| | | Dale Earnhardt's death last week meant the loss of a champion, an idol, a
husband, a father, a man. And the saddest thing is that his death won't be the last in auto racing.
|  | | Top: Dale Earnhardt Jr. hits the wall during the Dura Lube 400 on Sunday. Bottom: Dale Earnhardt Sr. hits the wall while getting hit by Ken Schrader in the Daytona 500 on Feb. 18. |
In the days since Earnhardt's death in the Daytona 500, I heard and read
several times that his fatal crash was the equivalent of Michael Jordan
dying in the NBA Finals or Ken Griffey Jr. dying in the World Series.
That's wrong. Such hypothetical deaths in other sports would be much
different for one simple and very important fact: Those sports do not kill their athletes.
Even with the danger of a beanball, we do not watch the World Series
wondering whether Derek Jeter will survive all nine innings. We do not watch the NBA playoffs worried that a blatant foul will send Kobe Bryant to the morgue. And as violent, bloody and potentially crippling as football can be,
we are not concerned that a player will be carried from the Super Bowl with
a white sheet over his body.
True, deaths occur in other sports. Just this week, Florida State linebacker
Devaughn Darling collapsed and died after what was described as intense
agility and conditioning drills (an autopsy was to reveal the cause of the
death). More infamously, Loyola Marymount (Calif.) college basketball player Hank Gathers collapsed and died on the court during a game in 1990, though that was due to an undetected heart problem, not the nature
of the sport.
The issue, however, is not whether death calls upon other sports on rare occasions, but whether death is an unavoidable part of the sport, whether it is an almost routine visitor to the arena. And it isn't. When we attend contests in baseball, basketball, hockey, football, soccer, golf -- you name it -- we quite reasonably expect that all the athletes will still be alive at the end.
Not so in auto racing. In just the past year, the sport has killed four
drivers, including Earnhardt.
It almost seemed odd, then, when NASCAR officials investigated the exact
cause of Earnhardt's death, when the cause was as obvious as the sponsorship
logos on his Chevy. He crashed his car into a wall at 180 mph. Someone crashes
at that speed on the interstate and no one asks why. Yet Earnhardt dies and people express surprise.
It didn't look like that bad a crash. I've seen worse.
Well, no, Earnhardt's crash didn't look that bad. And yes, we've all seen
worse, much worse. Earnhardt himself not only survived a 1997 wreck in which
his car flipped several times, he got out of the ambulance, returned to the
car and finished the race. His son's crash this week was frighteningly
similar to his father's fatal wreck, yet Dale Earnhardt Jr. walked away with
a limp and bruises.
That's the way it is in racing. There are wrecks all the time. Sometimes the
drivers walk away from those crashes. Sometimes ambulances take them to
hospitals where doctors patch them and return them to health so they can
race again. And sometimes, much too often, they die.
If you suspect that I am not an auto racing fan, that I do not understand
racing's compelling elements the way so many fans passionately do, you are
correct. I simply cannot understand the appeal of an event that includes
death riding in the passenger seat.
If any of this comes off as unfeeling, I do not mean it to. I feel sad for
Earnhardt, his family, his friends and his many fans, just as I feel sad for
all the people who died in car wrecks that same weekend without the
accompanying headlines, repeated videotapes and national outpouring of
grief.
And just as I will feel sad for the family, friends and fans of the next
driver when he crashes and does not limp away, when he turns in his race car for a hearse.
Jim Caple of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is a regular contributor to ESPN.com's baseball coverage and Page 2. Send this story to a friend | Most sent stories
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