A celebration ... or choreography?

So now we’re hearing from some Dale Earnhardt Jr. fans who believe NASCAR should have allowed the team to put gas in the car following his victory in the LifeLock 400 at Michigan so Earnhardt Jr. could have done a post-race burnout.

Supposedly, these folks feel cheated in some way that they didn’t get to see Earnhardt Jr. smoke the tires or do some other form of victory celebration.

Good grief.

When I first heard about this I thought people were kidding me. The race was over and Earnhardt Jr. made his last load of fuel last to end a 76-race winless streak and some of his fans feel deprived that they didn’t get to see a burnout?

Look, I am not a fuddy-duddy about postrace celebrations. Some people don’t like them at all, the way they don’t like hitters who pose after hitting a home run or a wide receiver choreographing a post-touchdown dance.

I am in favor of any expression of elation after athletic success as long as that expression is genuine and spontaneous. I love to see people react. I am not nearly as big of a fan of seeing them perform, however.

When some kind of celebration turns into your “trademark” it doesn’t bother me either as long as it doesn’t come off as contrived. Every time Tiger Woods does a fist pump, for instance, you get the feeling that it comes from real excitement or emotion. If he stopped and put on a glove with a Nike swoosh before doing them, that’d be too much.

Carl Edwards does backflips off his car after he wins. He’s giving his fans what they want, and there’s something to be said for that. But wouldn’t the backflip, or Tony Stewart’s fence climb, mean more if it only happened when those guys REALLY got pumped up.

Stewart first climbed the fence after a win because he hadn’t won in a while and was elated that he did.

When he won at Indianapolis, finally, what he wanted to do was drive over to where his family and friends were in Turn 2 and celebrate with them. So he did. When he got back to the start-finish line, though, people wanted him to climb the fence. By that time, the joy and adrenaline were gone and what he wound up doing looked perfunctory. Perfunctory is dull.

If Edwards is going to do a backflip when he wins a Nationwide race at Milwaukee, what would he do if he won the Daytona 500 or the championship? Does he have to do a double flip, or add a twist to show he is exceptionally happy?

The late Alan Kulwicki is known for his backward victory lap, what he called the Polish Victory Lap. He didn’t do that every time he won, though. He did it after his first win and nobody knew what he was up to. It was very cool, but NASCAR flipped out. As soon as the race ended before that, cars and people started moving at race tracks to start the egress process. Kulwicki was actually going against the flow of that and it caused some anxious moments.

NASCAR asked Kulwicki not to do it again. He agreed, but added that if he won a Daytona 500 or the championship that’d be a different story. So when he clinched the 1992 title in the Hooters 500 at Atlanta, he did the backward lap again and that made it special and memorable.

Television already messes up a winner’s normal reaction. The race winner drives to victory lane and sits there until TV gets back from commercial. The winner gets a cue to climb out and then a celebration ensues. It often comes off awkwardly.

NASCAR should not be making rules telling drivers how they can and can’t celebrate. That’s the last thing I want. But the next to last thing we need is some kind of “accepted” level of postrace frivolity that would mean a driver’s team needs to refuel his car so he could meet some expected level of celebration.

When a driver wins for the first time, or when he wins for the first time in a long time, or when he wins for the ninth straight week, that driver should react in accordance with his emotions at that moment. It needs to be a reflection of that driver’s personality and his emotions.
In other words, it needs to be real.