rich experience of taking in Hendrick Motorsports, there’s no time to consider the odd email messages from someone wondering if I’ve been fed and will have clean clothes.
What to do? It’s rude to be typing on the blackberry when the fine folks at Hendrick have put aside priorities like keeping Jeff Gordon in first place to host a pair of sweaty Yankees clueless in NASCAR Country. But I use the Blackberry a lot. So much, that people close to me wish to shove it where the sun doesn't shine. On the hand held, I can be dartingly quick, a thief in the night. Muscle memory takes over.
To the question of whether I've left clothes for the laundry, I tap out:
I forgot. The medication is taking its toll. I just haven't been myself lately. I wonder if any of this is worth it.
I sling the Blackberry back into the holster, a modern day (read: soft, sad) Jesse James. Seconds later, my belt vibrates.
The response:
U are a funny person, about medication and d effect its been having on u latekly, u made me laugh, about if worth it, onlytime will tell.
Only time will tell…where this is going. Indeed. But there’s scant time to process this in touring the Hendrick Museum, saying goodbyes, and now driving to meet J.D. Gibbs for the continuing NASCAR education of a big-time reporter representing a business publication whose skeptical editors need convincing this sport is worthy of ink. (To be honest, maybe we’d do better without the coverage. The prevalent sports business stories of the day concern doping, fixing games, gambling on fixed games, killing dogs fighting for sport, and burying said dogs in your back yard; NASCAR is thankfully immune to all of this, our big controversy being if Goodyear is making a hard enough tire compound and if Joe Gibbs Racing, currently running Chevys, will be called on to bring Toyota the glory it seeks in stock car auto racing.)
I’m unsure of the route to Joe Gibbs Racing. I declined on the GPS at Enterprise; accepting the device would have given the young inquisitive peppy kid with the khakis and the clipboard while more reasons to ask, while he inspected the car, unwanted questions like where I am from and did I use GPS back home. So I'm without GPS because Enterprise insists on inspecting the freaking car for dents before you leave. There is no Papa Joe Gibbs Avenue, which would have helped immensely at this point. I’m cruising along a Carolina county road at 70 mph perhaps in the wrong direction in a rented Kia minivan that drives like a boat. They saw me coming a mile away. I’m reading the tiny rental car map, Creedence on the radio, and though I’m lost, and likely to get to the shop after the next interview has started, there are worse ways to make a living, and I can't resist a little knee-driving to text back:
I feel I am funnier -- detached and whimsical -- as time goes on. Flipness is a preferred alternative state. Perhaps things are less important. I sense mortality. Do you?
I miraculously find the correct road, and the correct leafy business park, and we meet J.D. Gibbs in the operation's impressive facilities. When I was a kid, a “JD” meant juvenile delinquent. This J.D. is straight as they come, an honorable man with an under-appreciated sense of humor, playing the self deprecating card on the down beat and often. Sitting in a conference room decorated with trophies, J.D. says he came from a long line of PE majors. Folks chuckled when he went into NASCAR but they laugh no more, he notes.
J.D. has four boys, all younger than my daughter, who recently came home from sleep-away camp wearing a home-made necklace given presented by a 17 year old boy who closely resembled Ziggy Marley with a hug that lasted a second too long Then and now, listening to the slim youthful motorsports executive in the chief’s quarters of his race shop, I feel old, obsolete, on the sidelines of life scratching at potential that continues to elude me.
Some guys are born on third base with scant prospects for ever making it home. You get the sense J.D. has grown beautifully into his present role running a team that might once again field this year's Nextel Cup champion. I’m considering a life I know nothing about and wondering when the Journal's “So is Joe Gibbs Racing going with Toyota?” question will come. The guys at Hendrick had been talking as if it were a done deal, the money is right, it’s all about people anyway and Gibbs has the talent, mail it in, send Papa Joe across the Pacific for the reception.
