It's really not funny
Pretend for a moment that you're Michael Waltrip. You come into the season with high hopes, a new car, a new team and an old sponsor. You've got a great family, a nice home near Charlotte, tons of money, everyone knows who you are and ...
Suddenly you're the butt of a joke.
* You get caught up in NASCAR's biggest cheating scandal in years.
* You've made one race all year (out of 6) and you're dead last in points, 993 behind the leader.
* And now you roll your car on a Friday night and, bloody and pissed, walk home only to wake up the next morning to find a state highway patrollman at your door with a reckless driving ticket. (Here's one version of the story. Here's the AP account. What I think is the original account is here.)
Now if you're Michael Waltrip, what do you do? How do you handle all of this? Where's your head? And what do you say to your sponsors? It's not that the wreck is all that bad. It's just all of it tied together that screams trainwreck.
Related: The Hartford Courant's NASCAR blogger (that's Hartford as in Hartford, Yankee-neticut) gives his top 10 reasons for Waltrip's crash. (I like No. 4 the best.)
Wednesday night update: Waltrip talks to the Big Dog here: After the wreck, "I got out and someone had pulled up and said she would call 911. I said that I was fine, and I just decided to go home and then figure out what to do."
Comments (1)
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What does your insurance company say when you tell them you had a single-car wreck at 2 a.m., but decided to walk more than a mile home and report it the next day?
My guess is they say, Was alcohol involved, Mr. Waltrip?
Posted on April 11, 2007 4:58 PM