Turn 3

Cowboys Stadium: It's Bruton-like

By DAVID GREEN

Two thoughts came to mind as I watched the Dallas Cowboys play the past two weekends in team owner Jerry Jones' new stadium in Arlington, Texas.

1: The size and lavishness of this place defies belief, even as viewed on television.

2: Don't you know Bruton Smith wants an oval racing facility just like it, complete with retractable roof?

I mean, there are big facilities and fancy facilities and there are big and fancy facilities, but they all look like a small-town sandlot ball field in comparison. It's like the Titanic compared to an Ohio River tugboat. Nothing wrong with the sandlot diamond or the diesel-snorting tug, but, come on. This thing has a high-definition television complex suspended from its roof that weighs more than Lambeau Field, six inches of turf and two rows of the parking lot included.

And Bruton could do it, too, if he put his mind to it. Many of the features of this extravaganza are tailor-made for an indoor auto racing track, from the trick roof to the six-story-tall glass portals at each end of the stadium which can be opened or closed at will.

Size matters, you say? Yes, it does. We may still be a few decades away from developing the materials and the engineering to build a facility big enough to enclose something as large as Bruton's Texas Motor Speedway, just a little bit north and west of Arlington.

But, hey -- don't we have enough 1.5-mile tracks? Didn't I read somebody's complaint about that one or two times in the past couple of years? Let's build one like the new Iowa Speedway, or maybe Richmond -- maybe as big as Rockingham. You can't convince me that couldn't be done.

And what a wonder it would be. Just think of it. It would be a modern-day version of the Pyramids, or the Colossus of Rhodes.

NASCAR might even give Bruton a date for that one.

Juan Pablo's complaint, and other musings

By DAVID GREEN

Ironic, isn't it, that little ABC Sports featurette with Juan Pablo Montoya praising Mark Martin for helping him get competitive in Cup cars, and then suggesting that Martin "screwed me" after the finish of the Sylvania 300 Sunday.

You'd think Martin threw a cinder block out the window of his car in front of Montoya's, the way the Colombian has pouted about that incident.

I give Montoya credit for not causing a wreck. But he didn't refrain from roughing up the leader out of the goodness of his heart; he was surprised.

The natural instinct in such a situation is to go as hard as you can and hope, if your cars are nearly equal, that the other guy makes just a tiny mistake or has a tiny bit more wheelspin under acceleration than you do, something to give you the edge to make the pass or, if you're the leader, to stay in front.

It takes discipline, in the heat of a late-laps duel, to temper that instinct and to drive that corner to your best advantage rather than merely trying to go as fast as you can go. You also run the risk of the other guy taking you out if he's not paying attention, or of making a banzai move (kind of like Carl Edwards tried at California) and executing the pavement equivalent of a slide job on you.

Martin did absolutely nothing wrong. He did something Montoya wasn't expecting. That's what old pros do.

For better or worse, the Chase is with us. Some things to be thankful for:

...that Fox Sports is not doing the coverage. I had a nightmare last night that the Dover race was about to begin and DW was screaming, "BOOGITY BOOGITY BOOGITY! LET'S GO CHASIN', BOYS!" Scary stuff. Woke up in a cold sweat.

...that NASCAR turned thumbs down on a suggestion from Bruton Smith that we use four-abreast formations for restarts instead of the mundane two-wide. Hey, just because it was a hit at zMax Dragway...

...that Flavio Briatore is not a NASCAR participant.

Dover predictions, anyone? I have a feeling a non-chaser is going to steal the thunder at the Monster Mile. Kyle Busch, maybe? Clint Bowyer?

Say it ain't so, Renault

By DAVID GREEN

In October 1919, one of the world's first modern sports -- baseball, already 43 years old if you count the origin of today's National League as a starting point, even older if you date from the establishment of the first fully professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, in 1869 -- suffered a scandal of historic proportions when the Chicago White Sox of the American League were accused of deliberately losing the World Series to Cincinnati.

It took nearly a year for the rumors of skullduggery to result in any sort of consequence.

Fast-forward to today, almost 100 years after the baseball scandal, when another modern sport -- automobile racing -- is embroiled in a scandal that gnaws at the legitimacy of its purpose.

