CP MOTORSPORTS – MONTE DUTTON: A ROUND OF LAST HURRAHS ON ME
Click here to follow us on Twitter @circletrackplus Click here to like us on Facebook
Look, I get it. Your favorite drivers are fading away. Jeff Gordon brought you into this sport, or, when your hero, Dale Earnhardt died, you latched onto Junior, and, now, dad-blame it and what-not, he's 41.
Forty-one! F-O-R-T-Y! O-N-E! Where did the time go?
Gordon's retired, and Junior's 41, and I ain't feeling so hot myself.
The younger generation seems bland, colorless, fake, robotic, insincere, brash, cocky, disrespectful ... I could go on.
Let me be the first to admit that I know Christopher Somebody won the Truck race Saturday night. John Rex Weekly got into a "so-called" fight with Master Spencer Gallagher, and their personal manservants finally managed to get them apart before they finished ballroom dancing for the TV cameras.
As Winnie the Pooh said, "Oh, bother."
I kid the kids. They can take it. They're either millionaires, they're going to be millionaires soon, or their daddies are millionaires.
The main reason these kids seem to be pipsqueaks is we don't know them well enough. We've never thrown frisbees with them. We're not sophisticated in important things like rap music.
We've all got our preferences. It's all right to hope someone with whom we can relate ... wins. What's wrong is thinking those with whom we can relate are the only ones who have the right to compete. It’s okay for me to hope the Clinton Red Devils win football games. I was once a Clinton Red Devil.
I'm going to have to find replacements. Designated hitters. Courtesy runners. Surrogates. Boy wonders from down on the farm. Vacancies suddenly abound.
David Letterman! Big Papi! Garrison Keillor! Guy Clark! Merle Haggard! Now Tony Stewart! It seems as everyone who holds my interest is disappearing or winding down. It could be a great time to learn more about rap music, not to mention the Kardashians, but I doubt it.
To make a long story short, I was excited when Tony Stewart won at Sonoma. We're not the same age. I was 40 -- Forty! F-O-R-T-Y! Ten times four! -- when Stewart was a rookie, but I wrote a book about him once, and we hung out a lot, and now he's 45, and he's retiring at the end of the year.
Instead of firing off an email with my intentions in regard to the Bleacher Report column I write the morning after each race, and then making a trip to the Wendy's drive-through for a Spicy Chicken Salad, I fired off that email and went to a sit-down joint and ordered a big ribeye.
If it hadn't been Sunday, I might have had a beer.