Toyota doesn’t come up. Someone didn't do his homework or is bashful, not a condition to suffer when representing a national newspaper. J.D. pontificates generally on the state of the sport, peppered with playful jibes of how the money goes to NASCAR, and I’m looking in a wide-eyed cartoonish exaggeration at his wrist to see if he’s wearing a Rolex, tell me with a straight face who’s getting rich on this deal, truly, and before long the aimless shooting of the breeze is over, and now I sit stuck in the Charlotte airport bar draining watery supersized beers and awaiting the next mysterious text message.
The beers keep coming but the Blackberry leaves me high and dry.
She, or he, or it, hasn’t responded. The trail has gone cold.
My guess is it is a she. The husband has come home. The wife casually mentions how fun and unexpected and amusing their texting was. He goes suddenly pale, clueless, maybe panicking, because a man will immediately jump to “cheater” when confronted with the thought of his wife having a new heterosexual relationship that doesn’t concern him, just as the brain wires can automatically make you think Papa Joe was a rolling stone.
I imagine it doesn’t take long for the couple to figure out she was mistakenly corresponding with a stranger. That probably doesn’t sit well with the husband, who saw his wife’s bright-eyed delight in corresponding with a stranger. He is probably steamed, and in his seething infuriation, may even be plotting how to get into her phone and find me. They shoot horses, don’t they? I’d get worse.
Or, alternatively, maybe this is what’s happening. He’s immediately devising a plan, for later that evening, when the lights go down, to parlay his wife’s playful curiosity and temporary belief in his own poorly hidden vulnerability into the many splendored things that can happen deep in the night between a husband and wife, even if they still barely know one another.
Andrew Giangola’s critically acclaimed new book, "THE WEEKEND STARTS ON WEDNESDAY: True Stories of Remarkable NASCAR Fans” is available wherever fine books are sold.
That one morning, a peculiar email text message came in from an unfamiliar phone number. Actually, several will arrive.
The first asks, you’ve had something 2 eat?
I am in North Carolina, mobile, time pressed, bummed there’s no room for a quick stop at Chick-fil-A. And I’m pissed at myself for not printing decent directions for all the driving to NASCAR race shops that will be done today.
Normal people just erase. But I never met an email I didn't like. There is a tidal pull to respond.
(Confession: Like a true addict, I’m now replying to just about every incoming note. Even spam. Those, I answer with a customized phony “automated out of the office” response. For example, a course offered on civility and manners in the workplace warranted a rude, profanity-laced tirade. The growing collection of my responses is not for the faint of heart, a family audience, or appropriate to this particular story.)
Another text comes in:
I hope you’ve had something 2 eat?
It’s an innocent and caring question saying so much with so little. Uncharacteristically, I don’t find the time to try to be clever. I simply type “no,” and click “send.
Minutes later, the person behind this strange number asks:
Did u put clothes out fr laundry?
Huh? The number means nothing to me. It’s 917, my wife’s mobile phone exchange, but clearly not Viviane (who routinely throws my dirty crap into the machine without the need to text about it, which I’m thankful for).
I reckon I know what’s going on: this is a woman believing she’s texting her husband or significant other.
Wait.
How do you know that? It could be a beautiful Soho art dealer texting her grad school roommate-slash–secret lover from a glass-enclosed high-rise office with the Central Park view. But, why even consider a woman? We all do laundry. How utterly early ‘60’s-Don Draper to go assuming. Perhaps it’s a torn son, texting a slowly fading father losing his mind to Alzheimer’s or the effects of mercury poisoning from a lifetime of lunchtime tuna fish, or whatever reason is behind the shutdown of a brain. Shoot, it could be anyone; how can you possibly guess who?
I’m with the The Wall Street Journal in the middle of an impressive shop tour at Hendrick Motor Sports. You could eat off the freaking floor, it’s so clean. They have 113 people on the payroll solely to build race car engines. There are talented guys standing at built-from-the-floor machinery, manufacturing parts from raw aluminum. They make their own pistons here in this sprawling complex off Papa Joe Hendrick Blvd. Who makes pistons from scratch nowadays? Shouldn't they come on a ship in a box from an outfit across the Pacific Ocean paying their people $2 a week?
