Given the news, I had to.

Paul Tracy can’t wait to bring his special brand of douchebaggery to the IRL. Watch out Danica, Paul will punch you in the face if you look at him wrong.

Well well well, will you look at this:

Most Champ Car teams were told to quit working on their Panoz chassis Monday and expect delivery of their new cars in a few days. Paul Tracy is coming to Indianapolis later this week for a seat fitting. And one of Champ Car’s co-owners admitted to a fellow owner there would only be one series in 2008.

After 12 years of warring that cost open-wheel racing much of its sponsorship, audience and momentum, common sense has finally prevailed.

SPEEDtv.com has learned that the Indy Racing League and Champ Car have officially, and mercifully, agreed to become one entity. A press conference could come as early as Wednesday if Kevin Kalkhoven is back from England in time.

12 years that have killed open wheel  racing in the United States.  As someone who grew up idolizing drivers like Rick Mears and Bobby Rahal, going to pole day every year with my family and listening to the Indy 500 on the radio the decline of open wheel here has been hard to stomach. It’s to the point that the IRL was really on the verge of losing me to NASCAR, with the move of Sam Hornish Jr. to the ’stock’ cars just about being the final nail in the coffin.

Tony George wishes to inform you that the 12 year split is all part of his grand masterplan.  Next step: A laser death ray on the moon. (picture courtesy espn.com)

We’ll see if this helps open wheel or if it is too late. I’m hoping that the combined series will at least have the effect of more drivers per race driving a little more interest and this being in the news enough to draw some people back to give it a try again. Now to try and market the personalities of the drivers (which is what has sold NASCAR so well).

Open wheel is still the way to go for North American racing fans who like speed. Those boats on wheels in NASCAR (which stopped being ’stock’ YEARS ago) don’t hold a candle to the speed and danger of an Indy Car.

HT to Masson for finding this story.

P.S. Yes, I plan on writing here more again. 

OKay so I’m normally not one for conspiracy theories (unless I’m listening to Coast To Coast AM and laughing my ass off), but the following post at The Situationist* really has me scratching my head and wondering… and it starts right off with something I somehow missed from the ESPN Ombudsman ( a laughable position, but I digress).

Negative Press: Is ESPN Killing the National Hockey League by Influencing Public Attitudes?

ESPN’s ombudsman, Le Anne Schreiber, felt compelled to examine hockey coverage on the network. In an article last month, she confirmed that hockey coverage has indeed diminished 28% on Sportscenter over the last three years and that hockey-oriented shows such as NHL 2Night were cut altogether since ESPN’s loss of NHL rights.

The reduced exposure on ESPN can only be harmful to the NHL. By minimizing coverage and highlights, the network is effectively reducing the imprint of the game on Americans’ collective sports consciousness. Worse still, several ESPN writers and commentators have gone out of their way to emphasize the demise of hockey. Le Ann Schreiber recently noted that during the NHL’s regular season, hockey was only mentioned on-air if there happened to be “some egregious brawl” or if it was being “dissed” for its invisibility and irrelevance.

28% decrease in coverage? Say what you will about the popularity of hockey in the United States, but not even ONE nightly show dedicated to hockey verges on ridiculous - especially with the number of ESPN networks approaching the highly desired The Ocho. And what will Barry Melrose do now?

It ain’t cheap to look this good.

But back to the seriousness. It’s obvious to anyone who watches ESPN that hockey coverage has become fewer and far between and when it is covered it’s usually about something bad or with a tinge of “yeah, but hockey’s in a bad state of things.”

In sharp contrast to the treatment of the NHL, ESPN favorites such as NASCAR face little scrutiny and massive hype. Once a niche sport with limited appeal, NASCAR is ESPN’s new hot property and has found itself to be the chief beneficiary of the network’s downgrading of hockey. Northwest News Group columnist Kevin Kaduk notes that since ESPN’s purchase of NASCAR broadcast rights, the network has been force-feeding the sport to its readers via its various news outlets. Indeed in January 2007, ESPN senior vice president Jed Drake explicitly promised as much. Unlike its coverage of the NHL, ESPN has shown remarkable patience with NASCAR as evidenced by its burying or putting a positive spin on negative NASCAR news such as that of falling TV ratings for the sport.

What? Falling TV ratings for NASCAR? Honestly I hadn’t heard that. Thanks ESPN for not reporting the news! If they made as big of a deal of falling NASCAR ratings as they consistently do falling hockey ratings, we’d be hearing about it all the time. Alas…

To make matters worse, such informational social influence can translate into normative social influence, which is born of the need to “conform to the rules of other people.” If it seems that a growing number of people dislike hockey or that being a hockey fan exposes one to ridicule, many will hide, ignore, or lose their affection for hockey.

Thus, the network’s negative portrayal of hockey is very likely causing a profound two-fold effect on the viewing public by prejudicing their perception of the facts and by affecting their feelings for the game.

Indeed. The more ESPN’s talking heads and faceless writers (or God Damnit I WISH They Were Faceless Writers) say hockey is failing, the more people will feel the need to believe that as well because ESPN is so ‘respected’ among the casual sports fan. So now hockey has yet ANOTHER hill to climb - fighting the biggest and in some areas ONLY source of sports-centric news into giving their sport as much credibility as even Arena Fucking Football.

