Richard Childress Gets a Slap on the Wrist

     In case you are not a huge NASCAR fan, let me walk you through this crazy incident, which I have never heard anything like in sports before now.  Kyle Busch is a NASCAR driver, who is not exactly known for being the most polite race car driver in the world.  He will do anything he has to do to win a race, and that includes knocking another driver out of the way if necessary.  This is not an uncommon trait among NASCAR drivers, although Busch may be one of the guys who gets himself in these situations more often than others.  In this situation, in a race in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series, Busch and another driver, Joey Coulter, happened to be racing each other pretty aggressively.  Again, this is not uncommon.  What happened after this however is very uncommon. 

     Coulter drives in the Truck Series for Richard Childress Racing, a top NASCAR team which once was the team Dale Earnhardt Sr., drove for.  Lately, Busch has gotten himself in these aggressive driving situations with RCR cars frequently, and the RCR drivers have been very public about their dislike for him and his driving style.  Apparently this time, Richard Childress had enough with Kyle Busch.  After the race, Childress went down to the garage area, and found Kyle Busch, took his watch off, and put Busch in a headlock and repeatedly punched him in the head.  If you need to have this image in your head, please revisit the Nolan Ryan/Robin Ventura fight below:

     While this is very amusing, and I would have loved to see video of this altercation, this incident breaks the barrier between players and owners that is inexcusable.  Richard Childress was fined $150,000 and placed on probation for the incident, and I don't think that's good enough.  When you let players in a sport patrol their own behavior like is done in one way or another in every sport, that is one thing, but when you have owners getting in physical confrontations with athletes, that is a line that can not be crossed.  First of all, if this had happened in any other sport, players would be suspended for a significant amount of time, so why was Richard Childress not suspended at all?  In fact not only was he not suspended, he was allowed at the track for the weekend's Sprint Cup race.  Can you imagine if George Steinbrenner or Jerry Jones were seen getting in a fight with athletes?  They would be kicked out of the sport.  I'm not sure what makes this any different for Richard Childress.  One of the reason this bothers me the most, is that Earnhardt Sr, RCR's most popular and most successful driver ever, was most famous for driving extremely aggressive, much more so than Kyle Busch. 

     If I were making this decision, I would suspend Richard Childress from all operations from his team and not allow him to be at any NASCAR races for the remainder of the season.  After all, crew chiefs are suspended for multiple races when something from a car doesn't meet the exact specifications set forth by NASCAR.  I think it's pretty clear that this is much worse of an offense than that.