DAYTONA BEACH. This city on Florida's west coast has been the headquarters for NASCAR since the stock car racing giant was first formed in 1948. "Some cities looked at us when we were startin' out as just a bunch moonshine-runnin' hillbillies," says NASCAR spokesman Darnell Peters. "Daytona Beach took the time to get to know us and realize we also do beer runs."
"Do you know where I can get a bus transfer?"
But NASCAR's incredible success is threatened by the same high gas prices that are pinching consumer wallets as the price of the special Sunoco 260 GTX unleaded fuel drivers use has now hit $6.25 a gallon. "I was thinkin' I was gonna have to cut back on the number of races I run this summer," says Martin Truex, Jr. "But I put a 4 x 6" note card up in the pits, and me and Robby Gordon are gonna car pool for a while and see how that works out."
"We're gonna bump draft Tony Stewart all the way down the back stretch."
Other drivers say they will use VOTRAN, Volusia County Public Transit System, to keep costs under control at Daytona Beach until gas prices recede. "We will make scheduled stops every four blocks, the same as with our regular routes," says Anna O'Neill, director of customer service for VOTRAN. "NASCAR drivers will be able to jockey for position within the bus as long as they are seated or standing behind the yellow line when we start up again."
Solar-powered Capri Sun #53 Charger
Ultimately, NASCAR's survival may depend on a shift away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy, says Elise van der Hoef, an environmental activist who has never attended a stock car race but felt compelled to butt in anyway. "They could switch to solar-powered cars, which have attained top speeds of 40 miles per hour on a straightaway," she notes as she bites into a tofu and alfalfa sprout sandwich. "That should be enough excitement for anybody."
KANSAS CITY, Kansas. NASCAR officials today informed representatives of Pope Benedict XVI that he would not be allowed to compete in the O'Reilly Auto Parts 250 to be held this month at Kansas Speedway because his vehicle, popularly known as "The Popemobile", violated a number of mandatory specifications.
"Sorry--I was trying to find St. Columbkill's."
"Craftsman Trucks must have four-speed manual transmissions and minimum 650 horsepower engines," said NASCAR Rules Chairman Wade Bennett. "The Popemobile is a two-door Mercedes ML 430 with an automatic tranny, a 272 horsepower engine and an illegal air scoop--end of story."
The Popemobile, fueled by divine power.
Pope Benedict expressed disappointment with the ruling, and indicated he would appeal. "Eesa notta fair they no letta me ride witha 2007 Rookie of the Year Willie Allen and thee other toppa-flite Craftsman Truck Drivers," the German pontiff said in the bad Italian accent that all popes are required to use under Roman Catholic canon law. "Letta me tella you, I was ready to whup Ron Hornaday like an ugly stepchild."
Hornaday: "You just try it, Benny-boy."
The NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series is a season-long competition in which modified production pickup trucks race for points that may be redeemed for plastic model kits or credited against time in Purgatory, a place of temporary punishment where those who die with venial, but not mortal sins on their souls are made ready for heaven. In December of 2007, NASCAR announced that the manufacturers of Craftsman tools would terminate their sponsorship after the 2008 season, fueling speculation that the Roman Catholic Church series would step into the breach.
St. Peter's Drag-a-Way, Vatican City
"We view NASCAR as a great tool to reach a demographic where we have trouble drawing parishioners," said Vatican Director of Membership Services Antonio d'Allessandro. "It is hard to recruit from socio-economic groups who believe you are the Anti-Christ."
"Why don't you turn that goofy-looking rig around and git the hell out of here."
The truck series is the only NASCAR division that does not permit "pit stops", instead using a ten-minute "halftime" break during which teams can make any changes they want to their trucks. "It eesa mucha better for an old man like me," Benedict said. "I like to take a giant grape Slurpee along to keep cool, and there's no way I could make it through the Goody's Cool Orange 500," a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race, "without a restroom break."
