I’m really not a big race fan. Sure, I like to watch races when I find one on tv – motorcycles, cars, boats, bicycles, it’s great to watch the competition. But I don’t have a race number on the back window of my car, nor do I own any official hats or mugs or anything, I don’t follow certain drivers, I don’t keep up on the news.
Last weekend, mostly out of boredom, I turned on the Daytona coverage on Saturday. It was some kind of pre-race, I guess, part of the weekend leading up to the almighty Daytona 500, which of course is on Sunday. (God loves it when you race). And the little bit that I watched of this race was nothing but one crash after another. I’m like, damn, well, maybe these are like the drivers-in-training, like you gotta survive a few Saturday races before they let you drive on a Sunday. Hell, I don’t know. Like minor league baseball. Whatever.
Sunday after I buy my groceries and cook some lunch I turn on the Daytona coverage, figuring it would be nice background noise while I read a book. It’s raining! Oh, dear. Well the announcers kept coming up with things to talk about. For hours. I think at one point I think they were reading ingredients off of a cereal box. I know it’s hard to fill time, but they were just so sure the deluge was going to end and the race would happen. And OMG I cannot stand the twanginess. I get it, you’re southern. So am I. I think there’s a reason I don’t talk for a living and that’s because all the down-hominess would make my audience want to hang themselves after a while. How many different ways can you say “they really want to get this race started.” Seriously? And every other sentence they mentioned Twitter. “You need to get on the twitter.” I’m sure it was a paid endorsement as they never shut up about twitter and how many followers people had and how fantastic it is (really?) And then they announced – too much rain, sorry, come back tomorrow.
I imagined 50,000 fans (there were 150,000 in the stands) groaning and changing their Monday flight to something else.
Next day it’s delayed again (more rain!), so Monday night they finally race. Oh my! We’ve never done Daytona on a Monday before! Wow! Wouldn’t you know it, first lap or two there’s another huge wreck (I think the Saturday drivers snuck in a car or two). And another, and another crash. Then some guy loses control of his car and smashes into a maintenace vehicle that, in true Tim the Toolman fashion, is carrying a couple hundred gallons of jet fuel. Flame on! So they mess around for an hour or two washing jet fuel and car parts off the track (after putting the fire out of course). Then there were, I dunno, two or three more wrecks and then finally sometime Tuesday morning some (very tired, I guess) driver finally wins the thing.
So why am I writing all of this down? To show how insanely stubborn I can be to watch all of this coverage of a sport I’m only marginally interested in? To admire a business model where you can stage a major event horribly late and full of errors and wreck millions of dollars worth of equipment and still make a huge profit?
No.
I love that through all of this, nobody gave up. Nobody hung their head and said “fuck it, too much, we’re just not gonna race.” I love that 100,000 plus screaming and probably drunk fans sat there for a couple days just on the off chance that they didn’t cancel or finish the race under a caution flag. America, fuck yeah!
Well, this post didn’t go where it was supposed to. I came to write about my own struggles to get “un-stuck” in my thinking and move forward with parts of my life. Heh. Maybe I’ll revisit that topic another time.
