Off Wing Opinion

There's been an altercation at IRL race at Watkins Glen. With the race over and the cars all parked in Victory Lane, Sam Hornish, Jr. decided that he wanted a piece of Tony Kannan. Best of all, though ABC was in a commercial at the time, thanks to its "side-by-side" coverage, we got to watch the whole thing develop.

So what did ABC's announcer say when they came back from commercial?

"We're at an auto race where a hockey game has broken out."

Wow, how original. He said this even though it seems like racers on every major North American circuit, be it Champ Car, IRL or NASCAR, get into post-race confrontations like this on a more or less regular basis.

Instead, they ought to call these incidents for what they really are: WWE-style garbage. Hockey fights are real.

Of course, the IRL folks would never stoop so low as to use an incident like this to promote the sport, now would they?

More soon.

UPDATE: As soon as this hits YouTube, be sure to see Sam Hornish, Sr. do his best Don Zimmer imitation, first shoving Kannan, before getting shoved to the ground himself. Later, in a post-race interview, Kannan took a shot at Hornish, Sr., saying that the driver always needs to have his father around to defend him, and that's why "dads belong in the grandstand," and not the pits.

As Marco Andretti saw the fight develop, he pushed his father, Michael, out of the line of fire as he went to defend his driver Kannan. As Hornish, Sr. was shoved to the ground, it seemed as if the younger Andretti said, "See what happened," as the elder covered his eyes in disbelief.

ABC can't get enough of re-playing the incident. Oh, the horror.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 8th, 2007 at 5:37 pm by Eric McErlain and is filed under Auto Racing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.