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NASCAR Kasey Kahne lamp.
To create your unique one-of-a-kind DIY gold necklace, buy one (1) can of gold spray paint--Rust-Oleum is recommended for outdoor wear--and one (1) log chain of the desired length. Hang the chain from the heavy-duty internal steel spreader of a step ladder using medium gauge coated wire.
Stepladder Wire
After vigorously shaking the can for one (1) minute, spray the log chain with the gold paint. When paint dries, apply a second coating after removing chain and attaching other end to the steel spreader to achieve full coverage.
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FULTON, Ohio. It's Friday night at the Fulton County Fair in this tiny town in northwest Ohio, and the grandstands are packed for the opening round of the event that is the annual highlight of this rural chivaree--Demolition Derby.
"We draw our biggest crowds for Demolition Derby," says the fair's general manager, Oren Daily, Jr. "I don't know what it is--people just love to see cars smash into each other."
In addition to crowd favorites from the past such as Floyd Littleton, the "Sandusky Sniper", there's a new kid on the block this year. A bearded man wearing a hat and a black suit--Rabbi Eli Silberstein of Temple Beth Shalom in Shaker Heights, Ohio--sits in the "shotgun" seat of his 1992 Volvo as it rolls into this Gentile-rich environment. His driver is Jim Bob Embry, who wears a shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled into the sleeve on his bicep.
The "Kosher Krusher", the name painted on the front doors of Silberstein's car, is the rabbi's recruitment tool as he takes a radical step to reverse the declining number of Jews in America. "Intermarriage is the silent Holocaust," he says to Embry.
"Uh-huh," Embry replies, nodding slightly. He has his eye on a red Dodge Charger that is idling near the bleachers.
"Unless we become proactive, Jews will disappear from the face of the earth."
"That's what I hear," Embry says quietly. He guns the engine and takes off after an Oldsmobile Rocket 88, ramming it in the front left bumper, causing Silberstein to lurch forward.
"You okay, Rabbi?" the goy driver asks.
"I'm a little tsedreyt in kop (disoriented), but I'll be okay," the holy man says. "Anyway, before 1965 10% of Jews married non-Jews. Since 1985--"
"Hold on---"
Embry steers the Kosher Krusher into the Sandusky Sniper, and Floyd Littleton gives him a dirty look before driving off, damaged but still going.
"As I was saying," the rabbi continues, "since 1985, 52% of Jews have married outside their faith. One million American Jewish children under the age of 18 are being raised as non-Jews or with no religion at all."
"Jesus Christ!" says Embry.
"Goot gezugt," (well said) Silberstein replies with emphasis. "Anyway, I thought it was time to get off my toches (rear end) and get out here among the Unchosen People. Maybe pick off a few goyim."
Because Demolition Derby is held on Friday night, the rabbi must leave the driving to a shabbas goy--a non-Jew who assists him by performing work that Jews are forbidden to engage in on Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath.
After a while the pack is thinned and only the Kosher Krusher and the Sandusky Sniper remain mobile as the remaining cars are reduced to smoking hulks. Embry plays cat and mouse with Littleton, his lone adversary, with the rabbi urging him on.
"A broch su dir!" ("A curse on you!") Silberstein yells out his window at their opponent, and Embry feints a charge. The Sandusky Sniper bites on the fake, and its passenger side door is exposed.
"I got him now," Embry says. He steps on the accelerator and, like a matador, skillfully discharges his opponent with a single direct hit that sends Littleton to the hospital with a fractured collarbone.
"You egg-BLEEPin' dog, you," Littleton yells in pain as he is loaded into an ambulance. "Next time I see you I'm gonna punch you a new BLEEP, you little peckerwood."
"A glick ahf dir" ("Good health to you") the rabbi says as the ambulance drives off.
The winning team steps to the podium to accept their prizes; $200 in cash and two ten-pound packages of Roseland Lard. "You can have mine," the rabbi says, handing the clarified hog fat to his partner.
