Schumacher will yield to new king of the road
Schumacher To Announce Retirement
Forget the Formula One business model and the talk, however intriguing, about the new wave of talented young drivers on the Grand Prix scene. In the post-Michael Schumacher era, there's only one question that matters: Who's going to be king?
Somebody has to be king, after all. It's the most important job in sports. The king is the one whom half the people worship and the other half want beheaded in a palace coup. As soon as that coup occurs, it's time to worship the new king while beginning to plot his demise, too. Good clean fun.
Kings are controversial by nature in sports; it comes with the territory. NASCAR was big fun with Dale Earnhardt in it, because Earnhardt was such a great divider of racing fans. People either loved his tenaciousness and his willingness to scrap, or they hated the whole man-in-black thing and, in time, the cult of personality around him. (People loved and hated Jeff Gordon, too, but more personally, as if Gordon's mere existence offended them somehow. Gordon was great, but he was never king.)
Michael Jordan was a classic king, a wonderful player who didn't mind using dirty tricks when the moment suited him. He ruled imperially on the court, no doubt. He played fabulous mind games and drove himself to levels no one else could access. George Steinbrenner was an excellent king in baseball; full of bluster and arrogant to exactly the point that it suited his needs, Steinbrenner re-created the Yankees as the most avaricious team in sports. He made them easy to love and easier to hate, but almost impossible to regard with indifference. That is just about the perfect marketing concoction.
In Formula One, Michael Schumacher is the king of kings. But he's about to be yesterday's news: On Sunday, Schumacher made official his retirement from F1 racing after a career in which he seized control of virtually every significant record in the field -- and made a boatload of enemies and jealous snipers along the way.
And so, once they get used to the idea that they won't have Schumacher to kick around or lift upon their shoulders anymore, fans of the sport are going to start craving that thing that is missing from the F1 circuit. They will miss the buzz that Schumacher created every time he showed up; the act of his entering a race immediately heightened the expectation around it, the way Tiger Woods entering a golf tournament does now.
For the kings, even their demises are noteworthy. Schumacher announced his retirement with a handful of races left in a season in which he's actually battling for his eighth F1 world championship, just 12 points behind Fernando Alonso heading into the Italian Grand Prix in Monza. He's still got game at age 37, and he's still got competitors looking to take him down. As Jordan could tell you, that might not be everything, but sometimes it's enough.
It was one of Schumacher's former peers, in fact, who took a shot at the king recently. Retired driver Gerhard Berger told the racing site F1Racing.net that Schumacher should step aside, especially if he somehow passes Alonso and wins another championship, which would make it "perfect timing."
"He has been in the circuit for a long time and is starting to age," Berger said matter-of-factly. "All of us had to fight that phenomenon, and one day it is simply time to quit."
All well and good, Gerhard, but who shall be king? Is the Spaniard, Alonso, at 25, ready to serve as the sport's lightning rod? How about Brazilian Felipe Massa, who was 10 when Schumacher made his F1 debut and is running third in the world championship standings today?
Maybe so. Maybe one or the other is cocky enough and brilliant enough to pull it off, to win races and make enemies at the same time, to drive shrewdly yet be unafraid to mix it up with other drivers on the course, as Schumacher so often did -- even this year.
Schumacher bent the rules until they broke. He famously drove a competitor off the track in 1994 to win his first title, and ruined himself in a 1997 race by trying to knock out Jacques Villeneuve and instead driving himself off the course.
He also didn't apologize much. He fanned the flames of his celebrity. He accepted and perhaps even reveled in his controversy. He won and won and won. And when the king is dead, they'll be shouting "Long live the king," in the desperate hope that they're about to crown a new one.
Mark Kreidler of the Sacramento Bee can be reached at mkreidler@sacbee.com. His book, "Four Days to Glory: Wrestling With the Soul of the American Heartland," is available from HarperCollins publishers in January 2007.
