Jeff Gordon Thinks Drivers And Poker Players Are Cut From Same Cloth
Because we haven’t had the “Is NASCAR a sport” discussion is a while. Wait a minute, yeah I did, I had it here. Shameless plug there.
So okay, we haven’t had the “are drivers athletes” conversation in a while. And Jeff Gordon just set all drivers back about 25 years. At a press conference prior to Bristol, Gordon had this response to the question, “are drivers athletes?”:
“Well yeah, we are. You see more and more guys training. As hot as these cars are inside the race car. Every athlete goes through a different type of physical and mental challenge in their sport and I think that there are some sports that I think the guys are more fit and in that sense you could say are better athletes. Poker in my opinion, those guys are athletes. To be able to do what they do for a week straight playing all those games on hours on end and all the focus they have to have, to me that’s an athlete. I think that they are just characterized in a lot of different ways. I definitely think that we are.
I’ve been a proponent of drivers as athletes for a long time, and I’m a very avid poker player. I’ve played cards for damn near 24 hours straight (sober, and otherwise), and I’ve also heard the stories about the great poker players who have played for days and weeks at a time. It’s a great game that takes incredible confidence and skill.
But they’re not athletes. Trust me, the last marathon that Chris Moneymaker was at was on the corner of Western Avenue.
And for Gordon to try to make his case by saying that drivers are athletes because poker players should be considered athletes too, makes my head feel like it, and not Gordon, is traveling 200 mph while making only left turns for three hours. If you want to be considered an athlete, you compare what you do to people that everyone considers athletes, not people who aren’t considered athletes by the majority of the world’s population. You don’t water down the term athlete, just so that you can be considered one. Instead, you try to prove to everyone that your sport and its competitors are the equals of any great athletes in the world.
You say something like, “what we do during a race is the equivalent of having a boxing match, while at the same time running the 400 meters, and all the while trying to concentrate enough to hit a fastball from inside a 100 degree piece of metal traveling at 200 mph.”
You don’t say, “what we do during a race is the same as playing cards in an air-conditioned room, with a full bar/buffet, with minimal movement, and occasionally having to lay down kings when up against aces.”
Come on, Jeffrey, you know better.
Just because Phil Hellmuth has as many sponsors as a race car, and is a bigger brat than Kyle Busch, that doesn’t mean he should be your yardstick for what should be considered a great athlete.