Embry and the rabbi are the stars of the moment, and they wade into the crowd to accept the congratulations of men and women who have little formal education and--in many cases--less than a full set of teeth between them. He introduces himself to Gene Ray and Veneta Sue Doogs.
"Hello, there," he says. "Have you ever considered converting to Judaism?"
"Wait a minute," Gene Ray says suBLEEPiously. "I thought Jews weren't supposed to proselytize."
"Good point," the rabbi replies. "Under normal circumstances, the Jewish community does not seek converts."
"Where'd you learn that?" Veneta Sue asks her husband.
"I heard it on ESPN2's Texas Rattlesnake Hunt."
"These are not normal times," the rabbi continues. "Jewish fertility rates are not high enough to replenish our people, so for a limited time only, we are accepting new members."
"I like music in church," Veneta chimes in. "The Old Rugged Cross, Just a Closer Walk With Thee . . ."
"We have a full-time cantor--he's excellent."
"How many days off do Jews get?" Gene Ray asks.
"We got holidays like Heinz has pickles," the rabbi replies, as he begins to tick them off; "Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Channukah, Purim, Pesach . . ."
"Sounds good," Gene Ray says, cutting the rabbi off. "I like to fish, and I can't get off unless the plant is closed or it's a religious thing."
The Doogs take a pamphlet and Gene Ray accepts a complimentary yammukah, which he holds gingerly on his head. They say goodbye and walk across the parking lot to their truck, which seems unlikely to get them home.
"Well, Jim Bob," the rabbi says expansively as he watches them go. "I think we caught a couple tonight."
"Good deal, rabbi," Jim Bob says. "Say--you better fix that front suspension before tomorrow night if you want to win the championship," he adds.
"Not to worry," Silberstein replies. "When I get under that car, I work like a moyel who gets paid by the BLEEP."
DALLAS, Texas. When she was younger, 14 year-old Indira Singh was content to spend sunny afternoons indoors reading in the comfort of her parents' air-conditioned home. Then she saw the movie "Bend It Like Beckham" about an Indian girl who falls in love with the game of soccer over the objections of her parents.
"It totally changed my life," she says. She began to play on Dallas-area youth teams, unhindered by parental interference that created the film's dramatic tension. "We want her to be with her friends, and have a normal American childhood," says her father, Sareesh Singh. "We will support her as far as she wants to go."
Her ultimate destination is indeed a long way from Dallas. Indira's team finished first in their Metro U-15 league and are on their way to a national tournament at Disney World--if they can come up with approximately $25,000 to cover airfare, hotels and meals for the girls while they stay at the Orlando, Florida resort.
At present, her team is nowhere near meeting that goal. "We're finding there's a lot of 'giving fatigue' out there," says Cindi Stephens, mother of Indira's best friend Courtney. "You know, a tsunami here, a hurricane there--people get tired of charities asking for handouts and just say 'no'."
So after the girls tried bake sales, car washes and other standard teen fund-raising techniques without much success, Sareesh Singh came up with an idea. He will auction off the right to crush him beneath the Juggernaut, the manifestation of the Hindu god Vishnu as Krishna.
"I think if you offer people in the Dallas area something different from a raffle or a walk-a-thon perhaps we will have better luck," says Singh, a wiry 52 year-old who works at Dell Computers.
The Juggernaut shrine is traditionally placed on a moving platform called a "ratha" which is pulled by hand to a "summer house" as part of a festival held during the Hindu month of Ashadha (June-July). The rathas are so large that over 4,000 men are required to move them, and it is considered an act of piety to throw oneself beneath their wheels. Because the Hindi population of Dallas is small, the winning bidder will be permitted to power the ratha with his or her SUV.
Mr. Singh, like many Hindus, believes his sacrifice will guarantee him a place in heaven. "I am sure that this sacrifice will bring me my eternal reward," he says. "If not, I will remind Vishnu that I did it for my little girl's soccer team."
