Dec. 19, 2007 - Good Times?

Every sport has its problems these days, but auto racing has reason to celebrate this holiday season.

Yes, there are empty seats by the thousands in NASCAR’s California races — something I consider a sort of karmic payback for forsaking North Wilkesboro, Rockingham and Darlington.

Faced with rising operating costs and flagging attendance, the sports grassroots tracks are struggling to survive.

NASCAR and the NHRA have had to brace and recover from the losses of patriarchs Bill France, Jr. and Wally Parks this past year.

Yes, Champ Car is in trouble with a lack of sponsors and a liquid schedule every year. We wonder how much farther the series’s deep-pocketed owners are prepared to go to keep it afloat.

And the IndyCar Series can’t seem to keep any of its stars from defecting to NASCAR.

Then, there was the “spy-gate” scandal in Formula One, which cost McLaren something like $100 million, but I’m not sure anyone was appalled.

At least not like Major League Baseball fans, who have watched an entire era being defined by steroids. A generation of fans is being left with concrete knowledge that the latest to walk among baseball’s gods have turned the game’s most hallowed records into a sham.

None of racing’s biggest stars have been arrested and subsequently incarcerated for dog fighting — heinous enough in and of itself — and related crimes, which include but are not limited to racketeering.

This past year has been sad in the realm of sports, which I considered “life’s toy department” during my younger days as a sports writer. In 2007, the sports landscape was a little too gloomy and filled with enough lawyers and subpoenas to make F.A.O. Schwartz look like an episode of “Law & Order.”

Auto racing has taken a couple of punches, but avoided the big black eye.

In 2007, that’s reason enough to celebrate.

Happy Holidays.

Dec. 12, 2007 - 'Schumi's' Latest Ride

So, you’re a cab driver in a little Bavarian town called Coburg. And you’re expecting the usual day with the usual fares. And then Michael Schumacher shows up with his family to pick up an Australian Shepherd dog named Ed.

After picking up Ed, The Schumachers and Ed are running late for their return flight and the seven-time F-1 World Champion asks to get behind the wheel.

This is no longer an ordinary day in the town of 45,000 or so, not if you’re a taxi driver named Tuncer Yilmaz.

“I found myself a passenger, which was strange enough, but having 'Schumi' behind the wheel was incredible,” said Yilmaz. “He drove at full throttle around the corners and overtook in some unbelievable places.”

This, of course, begs several relevant questions:

• Schumacher flies commercial?

• A taxi instead of a limo?

• Why can’t drivers be “overtook” as such in Formula One, where passing seems, well, passé and parade laps are all the rage?

• Really, Ed?

But the most interesting question seems to be about Schumacher, who has repeatedly said that he is retired from the sport for good. Yet he continues to make news. Testing for Ferrari a few weeks ago at Barcelona, Schumacher was the fastest for both days over the likes of Lewis Hamilton and most of the current F-1 roster.

And now he’s turning a taxi into a saloon car on the streets of Coburg.

No matter what he says, it sure seems as if Schumacher still has the itch to race, doesn’t it?

Dec. 5 — Evel Knievel: One Of A Kind

It probably wasn’t the way Evel Knievel wanted to go out – quietly in Florida before the ambulance arrived. Maybe it’s not even the way he should’ve gone out, but he’s gone and the world is less an individual in the truest sense of the word.

Sure, there are daredevils these days — most of them are kids with skateboards, all alike with matching baggy pants and tattoos. We call them idiots.

It’s hard for that generation to understand, but Knievel wasn’t called an idiot. He was on the Wide World of Sports. When he revved that bike, the world watched and we held our breath. When he tried to jump a canyon with a rocket-propelled motorcycle after tests had failed and pointed toward certain death, we thought, maybe, just maybe he could make it because he was Evel Knievel.

He was part Elvis and part Ali. There was a swagger that came with the motorcycle that didn’t go away even after the bones were shattered, and he limped from the public view.

He was Evel Knievel. He was a badass.

And he was probably the leading cause of broken bones among boys of my generation. We had the toy action figures and motorcycles that could make jumps over the Hot Wheels cars after you pulled the zip cord. We built ramps and made jumps on our bikes that certainly defied our parents, if not death.

We know now that he lived hard and partied hard and maybe wasn’t always the husband or father he should have been.

But pardon me if I’m a little sadder since his passing — not because I knew him or because he was the hero of lots of little boys who are now 40-something and still, somewhere inside, that little boy.

It’s just because I know now that the world — with all its political correctness and arrogant uniformity — will never see the likes of Evel Knievel again.