You step into another building spacey as a gymnasium and guys are twisting metal bars to build chassis from the ground up. They’re working on spic-and-span tables they built. In another room, they’re constructing carbon fiber driver seats, precisely tuned to the contour and preference of each driver’s particular rear end. The feel is very important; more than one NASCAR star has noted you actually drive with your ass. In another room, they’re artfully shaping and wrapping silver sheet metal onto cars. More guys are behind thick glass windows running dynos to check the freshly made motors' horsepower.
Lining the walls, are straight rows of gleaming engines - a tight intestinal mix of metal and wires and hoses and belts - proudly labeled “Hendrick Motorsports” on the heads. Young guys outside in oppressive 98-degree heat are being video taped running pit stops, the car squealing to a stop just like Sunday in front of 160,000 screaming fans, air guns whining, seven intent men scrambling over the faux retaining wall to change four fat tires and dump a canister of fuel in less than 14 seconds.
Back inside, computers are everywhere. Except the nerdy Banana Republic-outfitted people you’d expect aren’t running them. Next to one laptop sits a 16-ounce water bottle, filled with thick brown fluid. An abnormal bulge in the lower lip above the soul patch of the dude tapping data into the nearby module provides the clue. Yes, Nancy Drew, that is Spittle! Someday, when Congress really gets rolling, repeatedly expectorating on the job will be considered sexual harassment. But until that dreaded day, have at ‘em, boys!
Indeed, in this War Games-like computer room next to the heralded million-dollar “seven post” rig, which through the window you see shaking the crap out of a No. 5 Kellogg's Chevrolet on hydraulic pads replicating the race track, another data inputter is diligently filling his bottle with Skoal spit. (Copenhagen spit is much darker; Skoal is frothier).
This is something I can not escape. Whenever I hear the song, “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” I think of Papa Joe Hendrick. And vice versa. There is no logic to this. Wherever he laid his hat, was not Papa Joe’s home. But body chemicals have aligned. Synapses are wired. The die is cast, and the papas melded. Uncontrolled thoughts haunt me.
We continue this overwhelmingly impressive tour of the extraordinarily impressive operation begat by Papa Joe. I’m no Tech-head. But this is cool stuff. There is no way another patriarch, Bill France, Sr., could have imagined the sport he created six decades ago would become this weighty, professional, significant. It is to be reckoned with. Amid the rich experience of taking in Hendrick Motorsports, there’s no time to consider the odd email messages from someone wondering if I’ve been fed and will have clean clothes.
What to do? It’s rude to be typing on the blackberry when the fine folks at Hendrick have put aside priorities like keeping Jeff Gordon in first place to host a pair of sweaty Yankees clueless in NASCAR Country. But I use the Blackberry a lot. So much, that people close to me wish to shove it where the sun doesn't shine. On the hand held, I can be dartingly quick, a thief in the night. Muscle memory takes over.
To the question of whether I've left clothes for the laundry, I tap out:
I forgot. The medication is taking its toll. I just haven't been myself lately. I wonder if any of this is worth it.
I sling the Blackberry back into the holster, a modern day (read: soft, sad) Jesse James. Seconds later, my belt vibrates.
The response:
U are a funny person, about medication and d effect its been having on u latekly, u made me laugh, about if worth it, onlytime will tell.
Only time will tell…where this is going. Indeed. But there’s scant time to process this in touring the Hendrick Museum, saying goodbyes, and now driving to meet J.D. Gibbs for the continuing NASCAR education of a big-time reporter representing a business publication whose skeptical editors need convincing this sport is worthy of ink. (To be honest, maybe we’d do better without the coverage. The prevalent sports business stories of the day concern doping, fixing games, gambling on fixed games, killing dogs fighting for sport, and burying said dogs in your back yard; NASCAR is thankfully immune to all of this, our big controversy being if Goodyear is making a hard enough tire compound and if Joe Gibbs Racing, currently running Chevys, will be called on to bring Toyota the glory it seeks in stock car auto racing.)
