The NASCAR show again trumps sport
If NASCAR officials ran baseball, they'd be taking a hard look at the Yankees in the playoffs. That .636 winning percentage is grounds to fear they'll stink up the show. So cut open bats, check for doctored balls, stock up on urinalysis cups; whatever it takes.
Just checkin'. You know how it is.
Running pro football, NASCAR would be all over this Brett Favre resurgence thing. Hell, you never know; with all those old injuries, he might be running bionic parts. So bring him in for a complete checkup, MRIs head to toe, conducted by the league.
Just checkin'.
Cleared, the Yankees and Vikings would still get the message: The powers that be are watching you like hawks, breathing down your necks, poised to pounce.
Just checkin'.
Now play ball. Play your best, and there'll be further investigation.
Excellence constitutes suspicious behavior. And excellence must sometimes be bridled, lest it stink up the show.
This brings us to The Strange Case of the 5 and the 48, still pending down at NASCAR police headquarters, without probable cause.
Those cars are driven by Mark Martin and Jimmie Johnson, who just happened to be threatening to run away with the Chase, NASCAR's playoff system.
NASCAR's just checkin', and I'm just sayin' …
NASCAR, unlike other sports, doesn't mind manipulating the show in midstream -- midseason, even mid-Chase. The NFL and MLB sometimes tweak rules to help the show, but not in midseason, not to quash the excellence of specific teams and certainly not in mid-playoffs. They see a Super Bowl blowout or a World Series sweep coming, there's nothing they can -- or will -- do about it.
In NASCAR, show trumps sport. That's why followers of other sports, and even other forms of motor racing, have difficulty accepting NASCAR as a sport at all.
Sometimes the manipulation is by midseason rule changes. Take the institution of double-file restarts this midsummer. To be sure, it has affected the outcomes of races, probably changed some, with the best cars being beaten beat-bang-shuffle. Excellence has lost to aggression. But the show is better.
Other times the manipulation is more subtle, under the vast umbrella of NASCAR's constant vigilance regarding cheating -- its technological police force.
At least NASCAR used to be forthright about it.
"We need to slow him down a little bit," the late chief technical officer Bill Gazaway would say openly, when a Dale Earnhardt or a Darrell Waltrip would get too hot for NASCAR's liking.
If they weren't breaking the rules, NASCAR would just make new rules, of which the cars would be in violation if they stayed the same.
Gazaway was a tough-sheriff predecessor of current police chief John Darby and police commissioner Robin Pemberton. They run a much larger, more sophisticated, more PR-oriented force.
A couple of weeks ago they pulled over the 5 and the 48 for doing a technological 69.9999 in a 70 mph zone. NASCAR issued a warning to the engineers and crew chiefs on those two teams in the Hendrick Motorsports empire.
If this had happened to private citizens on an interstate, "60 Minutes" would be on the story by now.
Two cars are pulled over and warning tickets are issued, not for going over the speed limit but under it -- just too close to it for the cops' liking.
Then the cops use the warning as an excuse to take the cars down to headquarters for a thorough search for contraband -- in NASCAR lingo, "non-allowed" equipment or configuration. Still, they find nothing.
You know how TV cops don't have to make an arrest to get results? Just lean on somebody hard enough. That'll straighten 'em out.
Coincidentally or not, Martin and Johnson, who'd won the first two races in the Chase, stopped stinking up the show in the third one, finishing seventh and ninth last Sunday at Kansas City.
But they remained 1-2 atop the playoff standings.
Still checkin', NASCAR confiscated the 5 and the 48 again and took them down to headquarters for another going-over. Finding nothing -- yet again -- NASCAR released the cars without fanfare Tuesday.
It will be interesting indeed to see whether Martin and Johnson dominate at Fontana, Calif., this Sunday -- as they're both capable of doing.
It all amounts to a friendly warning, Darby told reporters last week. Too many areas of the cars were too close to NASCAR limits, so don't risk going over.
But this is the era of high engineering in NASCAR, and Hendrick Motorsports has maybe three dozen formally educated engineers on staff. So the cars cleared NASCAR specs by one one-thousandth of an inch in some areas? Scientifically sound by a thousandth is scientifically sound by a mile to engineers who live by the micrometer. Margin is margin, infinitesimal as it might be.
What's happening -- what has been happening for years -- is that team technology is outrunning NASCAR's policing expertise.
Take the last time Johnson lost a Chase, in 2005. He was threatening to stink it up, and NASCAR found some shock absorbers underneath his car they didn't like -- not illegal, mind you; the cops just didn't like them, probably because they didn't understand them.
So they confiscated them. Made Johnson run the rest of the playoffs without them. If not for that, some believe, Johnson might be going for a five-peat rather than a four-peat this fall.
No arrest then, no arrest now. Just leaning hard on the 5 and the 48 teams, letting them know the powers that be are watching like hawks, constantly, relentlessly.
Just checkin'.
And I'm just sayin'.
Ed Hinton is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He can be reached at edward.t.hinton@espn3.com.
