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05/29/2007: "Happy, Soggy Ending"
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I spent the weekend offshore, so I was blissfully unaware of what happened in sports this weekend. That is, with the single exception of the Indy 500.
For a decade now, Tony George has done his damnedest to screw up the ultimate good thing, and sometimes it seems he's getting close. But then the race steps up and provides us with a feel-good story like this one - the ultimate victory of the tortoise over the hare ... the smart over the fast.
Dario Franchitti is one of IndyCar racing's good guys. Best known as the Scotsman with the Italian name, he's one of the few drivers left who can say they won a CART race. It doesn't matter what team he's on - he won't be the star, but he'll turn in solid performance after solid performance. He's overshadowed on his current team by high profile teammates like Marco Andretti and Danica Patrick, and doesn't say a thing. Hell, he's even overshadowed in his own home - his wife is actress Ashley Judd. He's not a guy you'll bet on, but you won't bet against him, either.
Fate smiled on Dario Sunday as the teams jockeyed for position in a race everyone knew would be shortened by rain. When the first squalls hit the track, the Andretti-Green team cars were perfectly placed in first, second, third and fifth place. Unfortuntely for Dario, he was the one in fifth, and it looked like that would be his final position for the race. But the skies cleared late and the track was dried enough to get the cars out for another hour. With another rainstorm - and darkness - quickly approaching, the leaders made a final pitstop, leaving Dario out front. When the rain came two laps later, he was the unlikely winner - or was once he paddled his car softly across a soggy finish line.
While it was a great tactical victory for a guy who really deserved it, even in victory Dario was upstaged by the sight of his wife Ashley running barefoot down pit lane, soaked to the skin and sprinting to a makeshift indoor Victory Lane. Look closely at the picture of her sitting lovingly on the sidepod of Dario's winning racer - if that's not a look of love, I don't know what it is!
Well done, Dario! You'll look good up there on the Borg Warner Trophy with your idol Jim Clark ... 
UPDATE: I'm not one to watch talk shows, but I had seen a promo that said Ashley Judd would be on the Ellen DeGeneris show this afternoon, so I tuned in. As is typical for most talk shows, they are filmed a couple of days in advance, but they pretend it's actually the day the show will air. So naturally, Ellen asked Ashley how her race weekend went, even though the show was filmed late last week. It was very funny to see Ashley talk about how busy her weekend was and hear her describe what she assumed would a typical race weekend - never in a million years imagining that her husband would actually win the race and make it the most atypical of experiences ... 
