The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com 0 0 DAILY SPORTS BREAKS DOWN THE WEEKEND THAT WAS 2B - Monday, March 5, 2007 SAID AND HEARD "Slipups like we had at the end of (Saturday) cost us the season." - Michigan center COURTNEY SIMS on the team's 65- 61 loss to No.1 Ohio State last weekend. The Wolverines held a six-point lead with four minutes remaining, but failed to score the rest of the way. ATHLETE OF THE WEEK ERIN WEBSTER WOMEN'S TRACK AND FIELD The senior won the 3,000- and 5,000-meter runs during the Big Ten Indoor Champion- ships, and Michigan placed second in the team standings. The All-American is just the second Wolverine in history to claim both events. Is your life STRUCTURED? If so, you can help us. Join the team at The Michigan Daily by becoming the Ad Layout Manager. Layout the ads for all Daily papers, including the Classifieds. Determine the size and shape of each paper we publish! Work behind the scenes of a student-run college newspaper! Without you, the paper wouldn't exist! Availability between 1 & 3 pm, M-F is highly recommended. Ability to work with computers and a strong sense of order is a must! E-mail Brittany at brimaroc@umich.edu Filling my Sunday void a At the end of January, I relinquished my role as managing sports editor of the Daily. This added something to my schedule that they tell me is called ' "free time." Unfamil- iar with this concept of a wide-open Sunday, I quickly set about filling it up. Wake J up, read the JACK newspaper, HERMAN shower, Daily, eat lunch and then what? In the fall, football would make this decision easy. Now, I needed help. Feb. 18, I got it. The Daytona 500 was on, and I couldn't let the chance to watch America's biggest race (and to stop studying business statistics) pass me by. In one of the closest finishes ever at the Daytona 500, Kevin Harvick passed Mark Martin on the final lap and beat him to the finish line by .02 seconds. The end- ing prevented Martin, one of the sport's most respected racers, from winning his first Daytona 500 and capped off a crazy day of racing that amazed even the veterans. "I've seen a lot of these Daytona 500s, and this has to be the wildest Daytona 500 I've ever watched," said Richard Childress, Harvick's team owner.. I'm willing to defer to the man who drove in the race from 1970 to 1981 and has owned one of the sport's most successful teams ever since. Suddenly intrigued by Amer- ica's second-most popular sport, I started researching like any Northeasterner with no knowl- edge of it might do; I read Tom Wolfe's famous piece about the whisky-runnin'-bootleg-turnin' rebel turned Nascar-drivin'-hard- chargin' rebel Junior Johnson, followed coverage in the New York Times, and joined a fantasy league. I could not, however, find a sponsor (Just imagine the Sports- Monday Column brought to you by your company here). I then listened to the com- plaints. My 14-year-old brother, for instance, devised the oh-so-clever argument that the sport is essen- tially cars making left turn after left turn after left turn for four hours. But I also like watching middle-aged men use metal sticks to smack a tiny white ball around a field, so the idea of roaring engines and blazing speeds is actually quite exciting. And exclamations like, "Tires are smoking, sheet metal is dragging and they're still racing with six laps left," as one announcer proclaimed during the Daytona 500, sure help spice things up. Others told me to disregard the sportbecause of its lack of sophis- tication ("Talladega Nights" cer- tainly didn't help this perception). But; if you've ever looked inside one of the cars you'd find they're more complex than Dr. Brown's Delorean, as the sport has evolved since its days of un-modified cars racing around dirt tracks. One charge I did accept was about the drivers' rebel mentality. In baseball, cheating prompts Con- gressional hearings. In Nascar, it's said that "If you ain't cheatin', you ain't trying." I certainly don't con- done those actions (and neither do racing officials, as they penalized a number of drivers before Day- tona), but the attitude is somewhat refreshing in a time when people take sports a little too seriously. It's also the attitude that helps endear the sport to its millions of fans. It's fun watching these guys speed around Daytona Interna- tional knowing they'd be just as comfortable - and competitive - driving around the figure-8 track at Bob's Go-Kart World. Some might be in it for the money, but salaries are more pro- tected than the names of under- cover CIA agents (um, on second thought, so is the money hidden beneath my mattress). This lack of any quantifiable numbers - stats like Kobe Bryant making $3121.94 per minute played - allows the stars to maintain their status as beer-guzzling, blue-collar, local diner-eating kind of guys. This is not to say Nascar is all fun and gear-shifting. There are some serious problems witn tne sport. Allowing the best drivers to participate in Busch Series events on Saturday would be the equivalent of letting major league baseball players moonlight in the minors, and Al Gore likely won't be handing out any environmen- tal awards to the sport anytime soon. But if you can overlook these quirks, you'll have a sport worth watching. I'll update you during the sea- son, through our blog on Michi- gandaily.com or in columns, at least until my editor yells at me for writing too much about NASCAR (That might be after he reads the first line of this one). But until then, I won't worry about that little thing called free time. - Herman can be reached at jaherman@umich.edu. _________________________i_______ I I Start your own business right here on campus! Randal Pinkett shows you how. A great book with a timely message. Our education system produces employees-that's why Campus CEO will create more millionaires! -Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad Randal's book is based on experience, and I would recommend it to anyone in school or out of school. He knows the ropes on both sides- and he's a great guy! -Donald J. Trump Learn more about Randal and Campus CEO at www.campusceo.com. You'll find out where Randal will be signing books on campuses across the country, and see who Randal selected as the winner of the Most Promising Campus CEO Contest! I(A P LA N PUBLISHING kaplanpublishing.com I