Colin Cowherd tries to blame "Southern culture" for something done by Yankees in New York? Fuck him

I got this via Ace, who got it from The Federalist. I plan to link a whole lot more because, a couple days ago when this happened, I really didn't feel moved to comment. Now, I do. OK, from Saturday, these are the basics:

Tony Stewart hit and killed driver Kevin Ward Jr., who walked toward Stewart's sprint car Saturday night after the two had an altercation at Canandaigua (N.Y.) Motorsports Park, according to authorities, witnesses and video of the tragedy.

Canandaigua is a dirt track. For those of you who don't know, Tony Stewart is a NASCAR star who likes to race on the local tracks the night before a NASCAR race. It is considered a big deal by the local tracks, who get record gates when Steward does this. Not all of them are dirt tracks, like Canandaigua, but they are short tracks. Stewart likes running on them. I don't know why.

Apparently, (I'm not going to link these details, because I am pretty sure every other story I link here contains them) Stewart and Ward, who was a local dirt-track racer (read: amateur, doing this for fun and sometimes a couple bucks) bumped while jockeying for position. This is called trading paint. It happens in every single auto race ever. Period. In this case, it sent Ward spinning into the wall, out of the race. Stewart drove on.

Ward, unhappy with the turn of events, got out of his car and walked out on the track -- violating, by the way, every rule of racing, which all tell you, never get out of a wrecked car unless it is on fire, and even then, stay off the track. Those cars are hauling ass and can't avoid you. Nonetheless, when Stewart's car came back around, Ward walked toward it, pointing his finger at Stewart and maybe yelling at him, who knows. He got hit. He died. There is video. I decline to link to it, because it is horrific and adds nothing.

Tony Stewart quit the race and withdrew from the next day's NASCAR race. He is cooperating with authorities, and there is no indication it was anything but an accident. A guy wearing black walking across the track, actually moving toward an oncoming car, at night, gets hit. No shit. I feel for his family, but this was practically suicide.

Which brings us to the point of this post. People don't think about liberal bias when thinking about the sports media, but they ought to. Face it, why should they be less liberal than their "news" counterparts? Brent Fuckberger -- sorry, Musberger -- and his anti-gun and anti-Redskins rants? The only reason there is any media pressure for the Redskins to change their name is the national sports media. Nobody else, outside a few liberal activists, cares at all.

One of the best-positioned witnesses to the even says Stewart did everything he could to avoid the accident:

“From what I saw, Tony did everything in his power to turn down away from Kevin to avoid him,” sprint car driver Cory Sparks told Rochester.twc.news.com.Sparks was a few cars behind Stewart on the racetrack but had a clear field of vision of what occurred, and said that videos that have been made public do not tell the whole story.
“People say that they heard the engine rev up and he gassed it,” Sparks said of Stewart. “In a sprint car, the only way to steer is you steer with the rear wheels as much as you do the steering wheel. In my opinion, what he did was he (Stewart) gassed it to turn down away from him (Ward).”
Sparks also confirmed the belief of many that Stewart’s vision may have been limited and that Stewart likely did not see Ward until it was too late.
“Kevin was wearing all-black,” Sparks said. “A black fire suit, a black helmet, which in normal situations isn’t a big deal, they are to go with the colors of your car. It was tragic accident and a mistake was made.”

So, naturally, it took ESPN's Colin Cowherd to put this tragic accident into true perspective. From Truth Revolt, via The Federalist:

Cowherd began the segment by citing NASCAR’s embrace of dangerous displays of masculinity and ‘settling the score,’ saying that it, like the NFL, NHL and boxing, deliberately allowed those elements to draw in a larger male audience. …Saying NASCAR had a ‘unique culture’ that was almost exclusively a ‘southern delicacy,’ the ESPN host linked the sport’s emphasis on displays of masculine aggression to what he said was the ‘eye-for-an-eye’ culture of the South, which he suggested encouraged behavior like that exhibited by both Ward and Stewart.
‘It doesn’t get ratings anywhere really outside of the South in the major cities, Atlanta, Charlotte [...] It’s really, really part of the South, and it’s an eye-for-an-eye culture.’
This culture, Cowherd said, encouraged drivers to find ways to ‘settle the score’ by dangerous means, as in the case of Ward and Stewart.

Awful Announcing likewise quotes some Cowherd brilliance:

The sport has a unique culture that I’m not part of. I’m not a gearhead. I’m not from the south, I’m not an eye-for-an-eye guy. There is a certain southern culture, that it doesn’t matter where you’re from, and a lot of NASCAR drivers are from Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, California, Arizona, it’s a southern delicacy. It doesn’t get ratings anywhere really outside the south…. it’s really, really part of the south and it’s an eye-for-an-eye culture.

The site then lights into Cowterd pretty good:

Of course, this makes no sense for a variety of reasons.
Yes, NASCAR is still very popular in the south, even as it has expanded nationally in the last 20 years. But sprint car racing is decisively not NASCAR. While NASCAR’s heritage lies in the south, sprint cars and open wheel racing has a deep history in the midwest, west, and northeastern parts of the country. It’s like Cowherd just chose to neglect the entire history of open wheel racing in this country. Almost four decades before NASCAR was founded, the first Indy 500 was ran in 1911. That year AAA sponsored races in San Francisco, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Santa Monica.
. . .
What does southern culture have to do with any of this?
How someone can talk about “the south” as a reason for why a driver from Indiana struck a driver from New York at a dirt track in that state is incomprehensible. A NASCAR driver was at the wheel when the accident took place, but that’s the only connection the series has to this incident at all.

Even Ward's local paper notes that the New York Times (no, I won't link them) did a story about the racing culture in central New York. Syracuse.com reports:

Syracuse, NY -- With the debate going on about Kevin Ward Jr.'s death on a Central New York racetrack this weekend, the New York Timestoday took a look at the racing culture that encourages kids as young as four or five to begin racing go karts.
Ward, who was killed Saturday when he was struck on the track at Canandaigua Motorsports Park by a sprint car driven by NASCAR driver Tony Stewart, began his career racing a fun kart in his backyard, moved up to go karts on a track, then micro sprint and sprint cars.
Canadaigua Motorsports Park announced on its Facebook page that racing will resume Saturday.

That's right, they plan ot start racing again at the track this weekend. Why would the track owner do something so irresponsible?

I spoke to Kevin Ward Sr this morning and he encouraged me to "get back to racing at CMP, Kevin would want you to.

Yeah, Damn that southern culture up in New York. Colin Cowterd can suck my balls. He's a blowhard who might or might not know something about sports -- I don't listen to him because of other reasons, so I couldn't say -- but he loves to play sociologist and blame isolated incidents like this one on great societal factors, like "southern culture." Despite the lack of any actual southerners, or even a southern location. Fuck him. Just one more reason we hate Yankees. They think they know everything, even as they prove they know fuck all.

As a southerner, I get really fucking tired of being the last ethnic/cultural group it is OK to slam on. Imagine if Cowterd blamed this on "African-American culture," or "Asian-American culture?" No, it's OK to slam southern culture because we're just a bunch of white male racists, right? Sorry, fuckchops, but there's a whole lot to southern culture besides NASCAR, and this wasn't even a fucking NASCAR race! Tell you what, Cowterd: if the main problem with southern culture is we tend to be masculine, while non-southern culture tends to not be masculine, I'm OK with that. So fuck off.