Speaking of the Arena League, I was a brief fan when there was a team in Indiana, but finding news of that league on ESPN was like looking for a live dog in Michael Vick’s backyard: if you were lucky enough to find it, you probably would have been happier if you hadn’t. But then the AFL gets on ESPN (after ESPN buys a stake in the league), pimps out John Elway and Jon Bon Jovi, and suddenly I’m awash in AFL playoff highlights at the same time that hockey highlights are reaching the frequency of Jonathan Ogden stops Dwight Freeney highlights. Maybe it’s just me, but ESPN owning part of a sports league screams of conflict of interest.

When he’s not selling cars he’s desperately trying to get you to care about an obscure indoor sport that languished in the fringes of American minor-minor leagues until ESPN bought part of the league. Look, Jon Bon Jovi!

But reports of hockey’s death are greatly exaggerated. Professional hockey is doing relatively well in both its traditional and non-traditional markets. Financially speaking, the NHL’s has rebounded since its disastrous lockout during the 2004-2005 season. Television ratings may be down nationally but the NHL’s attendance figures are still relatively strong with record crowds attending games this past January. Indeed, the NHL’s attendance figures, while lower, are somewhat comparable to those of the NBA - a league widely hailed as successful by sportswriters. In addition, franchise values have gone up markedly since the lockout allowed league owners to break the players’ union (the NHLPA) and implement a favorable new collective bargaining agreement which included, among other features, a hard salary cap. As Eric McErlain details on Off Wing Opinion, prospective owners such as Jim Balsillie and an ownership group in Kansas City have been chomping at the bit to introduce hockey to new markets via re-location of struggling franchises after paying a hefty premium for the privilege.

Amen and hallelujah! It’s something that doesn’t really get mentioned by ESPN - while ratings may be down attendance is doing great. Something I didn’t realize - the NHL’s attendance is on par with the NBA. When are we going to get the “NBA is failing!” stories - something I’d be more prone to agree with (falling talent levels, a boring one-on-one focused game, no fundamentals.. but that’s another post).

As the author of that column states, all is not indeed well with the NHL. Versus as a network can barely be found on cable networks that actually carry it and the league has far over-expanded. I would have loved to have seen the NHL contract some teams during the lockout. I would have loved to see them trim down the schedule and make it harder to get into the playoffs than it is to predict the result of a coin toss. Can fixing these negatives and the existence of the positives of the game outweigh a negativity campaign by the bully in the sports world that is ESPN? I doubt it.

Now here’s the big question that The Situationist doesn’t seem to get in to - why? What interest does ESPN have in knocking hockey down to the level of curling and inclined extreme chair bowling? My guess is that it’s not so much a dislike of hockey - hey, The Worldwide Leader is full of sports fans and I’m sure there are a good number of hockey fans, being in New England and all - but a love of the STORY of a once proud league falling and falling fast. What makes a better story, a league suffering a lockout but stumping the critics with a successful comeback or the failure of an entire sport?

The latter, obviously. We’ve seen the former before. Baseball made its comeback. The NFL survived a strike to become the dominant sport in the country. Basketball has been strangely labor-trouble free and just sort of… stagnant since the Magic-Bird-Jordan era. But Hockey! ah! Only those weird Canadians watch that, and a story about that league failing so spectacularly - now THAT is news. It’s almost like ESPN was expecting the league to fold during the lockout, and when it didn’t, when it actually succeeded in fixing the problems that led to the lockout, they had to scramble for a storyline instead of reporting the one that was there.

It really ties into the idea that ESPN is becoming less about reporting sports news and more about making sports news, with their handling of hockey just another sad example.

Ageless badass Chris Chelios has something to say to anyone who disses hockey.

*While not a sports blog, The Situationist does seem to be a pretty interesting read for those into “a forum for scholars, students, lawyers, policymakers, and interested citizens to examine, discuss, and debate the effect of situational forces – that is, non-salient factors around and within us – on law, policy, politics, policy theory, and our social, political, and economic institutions.” If you’re into that sorta thing. And apologies for liberally quoting so much of the column but it was very good and I couldn’t do it justice.

In a move that has surprised exactly no one who’s been paying any attention to NASCAR this year, Dale Earnhardt Jr. is leaving DEI, the company his father founded. This stems from an ownership fight with his stepmother, Theresa. In the words of my friend Leah who is a MUCH bigger NASCAR fan and follower than I:

What can you say? Theresa’s a bitch and it hurts DEI, not Junior

And there’s the biggest thing out of this. This move doesnt’ hurt Dale Jr. at all. He’s still the most popular name on the curcuit and will have no trouble landing a prime job on a great team. But without Jr. DEI will struggle even more. From some of the talk I heard on the radio last night there wouldn’t be much surprise if they even stopped fielding cars within the next few years and Theresa turned DEI into a purely entertaining oriented company aimed at milking Dale Earnhard Sr.’s legacy.

Another interesting tidbit I heard on the radio: one rumor going around is that Junior could end up at Richard Childress Racing (the team his father drove for before founding DEI) and that RCR might just roll out the old black #3 for Junior. Dale fans would go nuts over that - but in a good or a bad way?

… combine it with a demolition derby, of course! Seriously, how can you not absolutely love the Japanese after watching this.

Now to see hockey + tractor pulls or something. Link via the scum and villainy at With Leather.