Is it me or does it sometimes seem like we have an odd relationship with our heroes? We can celebrate their accomplishments and achievements but often it seems that we take the same glee in pointing out their very human flaws. I’m as guilty as anyone with regard to this, but I can’t seem to figure out where it comes from.

I’ve always been bad at doing the whole jaded thing. For instance, many times announcing for the IHRA we’d have horrific Top Fuel and Funny Car rounds where it seemed each car was just destined to wreck the track on every run. Wandering into the press room for a drink or snack during these times would result in listening to a group of people complain about or maybe even mock the efforts of the racers on the track. I never really got into it because frankly, I never took the fact that someone was paying me to be at the track for granted and without those racers out there I’d be out of a very fun job. Those guys didn’t seem to understand that, or they just didn’t care.

I managed to get right to the edge of becoming a jaded jerk when an encounter at a McDonald’s put me right. I happened to be eating with one of the other announcers after a marathon day at the track. It was somewhere around midnight and we were scarfing down some junk food before going to bed back at the hotel. We were BSing about the day and how it had just simply sucked due to explosions, oil downs, and so on. We were essentially feeling sorry for ourselves for having to have endured the torture of announcing a drag race. Woe is us, right? In the midst of the conversation a younger guy heard our voices and ran over with a group of people and said, “You’re the guys from the track!” We told him that we were and he shot back with, “You guys have the best job in the world.” To think I almost started off with, “Well, you know…,” still annoys me personally. I checked that thought and said, “You know what, you’re right.” He went bounding off with his friends and we laughed a little at the table. I’d rather him hit the message boards and type about meeting a couple nice guys in the middle of the night than a jerk.

We’re quick to tell stories about people who we see on television or at the movies that don’t live up to the persona we perceive them to have. Recently, it was Don Prudhomme who took it with both barrels on our forum section of the site. Several people commented on a news story he was quoted in regarding the departure of Larry Dixon from his team and how that made Prudhomme feel after such a long time of working together. He was called arrogant, “an ass,” and a host of other unflattering things. It’s not out of the question for the same people hurling those bricks to at another time praise Prudhomme for his days of wheeling the nearly unbeatable Greer-Black-Prudhomme dragster in the early ‘60s.

We all complain about the lack of passion and reality with regard to race car drivers and their interviews on television and with other media outlet sources, yet I’m not so sure we’d really like it if these guys were able to “unplug” and show their true selves all of the time. There’s something to be said for maintaining a public image, especially if it is on behalf of the people that pay for all the fun you are having: the sponsors.

The double-edged sword we create though is this split-personality situation where we’re just utterly shocked that our hero is not exactly as he portrays himself in the pits or at the top end of the track on camera. It was jarring for me personally to first cross that line and learn that these supermen who I had placed on pedestals actually put their drivers’ suits on one leg at a time.

I suppose it’s kind of a kick to have the inside view on a lot of this stuff and as I said before, I’m as guilty as anyone with regard to telling stories out of school. I need to get better at that because I should know better than to expect human beings to act as anything but human beings, warts and all.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think anyone ever does anything well enough to justify their acting like jerks, especially when that attitude is directed to their fans or admirers. I think that’s why people get so angry when their personal hero racing celebrity encounter goes South. You have something emotionally invested in them, but they don’t have that for you. It’s a scale with lots of weight on one end and none of the other that is very tough to balance.

I guess the point to all of this is that while it’s fine to hold these guys to higher standards of professional performance in their particular disciplines, whether they be driving, wrenching, or even commentating on the races, it’s hopeless to really believe they conduct themselves as those positive cliché dropping floating heads we see and know them as in the media.

I know I certainly have faults, so why wouldn’t they?