I’m unsure of the route to Joe Gibbs Racing. I declined on the GPS at Enterprise; accepting the device would have given the young inquisitive peppy kid with the khakis and the clipboard while more reasons to ask, while he inspected the car, unwanted questions like where I am from and did I use GPS back home. So I'm without GPS because Enterprise insists on inspecting the freaking car for dents before you leave. There is no Papa Joe Gibbs Avenue, which would have helped immensely at this point. I’m cruising along a Carolina county road at 70 mph perhaps in the wrong direction in a rented Kia minivan that drives like a boat. They saw me coming a mile away. I’m reading the tiny rental car map, Creedence on the radio, and though I’m lost, and likely to get to the shop after the next interview has started, there are worse ways to make a living, and I can't resist a little knee-driving to text back:
I feel I am funnier -- detached and whimsical -- as time goes on. Flipness is a preferred alternative state. Perhaps things are less important. I sense mortality. Do you?
I miraculously find the correct road, and the correct leafy business park, and we meet J.D. Gibbs in the operation's impressive facilities. When I was a kid, a “JD” meant juvenile delinquent. This J.D. is straight as they come, an honorable man with an under-appreciated sense of humor, playing the self deprecating card on the down beat and often. Sitting in a conference room decorated with trophies, J.D. says he came from a long line of PE majors. Folks chuckled when he went into NASCAR but they laugh no more, he notes.
J.D. has four boys, all younger than my daughter, who recently came home from sleep-away camp wearing a home-made necklace given presented by a 17 year old boy who closely resembled Ziggy Marley with a hug that lasted a second too long Then and now, listening to the slim youthful motorsports executive in the chief’s quarters of his race shop, I feel old, obsolete, on the sidelines of life scratching at potential that continues to elude me.
Some guys are born on third base with scant prospects for ever making it home. You get the sense J.D. has grown beautifully into his present role running a team that might once again field this year's Nextel Cup champion. I’m considering a life I know nothing about and wondering when the Journal's “So is Joe Gibbs Racing going with Toyota?” question will come. The guys at Hendrick had been talking as if it were a done deal, the money is right, it’s all about people anyway and Gibbs has the talent, mail it in, send Papa Joe across the Pacific for the reception.
Toyota doesn’t come up. Someone didn't do his homework or is bashful, not a condition to suffer when representing a national newspaper. J.D. pontificates generally on the state of the sport, peppered with playful jibes of how the money goes to NASCAR, and I’m looking in a wide-eyed cartoonish exaggeration at his wrist to see if he’s wearing a Rolex, tell me with a straight face who’s getting rich on this deal, truly, and before long the aimless shooting of the breeze is over, and now I sit stuck in the Charlotte airport bar draining watery supersized beers and awaiting the next mysterious text message.
The beers keep coming but the Blackberry leaves me high and dry.
She, or he, or it, hasn’t responded. The trail has gone cold.
My guess is it is a she. The husband has come home. The wife casually mentions how fun and unexpected and amusing their texting was. He goes suddenly pale, clueless, maybe panicking, because a man will immediately jump to “cheater” when confronted with the thought of his wife having a new heterosexual relationship that doesn’t concern him, just as the brain wires can automatically make you think Papa Joe was a rolling stone.
I imagine it doesn’t take long for the couple to figure out she was mistakenly corresponding with a stranger. That probably doesn’t sit well with the husband, who saw his wife’s bright-eyed delight in corresponding with a stranger. He is probably steamed, and in his seething infuriation, may even be plotting how to get into her phone and find me. They shoot horses, don’t they? I’d get worse.
Or, alternatively, maybe this is what’s happening. He’s immediately devising a plan, for later that evening, when the lights go down, to parlay his wife’s playful curiosity and temporary belief in his own poorly hidden vulnerability into the many splendored things that can happen deep in the night between a husband and wife, even if they still barely know one another.
Andrew Giangola’s critically acclaimed new book, "THE WEEKEND STARTS ON WEDNESDAY: True Stories of Remarkable NASCAR Fans” is available wherever fine books are sold.
Friday, January 22, 2010
My Dad Writes Rubbish, Part 2
My daughter Gaby has yawned through most of this book-release excitement.
