NASCAR, Hollywood stars and a party to remember in New York City
December 4, 2005
I just flew in from New York, and finally have a chance to share with you highlights from banquet week.
Drivers said crowds were much bigger everywhere they went. Tony Stewart seemed surprised to be recognized in Central Park, especially considering he was wearing a suit. "My parents wouldn't even recognize me in a suit," he said. I don't think he was kidding.
The whole parade Wednesday through Manhattan might have looked innocuous on The Today Show. But the drivers behaved about how you would expect them to. The cars ran for just a few seconds before the crowd urged drivers to rev it up, which of course they did ad nauseam, and the noise echoed off the skyscrapers. "We rattled the city," Jeremy Mayfield said. The route was only a mile or two, but the tires spun enough to cover 10 miles.
Ryan Newman became a running reference point after he turned a doughnut after overdoing a fishtail taking a corner. Instead of "one time, at band camp ..." this was "one time, at the corner of 42nd Street and Madison Avenue ..." It became such a memorable moment that Brian France mentioned it in his "State of the Sport" address and Newman highlighted it in his banquet speech. I heard rumblings that the New York City police were not thrilled with the drivers, which threw NASCAR into damage control mode.
Someone needs to tell the NYPD the story about the frog giving the scorpion a ride across a river. If you put 10 racecar drivers in high-powered cars and say, "go slowly and don't screw around," you might get one or the other, but there's no way you'll get both.
The most intriguing event of the week was a party held at a beautiful-people club called the Marquee. I don't want to sound like I have hay falling out of my pockets, but my wife and I were excited to hobnob at a place cool enough to be featured in the New York Times and be visited by Paris Hilton, Leonardo DiCaprio and other huge NASCAR fans.
Most of the top 10 drivers made at least an appearance. Ten minutes before Jimmie Johnson arrived, VIP couches were cleared for him and his entourage, which included an unshaven Brian Vickers.
Matt Kenseth sat on a couch, looking like he was having as much fun as you would expect a quiet man from Wisconsin to have at a New York City hot spot.
It was fun, I suppose, if you think standing shoulder-to-shoulder and hip-to-hip with 998 people you don't know is fun. It was fun in an "I write about NASCAR, what in the world am I doing here?" kind of way. A totally unverifiable statistic I heard is that the club was supposed to welcome 350 guests and by midnight 1,000 people crowded inside. Conversation was impossible. So we stayed for only a couple of hours. Strangely enough, when we got back to the hotel, we turned on ESPN Hollywood and saw a news brief about the party we had just left. The report said Will Ferrell and Luke Wilson would attend; we didn't see them there, neither did anybody else I asked. Then again, my parents could have been there and I would have missed them, it was so crowded.
The next day, the scuttlebutt was that we left too early, that the party turned, um, interesting as the adult beverages flowed. Comedian Chris Tucker and
actor Bruce Willis showed up. One driver played bartender. I would share details with you, but you know the old saying: What happens at banquet week, stays at banquet week.
At the banquet, the security was unbelievably strict. I walked in to the Waldorf-Astoria coat checkroom behind Joe Gibbs, and security would not let him in without his pass. Joe Freaking Gibbs. Only the owner of the team being honored at the banquet, only one of the most revered men in two different sports and an icon in both the NFL and NASCAR. It was not until that moment that I abandoned plans to sneak my wife in.
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