If only Tony Stewart had not been hauling all the baggage of a rough and tumble career in his sprint car two nights ago when he struck and killed young Kevin Ward Jr.
If only he hadn’t spent so much of his time trying to be the baddest man on the track, courting all those fines from NASCAR, swapping paint with so many of his contemporaries, being such a horse’s rear quarter panel .
Then, perhaps, there would be somewhat less public debate about what led to the fatal incident on a small dirt track in the Finger Lakes region of New York.
Otherwise, without Stewart’s reputation for hot-headedness, all you would have left is Ward’s horrible decision to leave his wrecked car and dodge traffic in an attempt to confront Stewart. On a dark track, wearing a black fire suit, Ward was not exactly a reflective stop sign out there. And pedestrian vs. car is a mismatch every time.
One life is lost and one high octane racing career is unhinged — and the troubling hows and whys remain unsettled.
Regardless of where the legal system takes this episode — and initially authorities said there was no evidence to support a criminal charge — Stewart will never be able to totally shake the idea that, somehow, his temperamental recklessness came into play.
You spend your life getting into so many well-documented dust-ups — tangling with Jeff Gordon, standing on pit row to throw a helmet at Matt Kenseth’s car, turning the 2006 Daytona 500 into a personal vendetta against several drivers, punching a photographer in the 2002 Brickyard 400 — and your character provides no easy amnesty.
Some of the very volatility that made Stewart so popular with a segment of the NASCAR audience can be used against him now.
The fact that a three-time champion in NASCAR’s grandest circuit was racing on a little dirt track in New York, racing for the rush of it rather than the cash, is another quality that appealed to his fans. Yet that, too, was totally ill-conceived (he suffered a fractured leg last year during a similar race in Iowa).
All that can be known with any certainty at this point is this: That among the best drivers in the world, only Tony Stewart could have been in the middle of an incident such as this.
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