Today, she made a $10 wager that her book would outsell mine. I reminded the girl I have a pretty good head start. Mainly, I actually have a book.
While a major New York publisher is mildly interested in the manuscript of her psychologicial horror novel, CYANIDE SMILE, and in fact while an executive at said publisher took a lunch meeting with young Gaby to serve up a few plot tweak suggestions, and in fact said, "This is very good, period; not 'good for a 14 year old' but just plain good," and furthermore went on to say a veteran editor may take a good hard look at the pages of CYANIDE SMILE if the changes were made, Gaby has no book deal yet. My daughter is pretty confident. She offered her pinky, and the bet was made.
Suffice it to say, Gaby the aspiring writer hasn't been overly impressed about the publication of her dad's book, outside of lighting up in seeing her name in the Acknowledgements, and thoroughly enjoying my own stories in the back of the book, especially "Wardrobe Malfunctions."
However, we reached a turning point today. When Gaby found out The Weekend Starts on Wednesday is on sale directly below the Dexter DVD on the Showtime Store's web site, she was PSYCHED. All smiles. Wants a screen shot. Her dad is now officially a cool author, thanks to a fictional serial killer.
Today, she made a $10 wager that her book would outsell mine. I reminded the girl I have a pretty good head start. Mainly, I actually have a book.
While a major New York publisher is mildly interested in the manuscript of her psychologicial horror novel, CYANIDE SMILE, and in fact while an executive at said publisher took a lunch meeting with young Gaby to serve up a few plot tweak suggestions, and in fact said, "This is very good, period; not 'good for a 14 year old' but just plain good," and furthermore went on to say a veteran editor may take a good hard look at the pages of CYANIDE SMILE if the changes were made, Gaby has no book deal yet. My daughter is pretty confident. She offered her pinky, and the bet was made.
Suffice it to say, Gaby the aspiring writer hasn't been overly impressed about the publication of her dad's book, outside of lighting up in seeing her name in the Acknowledgements, and thoroughly enjoying my own stories in the back of the book, especially "Wardrobe Malfunctions."
However, we reached a turning point today. When Gaby found out The Weekend Starts on Wednesday is on sale directly below the Dexter DVD on the Showtime Store's web site, she was PSYCHED. All smiles. Wants a screen shot. Her dad is now officially a cool author, thanks to a fictional serial killer.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Say a Prayer for Wessa
The sky always opens on me in Charlotte.
Heading to my first really big national interview, I was caught in a southern downpour. But it was fine. On the radio, no one knows you’re soaking wet.
As I sat down for Dave Moody’s afternoon drive show at Sirius XM’s studio outside Charlotte, a pack of Extenze Male Enhancement awaited me. They had to be for me, positioned on the console in front of my microphone. Sitting behind the wheel moments earlier, listening to the rain slam the rental car’s roof and Moody’s booming voice talking up “Andrew Giangola’s great new book,” I’d been on top of the mountain. And now, putting the headphones on, looking at the capsules I’m regularly told I need in spam e-mail, talk about cutting a man down to size…so to speak.
Actually, Moody didn’t place the penis enlargement pills there; the Extenze came from a previous guest. Hey, a race car is a pretty good place to advertise just about anything, even stuff that doesn’t work. Not that I know that from experience.
I was short of breath from the post 9.11 asthma and the general terror that strikes before a mike is opened, not because of the Extenze. Back in the hotel room, meditating to clear the cobwebs, the toilet started flushing on its own, scaring the bejesus out of me. It would be difficult to get phased when there are irregular ghosts in your room.
We got rolling, and it went really well. Dave was genuinely excited about the fan stories, and thought it was cool NASCAR let me tell them in my own voice. On a day when new rules were announced to let the boys have at it, you could say NASCAR is letting the drivers drive and the writers write. I even got in a dig on Al Qaeda.
Amazingly, Moody knew many of the fans in The Weekend Starts on Wednesday. Dr. Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, NASCAR’s “Science Lady” has been a guest on the show, as has up and coming driver Paulie Harraka, a whip smart student at Duke. Dave had been to Bob’s Party Bus and had met Tire Man. A veteran of the infield where many reporters don't trod; very cool.
