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Lincicome: NASCAR cheats its way to the top

Published February 17, 2007 at midnight

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It may be that NASCAR exposed a bunch of cheats before its greatest race because it was feeling left out.

I mean, all the great games do it. Baseball. Don't get me started. Again. Well, maybe just this. Sometime this spring Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa are going to appear in the same game.

In fact, checking my handy-dandy spring schedule, it could happen March 10 in Scottsdale, a reunion of the last remaining poster frauds for the steroid era, pending actual proof, of course.

Poor Sosa's corked bat is a mere crumb on the cheater's menu.

Football? Well, there was San Diego's Shawn Merriman accepting his reward at the Pro Bowl, the most prominent bustee of the NFL season, though the list is much longer than that.

Reggie Bush may yet take down USC, either then or now, for rules improprieties.

Hockey has penalties for cheating built into a box, expecting the worst and giving it a time limit.

Gonzaga just suspended a couple of its basketball players for mushrooms. The startling part of that sentence is not mushrooms but Gonzaga.

We may be a slow day away from another point-shaving scandal in basketball. These things seem to have a cycle.

The NBA is taking photo-ops in the home of the point spread, not to rattle that can again.

But speaking of cycles, Floyd Landis has announced that he will not defend the Tour de France yellow jersey, nor give it back, either. If bicycle racing did not have drug cheats it would have no image at all.

Italian soccer has fixed more results than wrestling.

On and on it goes, so that when news arrives that stock car racers have cheated before the Daytona 500, well, all you can think is, it's about time.

Not that you can understand the violation without an Idiot's Guide to Motor Cars, and not even then, but the numbers are impressive and the names are vaguely familiar.

Six crews found cheating, including Jeff Gordon and one of the Waltrips. Heretofore the biggest story going into another racing season was whether Dale Earnhardt Jr. was going to wrest his own and his father's name away from his stepmother.

Nothing like a little family squabble over stock car racing's greatest figurehead to grab a few headlines, but better yet, how about a little cheating scandal?

That shows stock car racers care just as much as Olympic sprinters, are just as dedicated as home run hitters, are as obsessed with winning as NFL linebackers.

NASCAR, you see, has been declining of late, in TV ratings, in attendance, in its general thrust out of the sticks and into the affections of civilization.

It was the fastest-growing sport since, well, since figure skating was born at the end of a poorly timed whack at Nancy Kerrigan's knee.

There was that most awful of accusations being thrown around, that stock car racing had plateaued, not that you would hear a word like plateau in a NASCAR pit unless it had something to do with shoes.

How did baseball win back its fans after its labor foolishness abolished the '94 World Series? Why, it juiced its players to hit home runs and boasted that chicks dig the long ball.

Football players must be bigger and faster and hit harder every year and if they get caught, why, just give them a month's vacation and still let them play in the Pro Bowl. Or if they are under house arrest, let them play in the Super Bowl.

Is NASCAR any less committed than soccer, where passions are so riled that games are played in empty stadiums for safety?

Stock car racing has a grand tradition of cheating, all sorts of chicanery, not that you would hear the word chicanery in a NASCAR pit unless it had something to do with coffee.

It does not matter exactly what they did, or even if we understand how holes in wheel wells make a car go faster. What we know is they are trying and working with what they have.

You just have to keep up. Nobody cheats in tennis any more, or maybe ever, and see what has become of that.

Golf? Without Tiger Woods it is just a parade of ciphers in shirts that don't fit.

No, the important thing is, we know NASCAR cares enough to cheat, just like real sports.