Of Myths, Pineapples, and Wild Things

I turned thirty-two years old a little over a month ago. One of the things that has been constant since I could save things to my memories and process the world around me has been what my Saturdays and Sundays have been about: video games or racing, sometimes both at the same time. In those early days, my family was all about CART, NASCAR, and the NHRA all at their relative peaks in the late 1990s into the 2000s. At the time I was still too young to fully process the reality of some of the things that happened on track, but old enough to understand the legends and history that was being made in front of my eyes. I don't have any memories of watching local icon Greg Moore drive for Forsythe, and only have fleeting whispers of memories of watching the 2001 Daytona 500 and the Dura Lube 400 and Cracker Barrel Old Country Store 500 that would follow. But in those races and events that happened then and would continue to happen, legends and myths are being made in real time in front of our very eyes; it's just a matter of can we understand the weight of the moment in real time and how much that grows in the weeks, months, and years that follow.

In the world of social media and instant messaging en masse, it's hard to slow it all down. Instant reactions get clicks and sell, it's easy to yell a take into the breeze and cause a storm of activity regardless of if you asked for it, and hyperbole on either end will often dominate and leave nuance and real reflection to days down the road when the rest of the world has already moved on. Often in all this is that there has to be caveats and diminishing traits to achievements to downplay what we all collectively witnessed or to justify our discontent with a result that we didn't wanted. It's hard to sit on your hands and be fully consumed by the world you just watched on your screen now, and then you're put in a situation where you have to. You're told to sit, because the moments in time you've watched for most of your life cannot happen again; because the characters that made it possible are no longer here. And then you realize the truth that your past self sometimes struggled with accepting or rejected on principal; that you were watching legends and myths being created in real time and you took it all for granted because the modern internet is built on taking things for granted.

That creation of legends and myths fully hit home for me with the passing of two of the greatest racing drivers I had the pleasure to watch in my youth and as an adult: being Alex "The Pineapple" Zanardi's death at the star of May and the sudden, shocking death of Kyle "Rowdy" Busch on May 21st.

That legend and mythology was something I was fully aware and understanding of with the driver they called "The Pineapple" because of the flamboyant flair he often drove with in his open wheel career. It was after that part of his career that we saw the legend and the myth grow; and nobody ever took it for granted, because Alex didn't either. Alex Zanardi got a free 25 years on the house after surviving a statistical impossibility that was his crash at the Lausitzring in 2001. In a million different lifetimes, that would have been it; but not this one. In this life, he came back. Alex came back to the Lausitzring and drove the last thirteen laps of that race. It truly felt like the entire racing world watched, as did I on rerun after missing it live on SPEED that Sunday morning.

In this life, he kept racing in a automobile and now a handcycle. That fire he had when he was one of the best racing drivers in the world never went away, but it had to change to fit the new reality of his life with his legs being amputated because of the crash. He started winning marathons with either a handcycle or in a wheelchair, became a Paralympic gold medalist in 2012 and 2016 while becoming a world champion para-cyclist and never let that new reality change him away from being a racer through and through. He won races in the World Touring Car Championship and gave Roberto Ravaglia his first wins as a team owner. BMW kept supporting him throughout the second half of his racing career: providing him with a guest entry with the DTM at Misano in 2018 before being a part of the Super GT x DTM Dream Race. Every time he was behind the wheel, either powered by internal combustion or by his own body and mind, it was a celebration of the fact that he was still here and able to share his incredible gift with those of us in the stands. He could have lived a quiet life and nobody would have blamed him, but he didn't.

Every time he would race again, it was a headline for a reason. The story and myth of Alex Zanardi was growing, and was embraced by everyone. Often when we look back at someone who passed on it's talked about how irreplaceable they were, how there will never be another person like them. There will truly never be another Alex Zanardi in the way he drove and carried himself in life, in a death that wasn't, and in life again. We already talked of him in the highest regard, but I can only imagine how tall the myth of "The Pineapple" or "The Doughnut King" will grow in the passing years and decades when we're already thirty years removed from him pulling off one of the greatest passes racing will ever see.

And such an adventure and journey that I was fully grateful to see and witness with my own eyes.

But for Kyle Busch, lovingly called "Wild Thing" by Fox lead broadcaster Mike Joy, he was a driver that I fully took for granted when I came back into watching NASCAR when I got a little older. Kyle was at his peak when I was at my most snarky in terms of my opinions about racing, no doubt a reflection of how I consumed social media and my newfound interest in professional wrestling born from the perspective of smarks I followed online.

This was the Kyle that was winning on any given Friday, Saturday, or Sunday driving his own car or for Joe Gibbs Racing. This was the Kyle that was years removed from wrecking Dale Earnhardt Jr. at Richmond Raceway and remained the biggest villain and main character the sport had seen in decades. This was the Kyle I took for granted; the Kyle that was a once in a generation talent behind the wheel of a stock car but could never get myself to look on in awe. I wasn't able to let it go and get beyond the criticism of him dominating in the Trucks or Grand National Series while being the best in Cup, and accept the reality of what I was actually watching. "Rowdy" was badass behind the wheel, and truly believed in that conviction in all of his 234 wins within those three national touring series.

It was that reality of what he did that finally came into perspective for me in his sudden passing. We will never see anyone do what he was able achieve on track ever again, and in the manner that he did it. Drivers in the twilight of their career always know that, and it's just a matter of the rest of us to realize what they know: that nothing is meant to last forever, except for the history and myths created along the way. The tragedy was that the myth and the legend of Kyle Busch wasn't meant to end here, but keep going to where he would be able to race his son Brexton in a NASCAR national touring series one day. There is multiple chapters of the myth of Kyle Busch left unwritten in the way that perhaps he had hoped, but it means there will be new, different chapters written instead that will still grow the myth and legacy. One part of that legend was a driver he helped bring to America in Daniel Suarez winning the first Cup Series race since his passing.

To think now is the time I finally feel grateful for what I did watch and he did achieve, while I could never accept that in the way that I should have in the decades he was a part of my life.

The one thing that will remain undefeated through all of this, is time. It is always a matter of what we do with the time that we're given in this mortal coil, and how we view what other people do with theirs. It's all able to change in the blink of an eye, but the truth of what we were all able to do with that time can and will come to the fore given the chance. To finally slow things down, take stock of the truth, and realize what we all collectively witnessed and experience in the best way is a part of mourning of the dead, and to be grateful for what they did.

And I choose to mourn the passing of Alex Zanardi and Kyle Busch by being grateful that I, and many others around the world, were able to watch legends of the sport be created in real time. It just took time to realize what I was fully seeing, a realization I was happy to finally be able to have.