Through the power of Social Networking I’d been able to alert the fans in the book and my own Facebook and Twitter friends about the appearance. Our Weekend Starts on Wednesday Facebook Fan Page added about 100 fans within hours of the interview. One fan emailed to say he’d ordered 10 copies from Amazon. Heck, I gotta go on the radio more often!
One question was especially tough: which fan story is my favorite? There are so many great stories; every fan is special in his or her own right. Along with CPL. John Hyland, I mentioned Wessa Miller, the Lucky Penny Girl, who on a Make a Wish gave Dale Earnhardt her lucky coin, “helping” him finally win the 1998 Daytona 500 after years of heartbreak and futility.
Well, I just learned that Wessa, who was born with spina bifida, had been suffering bad seizures and is in the ICU unit of a Kentucky hospital. As her dad Booker told me, Wessa is tough, she never complains. Getting to know the family in the course of writing The Lucky Penny Girl chapter, I found Wessa to be a girl with extraordinary faith and courage.
But she needs our help. She made it through a Code Blue today. Tonight, please say a special prayer for Wessa Miller.
Heading to my first really big national interview, I was caught in a southern downpour. But it was fine. On the radio, no one knows you’re soaking wet.
As I sat down for Dave Moody’s afternoon drive show at Sirius XM’s studio outside Charlotte, a pack of Extenze Male Enhancement awaited me. They had to be for me, positioned on the console in front of my microphone. Sitting behind the wheel moments earlier, listening to the rain slam the rental car’s roof and Moody’s booming voice talking up “Andrew Giangola’s great new book,” I’d been on top of the mountain. And now, putting the headphones on, looking at the capsules I’m regularly told I need in spam e-mail, talk about cutting a man down to size…so to speak.
Actually, Moody didn’t place the penis enlargement pills there; the Extenze came from a previous guest. Hey, a race car is a pretty good place to advertise just about anything, even stuff that doesn’t work. Not that I know that from experience.
I was short of breath from the post 9.11 asthma and the general terror that strikes before a mike is opened, not because of the Extenze. Back in the hotel room, meditating to clear the cobwebs, the toilet started flushing on its own, scaring the bejesus out of me. It would be difficult to get phased when there are irregular ghosts in your room.
We got rolling, and it went really well. Dave was genuinely excited about the fan stories, and thought it was cool NASCAR let me tell them in my own voice. On a day when new rules were announced to let the boys have at it, you could say NASCAR is letting the drivers drive and the writers write. I even got in a dig on Al Qaeda.
Amazingly, Moody knew many of the fans in The Weekend Starts on Wednesday. Dr. Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, NASCAR’s “Science Lady” has been a guest on the show, as has up and coming driver Paulie Harraka, a whip smart student at Duke. Dave had been to Bob’s Party Bus and had met Tire Man. A veteran of the infield where many reporters don't trod; very cool.
Through the power of Social Networking I’d been able to alert the fans in the book and my own Facebook and Twitter friends about the appearance. Our Weekend Starts on Wednesday Facebook Fan Page added about 100 fans within hours of the interview. One fan emailed to say he’d ordered 10 copies from Amazon. Heck, I gotta go on the radio more often!
One question was especially tough: which fan story is my favorite? There are so many great stories; every fan is special in his or her own right. Along with CPL. John Hyland, I mentioned Wessa Miller, the Lucky Penny Girl, who on a Make a Wish gave Dale Earnhardt her lucky coin, “helping” him finally win the 1998 Daytona 500 after years of heartbreak and futility.
Well, I just learned that Wessa, who was born with spina bifida, had been suffering bad seizures and is in the ICU unit of a Kentucky hospital. As her dad Booker told me, Wessa is tough, she never complains. Getting to know the family in the course of writing The Lucky Penny Girl chapter, I found Wessa to be a girl with extraordinary faith and courage.
But she needs our help. She made it through a Code Blue today. Tonight, please say a special prayer for Wessa Miller.
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