The Fighting Side of Me - I love the ‘fighting’ emotion these drivers are showing!
Well! The race at Texas sure turned out to be something else, didn't it. With the Golden Boy and the Mayor going at each other and Kyle's $25,000, three laps down, one finger wave, Sunday turned out to be a pretty interesting event! Not that it isn't anyhow, with how close the Chase is, but we got one heck of a show of, shall we say "personality" this past weekend.
There are lots of folks in NASCAR’s history that have had more than their share of personality. I don’t mean that in a bad way, not one little bit. Bad tempers, bad mouths, smart mouths and bad attitudes have colored NASCAR as much as the grace and dignity of drivers like Richard Petty. In the earliest days of NASCAR, drivers like Lee Petty were ruthless but still managed to maintain a semblance of grace about them. Stories of drivers going after one another with crowbars, or whatever else might be handy and heftable around a track are in most NASCAR biographies. Later on, taking a cue from the reputations which grew around them, drivers like Darrell Waltrip and Dale Earnhardt backed up their “personality” with actions both on and off the track.
It was rumored that Big Bill France carried a pistol with him where ever he went. Though that might have been a necessity in the rough and tumble days of NASCAR, one can only assume that the notion that the man might just snap might have been enough to keep some of the drivers in line.
Drivers settling their disputes with fists isn’t all that new either. Again, flipping through most NASCAR history books, one can usually find several examples, either in picture or story. The first NASCAR race televised flag to flag ended with maybe the most famous fist fight in NASCAR history. The picture of the Allisons and Cale Yarborough fighting at the 1979 Daytona 500 is one of the most iconic images in our sport.
The drivers in NASCAR’s history had personality in spades. I am excited that over the last season and a half, our modern era drivers have been encouraged to get on back to being real NASCAR drivers. Sometimes tempers don’t make for the smartest decisions, but passion, personality and a fighting side, even on the Golden Boy, Jeff Gordon makes for a modern NASCAR that is more like our much sought after “good old days” of stock car racing.
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