MY AMERICA By Ed Anger Weekly World News 9/13/01
THERE'S NO WAY NASCAR RIGGED THE PEPSI 400!
I'm madder than a grease monkey with a crooked dipstick over all the so-called experts who're saying the Pepsi 400 race at Daytona was rigged - and that's the only way Dale Earnhardt Jr. won.
All of a sudden, geeky sportswriters who've been to a racetrack just once or twice are declaring that the race was fixed, that other drivers let Dale Jr. win, and that NASCAR isn't even a sport, for crying out loud. Hogwash!
You couldn't fix a race if you tried. For starters, you have 40 men out there driving like maniacs trying their best to win. I guarantee you can't get all these guys to agree on what kind of motor oil to use - so there's no way that 39 of them will all slow down at once to let one guy go flying by.
And what would have happened to the supposed fix if Dale Jr. would have come up with a flat tire?
Would all the other drivers have just stopped right in the middle of the track or started driving backward? Did any of these pencil-necked sportswriters think of that?
And even if the race were fixed, there's no way they could keep it a secret. One of the drivers would probably slip and accidentally tell his wife or one of his girlfriends - and then she'd blab it to the whole world.
NASCAR drivers are the only true gladiators of the sports world. These are tough guys who drive with broken arms and legs and con-cussions and diarrhea - and don't even have an air-conditioner in the car for when it's 110 degrees.
I'll bet if you went up to the press box during a race, the sportswriters would have the air-conditioner going full blast - and they'd probably be sipping lemon daiquiris while they came up with stupid stories about how the race is rigged.
I think most of the eggheads who say the race was fixed are just jealous that they're not man enough to be out there on the track driving a car.
If you put any of those sissy sportswriters in a race car buzzing along at 200 m.p.h., I'll guarantee they'd be screaming so loud you could hear them over the roaring engines.
I say the only thing that needs to be fixed is some of the attitudes of these know-it-alls who think for one second that NASCAR is anything less than the true-blue all-American sport it is.
Published on: September 13, 2001