Life, liberty, and…..sports?

Opinion

January 24, 2013

Life, liberty, and…..sports?

Clay Mercer Cordele Dispatch The Cordele Dispatch Thu Jan 24, 2013, 09:00 AM EST

Pinehurst — Football season is down to the final game, the Super Bowl. Since I’ve managed to get to this point in the season without watching a football game, I figure I’m safe from the Super Bowl.

I used to be a sports fan, but along came those pesky performance enhancing drugs and the next thing you know, sports lost its appeal to me. What’s the point of watching a baseball game if one player is more likely, much more likely, to knock a home run than the whole rest of the team put together?

Look at Lance Armstrong. Sure, Lance was an inspiration in cycling. He won seven Tour de France trophies and beat cancer and wrote a great book and did lots of good things for charities, but now the truth is out. He used drugs all that time.

Would he have won without those drugs? Would that home run king have done as well without those drugs?

In the long run, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that he cheated and now that Lance has been caught, it might as well not have happened.

That’s one of the reasons I like NASCAR.

As far as I know, there aren’t any drugs that’ll make you a better race car driver. In fact, about the only thing that will prevent you from being a race car driver, provided you can drive, is if you’re too big to fit through the car window to get inside.

I don’t want to name names, but these are the drivers who have sponsors like Subway and Nutrisystem.

That’s not to say that some NASCAR drivers don’t use drugs. They do. A couple of years ago a driver got banned for testing positive for crystal meth. Oooh. That’s not good.

These dudes are easy to spot, though. They’re the ones that hit the wall at 200 mph and come cruising down pit road, parts flying, brakes on fire, sheet metal flapping, and pull into their pit stall screaming, “Let’s go, let’s go, Let’s GO!”

Even back in the garage, the forensics guys will be measuring the car for specific points of failure and ol’ Fireball will be dancing around like he still plans to hop in and make a few laps.

For the most part, though NASCAR drivers are clean when it comes to drugs. If anything, they need help calming down after a race, and judging from some of the wrecks we saw last year, they need help keeping calm during the race, too.

I just wish that NASCAR would make some rules about the fighting. I think that only drivers should be able to fight other drivers. That would keep some beefy jack man from ambushing a driver after a wreck on the track. What chance does a driver have against a jack man?

Let the pit crews fight each other, if they want to, but leave the drivers to duke it out among themselves. That’s the American way.

With the whole season before us, though, it can be difficult to forecast how it will all work out. NASCAR has a new generation car for the drivers, so some drivers have been testing to look for the best setup for that car at certain race tracks.

On the other hands, certain drivers have been doing roadwork and working out with Anderson Silva and sparring in the octagon. It should be an interesting season.

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