Skeptics question Junior's win
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Conspiracy theorists, start your engines.
Actually, they've been ready since the celebration ended Saturday night at Daytona and Dale Earnhardt Jr. left with his victory in the Pepsi 400.
Earnhardt won the first race at the track since his father was killed Feb. 18 in a last-lap wreck in the Daytona 500.
Junior was pushed across the finish line by Michael Waltrip, the teammate who won the 500 with his help. In a late charge from seventh to first, Earnhardt's car seemed to defy the laws of physics on a track where carburetor restrictor plates limit horsepower and almost always keep drivers close.
In virtually every aspect, the storybook triumph seemed too good to be true. Many skeptics think maybe it really was.
No fewer than a half-dozen newspaper columnists wrote Monday about the "wink-wink-nod-nod aspects of the result," in the words of the Tampa Tribune's Martin Fennelly. All day, the talk show hosts said it and the Internet users posted it.
"A guy asked me just earlier today, and that's the first I heard of it, and I about knocked the hell out of him," Earnhardt Jr. said Monday on CNN/SI's Sports Tonight. "I don't know what to say to people like that.
"Apparently they don't know what they're talking about because I race my ass off and I'm proud of the victory."
Is a fix a ridiculous notion? Of course it is, for any big-time sport.
But NASCAR has taken a very slow, increasingly awkward path into the spotlight. It hasn't quite gained the level of respect it yearns for, as all this second-guessing proves.
Once a sleepy Southern pastime filled with good ol' boys who couldn't tell a ratings point from a restrictor plate, it has become a riveting soap opera doubling as sport in the 4½ months since The Intimidator's death.
Safety issues have cast a cloud. Fans and media -- all paying more attention than ever before -- have put NASCAR on the spot, wondering if it is leveling with the public and doing everything in its power to protect the drivers.
Crucial doubts on that front have left NASCAR open to questions about everything else, too ' including the sanctity of a result so dramatic it almost seems corny.
"You don't go by yourself on the outside and make that kind of time up," Johnny Benson said of Earnhardt's late-race push to the front. "But it's OK. It was good that Junior won."
It's not the first time NASCAR has been accused of fashioning a perfect ending.
Nobody can forget Richard Petty's final victory in 1984. The King of racing earned his 200th win on July 4th, with President Reagan in the crowd. Fairy tale stuff, indeed.
But there's really no need to turn the clock back so far to find examples of NASCAR's credibility gap.
NASCAR has brandished a reputation as being one of the very few governing bodies in sports that tinkers with the rules on a consistent basis, sometimes from month to month, or moment to moment.
Tony Stewart lost 20 places in the final standings of Saturday's race when he received the black flag for crossing the yellow line at the bottom of the track.
NASCAR has always played it loose with that rule, but before the race, drivers were warned that enforcement would be stringent. Of course, the announcement came with the caveat that all rulings were subject to "NASCAR's judgment" -- no black and white there.
