For sports fans there is no greater time of year than in the fall. Fall is the time where The World Series takes place, the basketball season starts and football teams beat up on each other. Who wouldn’t love the idea of watching physically gifted athletes proving their merit against other gifted athletes both mentally and physically?
However something has been bugging me that I feel I should address (why not?). In what I consider to be a mock of traditional sporting events, racing cars in a circle is being thrust into the limelight because of television stations like ESPN giving it more coverage.
Personally I would not mind NASCAR so much if the networks covered other activities that involved repetitive circular motions. For instance women’s competitive hoola-hooping could be nice, but since this is not an option I think we should do away with all of these types of “sports”. It’s got to be all or nothing people.
Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying that driving fast does not require a skill set which only a few possess but the fact of the matter is, is that its boring.
It is hard to relate to the struggles and challenges these drivers are facing because most of the work, that the viewer can see, is being done by the car.
In a football game you can see physical qualities being put to the test and this gives the viewer something to relate to because they have the opportunity to go out and try it with their friends, but in NASCAR this level of connectivity is none existent and should not by tried.
Even with camera shots that show what the driver is looking at I can not become involved in a race because I do not know what that guy is doing and I cannot feel how fast he is driving.
ESPN loves this stuff though and I don’t get it. Lately I’ve been seeing as many stories about NASCAR as I do real sports.
The icing on the cake though is that after these stories are shown commercials relating to global warming air. To me this seems to be quite the paradox
With a majority of popular car manufacturers making hybrids and television stations doing public service announcements on how to reduce your daily impact on the environment it shocks me to hear that there is still a big push to glorify this, my most hated of all the sports.
Think about it, in the Indy 500 there are about thirty cars (a complete guess with no research to back that number up) all of which are doing 500 laps at about 200 miles an hour( again a complete guess). What type of impact does that have on the environment? So much for gas efficiency.
Personally I don’t think it’s cool that the world I live in is suffering for a sport I do not like. So I suggest that you do your part by not supporting NASCAR and getting it shut down. That is all.

Danny Penera is a City Times staff writer