The scandal is in Formula One, but American race fans, most of them attuned to NASCAR stock car racing, should take notice, because the entire sport is smeared by the actions of an F1 team in one of last year's races.

Renault, the French auto manufacturer which owns a Formula One team, has sacked the two leaders of the team and has stated that it will not contest accusations that ING Renault F1 Team conspired to manipulate the outcome of the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix, won by Renault driver Fernando Alonso.

In Great Britain, where F1 is every bit as big a deal as NASCAR is in Charlotte, the press are apoplectic. Phrases such as "one of the darkest days" and "worst single piece of cheating in the history of sport" have punctuated the coverage in publications such as The Times of London.

There are questions already being raised about the impact of the "fixed" race on last year's championship titles for drivers and manufacturers, and about whether litigation may be utilized as a means of redress of perceived and/or real grievances.

Other scribes have been less dramatic than that, discussing in less hysterical terms what the World Motor Sport Council may do to punish the team and what ramifications there may be for the two drivers involved in the cheating -- Alonso and Nelson Piquet, who has admitted deliberately crashing in the early stages to trigger a strategic advantage for Alonso versus the faster Ferrari and McLaren entries.

But make no mistake -- it's a tenuous time for racing.

Revelation of the Renault scandal comes in almost dead-solid synchronicity with uproar in Indianapolis over one of the icons of drag racing supposedly losing a race on purpose to help another driver's chances to make the cutoff for the NHRA Countdown to its season championship titles, and tumult in NASCAR over the selection of the 12 drivers who will battle each other in the Chase for the Cup.

Renault's admission of cheating comes at the same time John Force angrily responds to a competitor's assertions that he threw a race, while Carl Edwards candidly admits, sure, he would allow a teammate to pass him and even allow him to win if it were in the best interests of the team.

Never mind the dismissals of racing as "nothing but cars going around in circles"; race fans can question, with just as much validity, the "point" of other sports:

Football -- two groups of men butting and battling against each other, in order to advance a leather object up and down a field arbitrarily set at 100 yards long;

Baseball -- players attempting to hit a small ball with a wooden bat, only to run around a diamond-shaped course and, hopefully, end up where they started;

Basketball -- players running up and down a court, attempting to throw a ball into a steel-rimmed "basket" more often and with greater efficiency than an opposing group.

None of these activities has any world-historical significance, except in that they have all risen to great popularity and importance in a society increasingly freed from the life-and-death concerns of a more primitive time.

They have all become enormous businesses now, these sports and games. But their immense popularity and the passion of their fans remain based on the presumption that the contests are fair and square, not predetermined, staged or manipulated.

That presumption is now, at best, suspect. At worst, it is obsolete.

How to -- uh -- "fix" this mess?

Baseball, in 1920, imposed harsh penalties on the players implicated -- but never convicted -- in the "Black Sox" scandal. Baseball turned the emerging mass media into an ally as well as a watchdog adversary and rode the heroic exploits of players such as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and others into a triumph over its scandal.

That sport has had less success dealing with modern questions raised about the validity of competition based on performance-enhancing substances and issues of flawed character. The landscape of public opinion and media attention is much altered from that of the 1920s.

Racing may be in a quagmire from which it will be unable to extricate itself. Its management has conspired with a select few to turn all major forms of the sport into team-centered competition. Many observers and students of the sport, along with a good many competitors, have decried this trend as something that undermines the competitive integrity of racing.

It will be interesting to see what the leaders of motor sport do in this time. I only hope we will witness some sort of Ruthian miracle, and that we will not be instead witnessing the ignoble end of the racing world as we know it.

'Team' concept out of control

By DAVID GREEN

Thanks to all who posted responses to my most recent item, but the "team orders" issue has taken on a life of itself and, I believe, deserves revisiting.

The point of my original post was to stimulate debate about efforts to correct mistakes, and focused on the FIA's investigation into the nearly year-old outcome of a Formula One race. I alluded to instant reply to evaluate the calls of referees and umpires and used the NCAA as an example of what I believe to be overzealous "correcting" of results from the recent and even not-so-recent past.

Just days before that item was posted, the NHRA had a scandalous incident at its most tradition-filled and revered event, the U.S. Nationals, involving one of its most famous and popular drivers. I skipped over that development, largely because (as far as I know) the NHRA is not attempting to "get it right" in the matter of whether John Force deliberately "threw" a race.

