Commentary: The Chase is no excuse for childish behavior

Why is gasoline $3 a gallon? Why is a lasting peace in the Middle East so elusive? Why are Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes being so protective of their daughter, Suri?

Apparently, it’s all because of the Chase for the Nextel Cup.

It is an emerging consensus among NASCAR hand-wringers that many problems in the sport are directly related to the third-year championship format. Given NASCAR’s ever-broadening scope, the world therefore must be impacted, too.

The thinking goes that the pressures of the 10-race championship format and the 26-race competition that leads to it give drivers a perfectly good excuse for doing whatever it is they might want to do.

The good thing about how fast this excuse is catching on is it might give us poor old media guys a break. Until now, anytime a driver says something that winds up backfiring on him he’s gone to the “I was taken out of context” defense. Now, drivers might start using the “The Chase made me do it” to break things up.

Supposedly, the onus to make the Chase for the Cup is such that drivers have to knock the guy in front of them out of the way. They hate to do it, but who’s to say one position might not be the difference? With intensity so high, nobody can afford to show patience. If another driver bumps you or so much as crowds you, then he must be dealt with instantly.

This is all, of course, the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.

Nextel Cup is the deep end of the stock-car racing pool. It’s supposed to be hard.

Pressure? Someone once asked professional golfer Lee Trevino how he dealt with the pressure of having to make a putt to win a major championship and a prize of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Trevino laughed. “Pressure,” he said, “is playing for $10 when you don’t have a dime in your pocket.”

The pressure in Nextel Cup is to keep your job, because payday is very nice. Drivers, crew chiefs and team members deserve every dime they make, but the minute you cast a line in the Nextel Cup pond you have to realize you’re almost as likely to have the fish pull you in as you are to yank one out.

If you’re driving for a Cup team with sponsors pumping close to $20 million into the kitty, you’d better be racing hard, Chase or no Chase.

The six races between now and this year’s Chase cutoff at Richmond, Va., figure to be very interesting, because about 11 or 12 good teams look like they’re going to be fighting for eight spots. Then, the Chase format will significantly increase the chances for a competitive title fight.

But the Chase won’t be what causes drivers to run into each other, or act like children after they do.

The Chase won’t make people cut corners on the rules.

Neither will it force teams to hire and/or fire drivers and/or crew chiefs too soon and/or too late.

You know what causes all of that.

No, not the media.