Let The Juniors Joke

Guest Column By Cathy Elliott

Just five races into the 2009 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season and we're already discussing the interpersonal skills of the two juniors, Dale Earnhardt and his crew chief, Tony Eury.

I suppose the most recent springboard for this topic came at Atlanta, when Junior commented to Eury on the radio that if his wheel came off as the result of a mistake earlier in the race, he was going to take a hammer to the head of every member of his pit crew. It was one of those funny comments, like "Point that finger at me one more time and I'll bite it off," that in some societies are known as ... jokes.

This in turn set off the inevitable flurry of remarks from the millions of armchair and barstool NASCAR experts out there, who really want to believe that all that's holding Junior back from regular visits to Victory Lane is the seemingly contentious relationship between the driver and his crew chief. If Eury doesn't have the ability to settle his driver down during a race, they ask, how can he possibly guide Junior to a win?

This seems ridiculous to me. I'm far from a mechanical expert -- I just learned how to spell carburetor last year -- but if memory serves, Junior made the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup in 2008 and won one race more than four-time champion Jeff Gordon did. Are we really so ready to throw in the towel because his season has gotten off to somewhat of a bumpy beginning? Is finger-pointing ever the answer to anything?

And perhaps most importantly, when did we lose our collective sense of humor?

In the excellent but mostly depressing movie "Gran Torino," there's a memorable scene where Clint Eastwood's character, along with a friend from the neighborhood barbershop, attempts to teach a young boy "how men talk to each other."

I can't go into too much detail, because the movie is rated R and this column is not. But when I tell you the scene included a few hand gestures that could be described as "suggestive" and more than a few words that could be described as "profane," you probably get the picture. And the soundtrack.

In essence, this scene was a more adult version of the name-calling contests most of us engaged in with our siblings as kids. Strangely, verbal missiles like "scab eater" and "cheese breath," which merited a good stern talking-to from Mom back in the 1970s, don't seem to pack the same punch they had back then.

But no matter. The point is that we interact differently with our friends and family members than we do with casual acquaintances or strangers. Little girls might hug one another on the playground, while their male counterparts are more likely to playfully shove one another around. This isn't intended as a gender-biased observation. It's just that in my own personal experience, these are often the patterns we follow when we communicate.

So if I told my brother I was going to whack him upside the head with a hammer, it would be an expression of affection. But if I said the same thing to the guy who owns the insurance agency around the corner, it would constitute a threat, and likely would involve the cops. It's all about the context.

When you think about it, NASCAR gives fans a wonderful and largely unprecedented gift by allowing us the ability to monitor our drivers' radio frequencies during races. Do we really want our teams to resort to communicating by way of some type of encrypted signals that we are unable to access?

All that would accomplish is to turn NASCAR crew chiefs into some version of football coaches, hiding their faces behind those silly clipboards. That's a bleak prospect, indeed.

Perhaps instead of using what we hear as the basis for trying to get guys fired based on our opinions of their communication skills, we should adopt a policy of keeping our own mouths shut about what comes out of theirs. Sanctioned eavesdropping isn't all that common, you know. One man's belligerence may well be another man's banter. "Sweetheart" and "scab eater" could be interchangeable, according to the speaker and the circumstances.

We need to take off the headsets if we can't take a joke.

source: nascar press