Alan Truex: Roger Penske still the Captain, but otherwise Indy’s not what it was
LLANO, Texas — Growing up in Texas, home of A.J. Foyt, I considered Memorial Day weekend important for one thing: the Indianapolis 500, how it matched America’s most hell-bent open-wheel racer against the speed of Europe: Mario Andretti, Graham Hill and Jim Clark, the Scot who crashed to his death in Formula One racing at 32.
The Greatest Spectacle in Racing it was known then, when it was Olympian in global stature. It was equally mesmerizing when I viewed it in the 1980s and ‘90s from an open-air press box that hung out almost to the edge of the track.
Four-time Indy champ A.J. was no longer truly competitive then but was still a presence, a redneck when rednecks were cool. You never knew when he’d insult Eddie Cheever or punch out Arie Luyendyk (both winners of this most iconic of races) or burst into the press room and exclaim, “I coulda picked up a better crew at a Chevron station.”
By then A.J. was an anachronism, a one-man band who built and fixed his own engines in a sport taken over by vast multicar teams of specialists with walls of computers. No. 1 team is Roger Penske’s. He’s won Indy 17 times, most recently on Sunday with Will Power saving his ride. It was the first Indy victory for the Australian in his 11th try, and Capt. Penske was losing patience.
It was fitting that another Penske driver, Helio Castroneves, did NOT become the fourth driver to win a fourth BorgWarner Trophy. He’s a solid racer but not deserving linkage to Foyt, Big Al Unser and Rick Mears. Truth is, Indy hasn’t had a superstar driver since Emerson Fittipaldi won in 1993. Indy is now to automobile racing what MLS is to world soccer.
Aside from Penske’s amazing vigor at 81, the 500 has changed drastically for the worse. The spiral began in 1995, when Tony George, CEO of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, declared war on CART, which supplied the teams and cars for the race.
George succeeded in pushing CART into bankruptcy, and he kept the Speedway profitable with lucrative innovations, though the Brickyard 400 is not as lucrative as it was before everyone realized you can’t race stock cars on such low banking. For so many reasons George so enraged the industry’s leaders and fan base that the Indy 500 now gets lost in the Memorial crush.
I watched Sunday’s 102nd Indy but found it less than mesmerizing. Power ran steadily near the front, and the Penske crew timed his pit stops perfectly, so he could push hard when needed. Not much back and forth dogfighting, and more enthralling events before and after: NBA conference finals, Stanley Cup Final, European Champions League Final.
Baseball, only a third of the way through its season, was barely in the discussion. But then I noticed Justin Verlander, the Rembrandt of his time, painting in Yankee Stadium on Monday afternoon on ESPN. Can’t miss watching an artist like this that appears once a generation. And if ever there’s a worthy adversary for Verlander, it’s the eternal Yankees.
But it’s a soccer game — Champions League Final – that’s the world’s most watched annual sporting event. Saturday’s was a clash of athletic grace at its best and worst as Real Madrid won for the 13th time — third consecutive.
The world’s No. 1 soccer player, Cristiano Ronaldo, was not the best player on his team. That was Gareth Bale, the disgruntled Welsh substitute, who scored two goals to break a 1-1 tie and beat Liverpool 3-1.
Bale’s first goal was an astonishing overhead kick — his body totally horizontal — that darted into the top corner of the net.
I keep replaying that goal, wondering how it’s possible to levitate like that, and why I should watch any sport but futbol the way God meant it to be.
And then I saw the next soccer goal.
This was Bale with the insurance, a leisurely 35-yard kick that slipped through the cupped hands of goalkeeper Loris Karius. I wondered how many people in Kiev could have stopped that giant marshmallow. I wanted to advise my grandson Wyatt: Give up Little League Baseball. In ten years you can be a big-league goalkeeper and make $80,000 a week!
And that was not the ugliest goal Karius waved in during this one contest. He inadvertently tossed the ball in front of the foot of Madrid’s Karim Benzema, who booted it into the net for the first goal of the game and easiest of his life.
In the aftermath, Karius wept and bowed in supplication before the Liverpool delegation, a humiliated gladiator hoping to be spared execution. Some observers wondered if the 24-year-old German should be on suicide watch, such is the stress of big-league soccer. As Americans we have no idea.
So I don’t know what to make of this conundrum that is soccer: very few goals, about half of them beauties, half of them blunders. I do like the dynamic tension – that low hum of the stands while everyone waits for something to happen.
Like soccer, its much slower cousin, hockey is skimpy on the goals. In both sports goals are mysterious things but are well served by evolving technology. Hockey and soccer are more fun to watch as the visuals expand and sharpen. And there’s something to be said for pregame shows the Vegas Golden Knights put on. With Lil Jon, a rapping Vegas mainstay, performing outside.
The Stanley Cup Final is an unlikely pairing of a first-year upstart club with the overly seasoned Washington Capitals haunted by a tradition of postseason collapse. The Caps’ Alexander Ovechkin, 3-time MVP, had it right as the best-of-7 began: “Nobody believed in us and nobody believed in Vegas.”
There are lots of shams in Vegas, but the Golden Knights are shockingly honest. They’re all but invincible in their deafening home – 7-1 for the postseason after they outscrapped the Caps, 6-4 in Monday’s opener.
For several years hockey playoffs have been more telegenic than basketball’s, although Nielsen ratings still favor hoops by 2-1. Viewers are dismayed when so many NBA stars are limp from exhaustion or limping from injuries. We haven’t seen the best of Harden, Durant and Curry, three of the sport’s four supernovas. Omniscient as ever is King James, but even he’s had lapses.
LeBron and the Cleveland Cavaliers could have used All-Star power forward Kevin Love on Sunday night in the Boston Garden. But Jeff Green, five years recovered from open-heart surgery, filled in admirably for the concussed Love and popped in 19 points. LeBron did the rest, shot, passed, boarded and willed a team to the NBA Finals for the eighth consecutive year.
Meanwhile the Houston Rockets needed one win out of Games 6 and 7 against Golden State. But they couldn’t overcome the loss of Chris Paul, who’s their on-court leader, not the presumptive MVP Harden. Without CP3 the Rockets had no cohesion and faded out of the West, setting an NBA playoff record by missing 27 consecutive 3-pointers, and I thought that’s what they did best.
None of the Memorial events were close at the end except hockey, which was marred by blind justice. The Knights’ final goal came against an empty net with 2 seconds left, and their fourth, which tied the game, was undeserved; Ryan Reaves should have been in the penalty box for a cross-check that sent John Carlson sprawling at the goalmouth.
Props to King James and Master Verlander (5-1 winner, 6 2/3 innings), but nothing so great happened on Memorial weekend that makes me stop missing Indy the way it was.