Jeff Olson, who is far more “homer” than “Homer,” has trotted out his imaginary alter-ego “Skidmark” again. For those who have the good sense not to follow Jeff’s alleged writings over at SPEED, “Skidmark” is a fictional friend of Jeff’s who is a 300-pound walking (and gloating) NASCAR caricature that Olson uses anytime he needs to defend IndyCars against legitimate criticism. The idea, of course, being that anyone that criticizes IndyCar must be a fat, Wal-Mart-lovin’, brain-cell hemorrhaging, ass-crack showing doofus who watches stock car racing.
This conceit is as heavy-handed, unsubtle, and devoid of any real writing skill as… well, just about anything else Olson writes. It could even be classified as funny (although not as biting satire - more like the kind of entertainment one gets from listening to someone like Brick Tamland) if it weren’t for the fact that it is so transparent and, most times, so offensively one-dimensional. It’s a weak-sister stereotype erected to make Olson’s weak rationalizations look stronger in the comparison.
The reason I even reference the latest episode of “The Jeff Olson Multiple Personality Variety Hour,” however, has little to do with his ongoing NASCAR put-downs. It has everything to do, in fact, with a throwaway line in his “dialogue” with himself about the new IRL TV deal in which he asks himself - er, “Skidmark” - the following question:
“What has ESPN ever done for racing?”
Few lines have ever done more to illustrate the limited scope of Olson’s motorsports vision than this. Anyone who knows anything about racing in America knows exactly what ESPN has done for American motorsports.
It was ESPN, a fledgling cable network looking for a hook upon which to hang its hat and get itself shoehorned into the national consciousness, that picked auto racing as its marquee sport that it would broadcast live, start-to-finish. Only a couple of years previously, CBS had made a big splash with the first live flag-to-flag coverage of the Daytona 500 - in contrast, the Indy 500 was still being broadcast on tape delay and cut down to fit a broadcast block. ESPN, bereft of the bigger sports that were the exclusive domain of the big three networks, decided to broadcast the balance of the NASCAR Winston Cup schedule and do it all live.
That sounds pretty tame in this day of information overload, but back in the early 1980s this was unprecedented. But more amazingly, it worked. ESPN’s coverage won awards, and stock car racing started looking less like Six Pack or Stroker Ace and more like… well, a legitimate sport. The trickle-down effect also landed CART live coverage of their events on ESPN and made “live flag-to-flag coverage” the standard, not the exception, to the motorsports broadcast rule.
Today’s ESPN may be a lazy, bland, uninspired version of the multi-Emmy-winning ancestor of nearly thirty years ago, but if it weren’t for ESPN Jeff Olson would be commenting on races based on AP wire stories and hacked up highlight summaries on “Wide World of Sports.”
Now, if Olson were smart enough, he’d have used ESPN as a justification for the IRL’s new deal with VERSUS… maybe drawing a parallel or two to show the promise of the VERSUS deal instead of the limitations that most folks are bringing to light at the moment. But one thing that I’d never attribute to Jeff Olson’s commentary is keen insight, and thankfully Olson backed me up by totally steamrollering past that point.
I occasionally daydream that at some point Olson will meet up with a real “Skidmark” who will rearrange his dental work, but that kind of walking stereotype is becoming as much of an endangered species as… well… racing commentators with keen insight.
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