Singh is right about one thing; the unusual nature of his donation is drawing interest that extends beyond the immediate circle of the girls' parents and relatives. Joe Don Mooney, a successful Dallas-area real estate broker and a halfback for Southern Methodist University during his college days, says he will open with a bid of $15,000 for the right to push the ratha with his Chevrolet Tahoe SUV, and is prepared to go higher.
"It sounds like a fun thing to do and it's for a good cause," Mooney says, "plus its tremendous publicity. If I win, I'm gonna put 'Joe Don Mooney Real Estate' right on the front of that big ratha, just like a NASCAR driver with a 'Home Depot' or 'Lowe's' decal on his hood."
RALEIGH, North Carolina. As the Carolina Hurricanes prepare to take the Stanley Cup on its first tour of tobacco country, National Hockey League officials say they will increase security against a risk the silver bowl has never faced before: smokeless tobacco, which is considered one of the four basic food groups by many NASCAR fans.
"Lord Stanley didn't donate his challenge cup to be used as a spitoon," said NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, "and our fear is that every Joe Don and Gene Ray in NASCAR country will goober it up with their spit."
Mike Helton, President of NASCAR, said he found Bettman's concern overblown. "Thath ith the motht dithguthting and inthulting sthereotype," he said as brown juice dripped from the corner of his mouth. "Bettman's jutht jealouth of our TV ratingth."
"Smokeless tobacco" is the sanitized term used by manufacturers of snuff and chewing tobacco, the two forms of the product that is referred to by its users as "chew", "chaw", "dip" and "plug". Snuff is fine-grain tobacco that a user "pinches" between his or her lower lip and gum, while chewing tobacco takes the form of shredded tobacco leaves that users put between their cheeks and their gums.
The Stanley Cup is a silver bowl that measures 7.5" inches in height and 11.5" across, and was donated by Lord Stanley, Earl of Preston and Governor General of Canada, as a challenge cup in 1892 to be awarded annually to Canada's champion hockey team. In donating the silver bowl, Lord Stanley said that he wanted it to remind hockey players of "the importance of having the game played fairly and under rules generally recognized, and not to be used as a cooler for Coors Light Beer, which will not be invented for another century."
Some NASCAR fans took offense at Bettman's statement. Jim Ray Embree, owner of an LP gas store in Aiken, South Carolina, said "Hockey dads in the Northeast kill each other over practice times, and they're looking down they're nose at us?"
Others said the NHL's was overreacting. "Nobody's gonna spit in it," said Darrell Dunham of Charlotte, North Carolina. "More likely the wimmen folk will use it for potato salad."
As the Next Great Sportswriter Competition draws to a close, Gerbil Sports Network wishes to correct and amplify the following postings in order to avoid massive libel judgments.
In a December 25th posting titled "Billy Martin--R.I.P." that the Gerbil thought would have the NGS judges bawling like a bunch of Miss America contestants, George Steinbrenner was referred to as "the principal owner of the New York Yankees." Mr. Steinbrenner is in fact the corpulent, blowhard owner of the Yankees. The Gerbil regrets its error.
In a posting regarding Albert Belle, the former Cleveland Indians slugger, it was reported that Mr. Belle once chased a group of trick-or-treaters away from his house on Halloween. Mr. Belle's publicist has pointed out that the children had egged Mr. Belle's house, and thus provoked his actions. In addition, the children taunted Mr. Belle with the following chant:
"Trick-or-treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat.
If you don't, it's a shame, you'll never make the Hall of Fame!"
In a post regarding NASCAR, the Daytona 500 was referred to as a "series of left turns whose unremitting tedium was punctuated only by fatal crashes." NASCAR fans have pointed out that their boredom is also alleviated by fights in the pits. The Gerbil stands corrected.