But clearly, "team orders" has become an issue that NASCAR and the NHRA ought to address, as F1 did some seven years ago.

Even in this cynical age, when wild-eyed obsession about political correctness coexists with crude and crass behavior not seen previously in modern civilization, there's a good measure of regard for old-fashioned ethical behavior -- otherwise, no one would be paying any attention to John Force and the outrage of the Pedregon brothers, or to Carl Edwards and his admission that he would "let" a teammate win if it were in the best interests of their team.

There's something about the notion of "fixing" an outcome that is odious to most of us, whether it's an election or a political-favor appointment, a ball game or boxing match. "Team orders" are all about "fixing" the outcome of a motor sports event.

The expression comes from European racing, which has always had a structure more deeply rooted in "teams." American racing, historically, was more about individual competitors.

Europeans, many of whom have always considered themselves much more sophisticated than Americans, accepted the notion of racing teammates helping each other with no more reaction than a shrug of the shoulders for many years.

Americans, meanwhile, railed at such notions. Baseball's reputation still bears the scar of the 1919 "Black Sox" scandal and prizefighting, once immensely popular, has been rendered all but irrelevant because of scandals about "fixed" matches. Wrestling is a niche "sport," appealing mostly to people who merely want to be entertained and don't take the "competition" seriously.

Not that "team orders" were nonexistent in American racing. The practice of "hippodroming," in which drivers would conspire to entertain the fans with staged competition until the final laps, was commonplace in the sport's early days. And there were instances in which drivers blocked for each other, as the late Dale Earnhardt was accused of doing in the race in which he was killed, or wrecking adversaries.

But for the most part, team orders were much like mistresses: We Americans tended to be secretive and even embarrassed about it, while the "sophisticated" Europeans took such behavior in stride.

However, in 2002, the European racing community had a quite American-like reaction when Rubens Barrichello abruptly slowed near the finish and allowed his Ferrari teammate, Michael Schumacher, to pass him and take victory in the Austrian Grand Prix. The uproar grew a few races later, when the two Ferraris finished in a reduced-speed, side-by-side formation and Barrichello was determined to be the winner in the U.S. GP at Indianapolis.

F1, as a consequence, did an about-face from its supposedly sophisticated position and banned team orders. Enforcing that ban is proving to be a challenge, but no longer are team orders accepted by F1's audience as "just a part of the sport." And the basis for their inquiry into last year's Singapore Grand Prix is whether Nelson Piquet deliberately crashed early in the race to set in motion a pit-stop sequence that would allow his Renault teammate, Fernando Alonso, to have a chance to win.

Meanwhile, during the period of its greatest growth in the 1990s, NASCAR was permitting unrestrained expansion of its bigger and wealthier teams, hypocritically ignoring its own rule that no registered team owner could operate more than two cars in any event. Not only did it permit the wink-nod "ownership" of third, fourth and even fifth entries by family members, top-ranking employees and even drivers, NASCAR and a good many of its entourage of media encouraged it with disclaimers couched in a celebration of the NASCAR "family":

"Oh, the 25 is not Rick Hendrick's car. That's Papa Joe's."

"Oh, that's not a Roush car. That one is owned by Geoff Smith."

"Isn't it wonderful that Jeff Gordon is providing a top-flight ride for his protege, Jimmie Johnson?"

Finally, several years ago NASCAR dispensed with the smoke-and-mirrors routine and "limited" entry numbers to four per team. Not only has that all but squeezed out the privateer, it has also given some suggestion of legitimacy to manipulation "for the good of the team." Only in such brazen instances, such as John Force Racing's tactics at Indianapolis or when a driver of the status of Carl Edwards admits he would "throw" a race to benefit a teammate, do we even notice.

How far we have come, indeed, when it wasn't only the Olympics in which playing for pay was seen with skepticism by a good many observers. How far we have come, indeed, from the time when poet-sports writer Grantland Rice penned the lines, "For when the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name, He marks - not that you won or lost - but how you played the Game."

Bottom line: Team orders are un-American, and they stink, no matter how much cologne you may spray on them. NASCAR and the NHRA should follow F1's lead and declare them unacceptable.

