Will the real Kyle please stand up?
So are you happy now? Do you feel better?
You put Kyle Busch right where you want him. Whipped him down. Ground him into submission. Paddled his butt, stood him in the corner with his nose to the wall and made him think about what he's done till he changed his attitude.
He's just another politically correct NASCAR driver now, pitching products, praising peers, polite, pacifistic when victimized …
Congratulations.
But you know what? I don't want to hear it anymore. I don't want any more e-mails complaining about the "vanilla" personalities, the robots. You know who makes them that way? You do. You, the justices on the court of public opinion.
I've heard and read your grumbles and gripes that they won't (can't?) be themselves. And then when they try, when they're human, you ridicule them, grind them down, paddle their butts, stand them in the corner until …
The transformation of Kyle Busch appeared to occur overnight, or at least over last weekend. (It didn't, but more about that in a minute.)
He rode the Bristol roller coaster -- triumph, disaster, triumph -- with unfaltering dignity.
He won the Truck race and showed relief and gratitude -- he hadn't won in NASCAR's three national series in a month, rare for him. He was vanilla in Victory Lane, and when ESPN reporters asked him how this might translate to his slumping Cup efforts, he said simply that "it just tells you that you can do it."
That gave away that he'd been wondering whether he could do it anymore, even if only in the back of his mind, even at age 24.
In Chapter II at Bristol, he clearly had the car to win the Nationwide race Friday night, but was taken out bluntly, blatantly, by a rookie's mistake. You halfway expected Busch to shred Chase Austin's blunder on television. He didn't at all. He was forgiving, understanding.
But his greatest show of self-restraint that night was that he didn't scowl, let alone snarl, at a travesty done him by the Bristol crowd. Because that crowd comes from across the nation, I've always considered it the supreme court of NASCAR public opinion.
After Austin turned him, when Busch's car hit the wall hard, head-on, the supreme court stood and cheered mightily, joyfully, euphorically.
I've seen NASCAR fans cheer the misfortunes of drivers they don't like my whole adult life. It's just their nature. It's one thing to cheer when your villain makes an aggressive mistake that does him in.
But to cheer, so gleefully, when a driver is blindsided like that, and crashes so violently that he could be badly hurt -- indeed, in older NASCAR cars he could have been killed -- is heartless to the point of cruelty, a massive turning of thumbs down on the wounded gladiator.
It lowers a NASCAR crowd to the level of a rasslin' crowd -- rather, worse, because rasslin' fans know deep inside that the wounds are phony.
At that point I went from being amused by Kyle Busch -- I liked him just the way he was -- to feeling sorry for the guy. You, the public, had gone too far.
If there was an epiphany for Busch, maybe it was that moment of thunderous cheering, the realization that if you go against the grain enough, the masses wish you disaster. There is nothing left then but surrender.
After he won the Cup race, breaking a 13-race slump that had dragged on since Richmond in May, came an apparent transformation so great some wondered whether aliens had abducted the real Kyle Busch and replaced him with a cyborg.
He spoke of "what an honorable race car driver Mark Martin is" to reporters after the duel to the finish. "Such an honor to race with him."
But this decent, dignified, humble driver was no cyborg, nor had the transformation happened overnight.
Rumors got out that Busch had undergone some sort of crash course in behavior that very weekend, boiled in a sort of PR pressure cooker by Joe Gibbs Racing.
I'm told from within his circle that that's not true; that indeed, not a word has been said to Kyle Busch lately that hasn't been said to him for more than a year.
Specifically and especially, when he walked straight into his hauler Friday night after the wreck, amid the thunderous cheering, to collect his thoughts for five minutes, there were three handlers inside -- two PR people and a representative from his sports agency -- but I've been assured none of them said a single word to him. They just let him cool down.
PR people are a curious lot, obsessed with pushing their drivers into the limelight with positive spin, and yet they want no part of the limelight themselves. But Busch's primary guy swears nothing has changed, except that "Kyle Busch gets it."
His handlers didn't want to speak publicly here because they're not sure they have a finished product. One good weekend doesn't constitute a permanent transformation.
But I've been around long enough to know when a driver has been housebroken by the public, and this is it.
Kyle Busch is just your latest makeover. I've seen you operate all the way back to Darrell Waltrip in his prime. Hell, I heard you booing Dale Earnhardt with near-unanimity back in the day, and now you've canonized the man.
So you have another self-restrained driver -- the type, of course, you don't like either.
I remember talking with a self-described "dedicated Jeff Gordon fan," one Charles Barkley of NBA renown, during Gordon's prime.
Barkley had been in hot water for his "I am not a role model" statement. By this point, being a friend and admirer of Gordon, Barkley was disgusted that finally the public had a guy who never got into trouble and spoke of his religious faith -- a pure role model if ever there was one by American societal standards -- "and what do they do? They boo him," Barkley said.
I asked why that might be. "Because," Sir Charles began, then paused and pondered, "people are just nuts."
That's about the size of it.
Now you'll howl that Busch is PC, vanilla, robotic. And yet paradoxically you'll never let go of the "Cryle Busch" moniker many of you hung on him while he was being human.
You're going to hit him with both barrels.
You'll continue to claim he drives dirty, although he doesn't. Name me a single instance, and I don't mean driving aggressively; I mean clear-cut back-shooting, winning by taking others out intentionally.
So Busch can't win with you. He can only win on the racetrack. And I concur completely with what my colleague David Newton wrote the other day, that the less volatile and pouty Busch becomes, the more he'll win.
You accuse many journalists of favoring Busch, when the truth is we have no favorites. We're just obligated to report the truth when a driver is good. And the truth is, this one is very good.
So the autumn of your discontent is upon you. In all likelihood Busch will climb swiftly now from just outside the Chase to very much in the middle of it, if not the top of it. One win at either of two good tracks for him, Atlanta or Richmond, could make him the top seed in the playoffs with a series-high five wins.
Then you'll have a dignified driver who wins a lot -- gag, you say, a throwback to Jeff Gordon, just another Jimmie Johnson.
Just remember while you're booing yourselves hoarse: You brought this on yourselves.
Ed Hinton is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He can be reached at edward.t.hinton@espn3.com.