A commentary on German figure skater Katerina Witt referred to her as a "former East German apparatchik who BLEEPed up to Communist party officials in order to secure her place on national and Olympic teams, which she has parlayed into a lucrative career as a television skating commentator." Ms. Witt's attorney has provided the Gerbil with copies of her tax returns which demonstrate that being a skating commentator is not, in fact, highly remunerative in light of the hazardous nature of the work, which requires prolonged exposure to BLEEP Button.
A posting on former Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes and Texas Tech basketball coach Bobby Knight--"When Coaches Attack!"--described the incidents in which Mr. Hayes hit an opposing team's defensive back with a clipboard and Mr. Knight threw a folding chair at a basketball referee. The Ohio State public relations department claims that Mr. Hayes was actually showing the defensive back a pro-style cover two setup in an effort to increase the young man's knowledge of football. Mr. Knight's publicist alleges that he threw a folding chair "to" rather than "at" a referee who had been on his feet all day so that the official could avoid shin splints.
Former Boston Bruin Marty McSorley was described as a "goon" for his two-fisted attack on Vancouver Canucks' forward Donald Brashear that resulted in an assault conviction in 2000. The Gerbil meant to say "thug."
A posting on Dennis Rodman referred to the former NBA great as of "dubious gender." Mr. Rodman informed the NGS judges that there is no doubt as to his/her gender as he/she expresses himself in all of them. He admitted to being of dubious sanity.
ST. LOUIS, Mo. NASCAR fans had reason to snicker a few years back when it was announced that rapper Nelly, whose real name is Cornell Haynes, had bought into a Craftsman Truck racing team.
"There hadn't been a lot of hip-hop in the pits before Nelly," said driver Andy Houston. "We wiped sarcastic grins off a lot of faces," Houston added as he smiled through a set of Iced Out Custom Removable Teeth--the dental adornment rappers call "grillz"--that Nelly gave him to celebrate a second-place finish at Darlington Raceway.
Now Nelly says he is turning his attention to another sport where minorities have been conBLEEPuous by their absence--platform tennis, often referred to as simply "paddle."
Paddle has been called the ultimate WASP sport, and is played primarily at private clubs where blacks were historically excluded, and are now underrepresented if they are admitted. The game is played on an outdoor surface one-fourth the size of a regulation tennis court, with 12' wire fencing surrounding the court that enables players to hit balls off these walls, as in squash or racquetball.
Players use wimpy-looking 18" wooden rackets to hit a spongy rubber ball, with scoring as in regulation tennis. Doubles play generally involves two cute couples with names like "Brad" and "Cindy" on one side and "Chip" and "Becca" on the other. After one team wins a match, the couples retire for an evening of drinks and wife-swapping.
"I'm gonna bust up the whole paddle racket," said Nelly, adding that he intended no pun. "We need to get a couple 'LaToya's' out there with a couple 'Jamaal's' if you know what I mean."
Nelly scored a big hit in 2002 with the single "Hot in Herre"--the last word representing rapper-spelling of the word "here". His popularity took a downturn after he was depicted in a music video swiping a credit card through a woman's buttocks.
"I know wherre I went wrong before, but therre's nothing I can do about the past," Nelly said as he slipped into a turtle neck, wide-wale corduroys and a down-filled vest before a match at The Racquet Club in Ladue, Missouri.
To restore his image, the rapper has agreed to appear in public service announcements sponsored by the American Society of Financial Planners that stress the proper use of consumer credit.
Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer. He is the author of "The Year of the Gerbil: How the Yankees Won (and the Red Sox Lost) the Greatest Pennant Race Ever," a history of the 1978 AL East pennant race, and a number of plays, including "Number One Hockey Mom," "Please, Pope," and "What Mickey Belle Isle Told You," a trilogy about hockey (JAC Publishing). His work is available on Amazon Shorts (at 49 cents a dowload), and he writes on sports for Flak Magazine.
