Is “The Shrub” the next Intimidator? Uh, no.

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A lot of people have been asking me what I think about Kyle Busch.

The buzz he’s been getting lately - and believe me, there’s plenty of it thanks to the new NASCAR mandate to woo back old-school fans and ramp up the animosity in their vanilla sport - certainly leads a lot of folks to believe that Busch is the second coming of Dale Earnhardt.

The biggest reason for this is that NASCAR needs another Dale Earnhardt, and so far his son is too commonsensical, possesses too much equanimity, and drives way too fairly on the racetrack to oblige. Busch, on the other hand, combines a brittle and outspoken public personality, a voracious appetite for attention (especially the bad kind), and an admittedly exceptional skill set behind the wheel - all elements from the legend of the Intimidator that any NASCAR publicist would recognize.

But you have to dig deeper to get the real answer, and the answer is that Busch is nowhere near being another Dale Earnhardt… simply because there’s no way to replicate ol’ Ironhead.

Earnhardt was an original. He went from being a dirt-poor son of an itinerant short-tracker with a couple of failed marriages and estranged kids to the richest man in the sport and the redneck racin’ fan’s version of Elvis Presley. He wasn’t brittle, he was taciturn. He had exceptional car control and a spooky feel for the physics of racing that he himself would be hard-pressed to put into words. He was aggressive on the track, but he could take it as well as he could give it because that was the way he learned the trade. Like a pro hockey player, he figured that whining was for pussies and that if you weren’t willing to get hurt, get spun, or get roughed up then you should probably go do something besides race. Race fans either loved him unconditionally or hated him unconditionally, but most fans acknowledged regardless that he was the ultimate blue-collar superstar - no matter how rich he got, he was still the chicken-farming, hunting-and-fishing regular guy that appealed to the core NASCAR fan.

Kyle Busch resembles Earnhardt only because he has a boatload of driving talent and because he’s the appointed “black hat” wearer for the sport. In just about every other respect, Busch couldn’t hold Earnhardt’s jock. Busch is peevish like Earnhardt could be, but not for the same reasons - Busch’s peevishness stems from a sense of violated entitlement, like a spoiled rich kid who gets shorted a few dollars of his allowance. Earnhardt earned the right to be a voice people listened to in the garage and in the NASCAR offices; Busch assumes that right even though he has done nothing to qualify for it. But most importantly, Earnhardt never ever taunted or looked down on the fans - not even the ones who booed him. He ignored them, sure. He laughed at the derision, absolutely. But he never mocked, never looked down his nose at the people who hated him.

That’s why it rubs me the wrong way for the FOX hype machine to even bring Busch within Earnhardt’s zip code… because Busch is a spoiled, preening, self-important kid who assumes an entitlement that is too big for his narrow, weasel-like shoulders. It’s an entitlement that Earnhardt spent over twenty years to earn and one that he had to seal with his own death.

Racing these days is an arena where people are desperate to manufacturer new idols to replace old ones. What people forget is that the old idols earned their status over years, even decades, and they did it by what they did on the track and not what the press or publicists told people they did. This new assembly-line style of making heroes is cheap, chintzy, and lacks any sort of permanence. Busch is a temporary hero and a guy about whom the next generation of racing fans will inquire, “Which one was he again?”

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Tags: Dale Earnhardt, Fox Sports, Kyle Busch