White people sports fight too much.
Race car driving is the new hockey, but even hockey seems to be fighting tooth and nail to hang on to fighting. It has become some forgone conclusion within these sports that something gruesome, either a blind sided run into the side boards or something similar on the race track, is a necessity for full entertainment value. In sports like soccer or football and basketball, fighting has been legislated away from the game. Players might try it, but the penalties insure that they won't do it twice. In hockey, certain players actually remain employed in the NHL, despite limited skills on skates, simply because they've been garnered with the tag. "Enforcer".
This is the guy who beats up other guys that play the game too physically, especially when said physical play is being forced upon a key scorer on your team. Many of these players may never even see the ice until they are needed to isolate other enforcers. For the sake of the test later, I am going to paraphrase that for you. Hockey has players that they pay to perform assault and battery on each other.
Although car racing does not utilize an enforcer, it does allow, and seemingly condone bumping and shoving on the track that keeps leading to assault and battery after the race. Technically, one of the attacked would have to press charges and since there is so much noise in the arena, it would even be hard to site them for disturbance of the peace, but you get my drift. This is assault and battery that may someday cause a man to lose his life, and then what will we do.
Well, someday is now. Granted, this fight was not like the others. Car versus man is closer to vehicular homicide which begins to question the motive of the killer and the intent of the slain. Was he really going to try to fight Tony Stewart during the actual race (the video says maybe), and why is it okay that we continue to watch the escalation of raceway retribution? Is it still okay that we allow and nearly condone the fighting now that we've lost Ward Jr.? Tony Stewart is a virtual poster child for dirty driving (enforcer) tactics, so the question of whether or not this would have happened if it were any other driver except Stewart looms over the Stewart legacy in addition to the life lost while Stewart was, once again, being Stewart.
Questions are endless in the face of tragedy. Yet, searching for a reason for the lost life goes without question. Whatever we determine to be the singular cause for this incident, fighting , or the unabashed allowance of it, needs to be high upon the list of focal points. No one can speak for Ward Jr. and what motivated him to do what he did that day. If Stewart was planning on accepting blame, I doubt that he would be mulling over whether or not to race in Michigan this coming weekend. To Stewart, this was just an accident. You know, the kind of stuff that happens when you allow really fast cars to race around a track, and really immature men to fight when their cars crash from racing so fast.
It used to be that the barbarism of the wreck was enough for race fans. The track design combined with the speed and volume of cars proves they have an expectation of a wreck; maybe even the hope of one. Race fans who frequent the tracks seem to recall the scene of a wreck more than they do the 60 cars that passed the dude in the back of the pack. These days, if the wreck doesn't entertain you enough, there is the obligatory, post race fist fight in response to the wreck.
Post race!!
Ward Jr. decided that he couldn't wait to get his point across to Stewart. People who live on the edge of death may not have the same sensitivity to it as one might expect; both Ward Jr. in his fearless attack of a moving vehicle, and Stewart in his cold ability to move on so quickly after taking part in the death of a 20 year old man. As for hockey? We will likely need to see a player have his nose bone forced into his brain from one of those close combat punches in hockey, causing the first hockey related death from fighting, but do we need anything else to clearly see the risk of allowing men who drive fast cars to fight each other without retribution?
If every race car driver who engages in an act of raceway violence knew that they would have to sit out the next 2 races, do you think we would ever see another fight, or another death due to the acceptance of fighting? Even the guy who wanted to fight would not often gain a willing combatant if we change the rules around fighting on the raceway.
As a show of respect to the parents of Kevin Ward Jr., that should be the new standard for all race car drivers on any level. We will call it the Kevin Ward Jr. rule in honor of his tragic and senseless death. To me, that's the only way to give this loss some meaning.
Hockey is starting to get too many black players, so they will self correct soon enough. America is uncomfortable with black love and black violence as it invokes images of fear that Will Smith and Colin Powell haven't fully erased from our psyche. Don't be offended white people, we are all afraid of young black men with a chip on their shoulder, me included. A few of us are just more afraid for them. (another topic for another day)
As for race car driving, the brothers are not aching to take over that sport any time soon, so you will have to fix that one yourself. Wrecks and scraps are blowing the sport up exponentially, but they are also causing the sport to lose favor among parents who have to bury the victims of this growing craze. Fighting in racing might seem benign when you consider the massive pit crews that typically separate the angry combatants, but sometimes even the pit crews lose their cool. Sooner or later fighting always leads to some unexpected incident, like the one we saw in Detroit...... or the death of Kevin Ward Jr.
Its time for the fighting to end.
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