None other than the Three Stooges themselves summed it up best in a zany send-up of the motto of Dumas' Three Musketeers:

Moe: "One for all!" Larry: "All for one!"

Curly: "Every man for himself!"

You tell 'em, Curly. Woo-woo-woo-woo!

Getting it right

By DAVID GREEN

It's human nature, I suppose, to want what we don't have. It's defensible, perhaps even honorable, to work to eliminate all imperfections that we discern.

But anything can be carried to an unhealthy extreme, and as Randy Travis sang some years ago, "I hear tell the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

That's especially true in the world of sports, where we have become obsessed with getting everything perfect with regard to referees' and umpires' calls, strict adherence to rules -- and the finishing order of automobile races.

Now, as a self-diagnosed obsessive-compulsive, I must admit I can relate. I like a place for everything and everything in its place. I'm among the worst offenders in the "Kill the ump!" crowd. I want my favorite teams to win, but fairly. And I want accurate results of races.

However, we're pushing the envelope in the sports world. We have instant replay in just about all major sports. We obsess about the effects and the fairness of "performance enhancing" substance use. And some policies of the NCAA border on revisionist history.

On Sept. 21, the Renault Formula One racing team will appear before the World Motor Sport Council to defend itself against charges that it conspired to fix the outcome of the Singapore Grand Prix -- a race which was contested exactly 51 weeks earlier, on Sept. 28, 2008.

According to a Brazilian television report, Nelson Piquet claims his crash early in the race was by design, the purpose to trigger a sequence of events that would put his teammate, Fernando Alonso, in position to benefit from pit-stop intervals and overcome a competitive disadvantage.

It should be noted that Piquet came forward only after he was sacked by the team, so his motives (and, by extension, his accuracy) require investigation.

Speculation is that, at worst, the win may be taken away and the French team may be excluded from the rest of this year's competition. Some observers have wondered whether the runner-up -- Nico Rosberg, in a Williams-Toyota -- will get credit for the victory, whether other performances by Alonso and the Renault team this year and last (Alonso also won the next race after Singapore, at Japan, last year) will be altered, whether driver and constructor points race from either or both seasons will be affected, and so on.

Of course, F1 could follow the lead of America's NCAA and merely "vacate" the achievements of its designated criminals. There would be no winner of the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix.

NASCAR is well on its way to this sort of micromanagement, as evidenced by the Tuesday morning "rap sheet" that has become almost as regular as the sunrise. With regard to individual events, the stock-car sanctioning body has the slightly less pure motivation of producing a crowd-pleasing spectacle, hence its green-white-checkered finish rule and other procedural changes. NASCAR is less concerned that the most deserving driver is rewarded, although (with apologies to Bill Clinton) I suppose it depends on what "deserving" means.

At some point, it all leaves a very bad taste in my mouth -- at least as bad as that left by the "We wuz robbed!" complaint triggered by incidents such as the blown call by umpire Don Denkinger that cost the St. Louis Cardinals a World Series championship in 1985.

Most sports contests have a time frame in which an error committed by officials or an infraction committed by a competitor must be addressed. After that time, it is considered an uncorrectable error. Criminal law has a similar philosophy in its various statutes of limitation, although some crimes (such as murder) are exempt.

Here's a suggestion: If it can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Piquet crashed on purpose, and that the team conspired with him or ordered him to do it, then he and Renault should be penalized. If it can be proved that Alonso was in on it, punish him, too. Fine, suspend, exclude the guilty parties.

But leave the race result alone, please.Make revisions in archived reports and records of the investigation and its results. Don't pretend that it didn't happen.

The bottom line is that a sports event's outcome almost never hinges on any solitary incident or moment. Even my beloved Cardinals still had the remainder of the bottom on the ninth inning to hang onto their 1-0 lead, and then they had Game 7 to overcome Denkinger's blown call in that 1985 World Series. In addition, the Kansas City Royals had to score two runs after Denkinger's Game 6 mistake in order to win.

If Piquet crashed on purpose, he may have certainly helped Alonso win. But Alonso had to perfectly execute the remaining 40-some-odd laps of a 61-lap race to make the skullduggery work.

Any honorable person wants correct and just outcomes, and I'm not advocating the abandonment of rules and regulations.

But it's folly to think we can get everything right. It does a disservice to everybody to lead them to believe that we can do so, in any endeavor.