Johnson can’t feel the love like Tiger did (Yahoo! Sports)
February 26, 2010
LAS VEGAS – Back when Tiger Woods routinely was compiling majors and girlfriends, fans couldn’t get enough of him. They reveled in Tiger accomplishing everything that Phil couldn’t, in him crushing the dreams of Rocco Mediate and they didn’t bat an eye when he sent Bob May back into oblivion.
It didn’t matter that Sundays had become a weekly exercise for second place. In fact, the more Tiger won the better because witnessing dominance on an unprecedented level was what many tuned in to see.
It’s worth recounting because last week when Jimmie Johnson won at Auto Club Speedway in Southern California, the victory was received like a mid-February nor’easter.
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Not again.
Johnson’s dominance is no less colossal than Tiger’s. Tiger wins about once every four tournaments, while Johnson wins once every fifth race, and each has won about twice as many events in the last eight years as his closest contemporary.
So why is it, then, that fans celebrate Tiger’s dominance but are put off by Johnson’s?
It’s a question that befuddles more than it frustrates NASCAR’s four-time defending champion.
“Shaun White is the best at snowboarding. Does it hurt their sport? No,” Johnson said. “You look at golf. Granted Tiger’s got some different issues now, but before that did it hurt golf? No. You go through tennis – [Roger] Federer. Did it hurt that sport? No, it helped. So I think a lot of it is the perception of the fan base, and in our culture, we don’t like to see dominance. We like to see the underdog kind of come through and prevail.”
The irony is Johnson comes from a blue-collar background himself, having grown up in a trailer park. His father drove a delivery truck, his mother a school bus. Johnson, as much as anyone, is the underdog.
With Johnson, it’s more complicated – more layered.
For starters, he’s unrivaled. Phil Mickelson may not win as many tournaments as Tiger, but he’s been in them, challenging Woods on a fairly consistent basis. Their rivalry forced fans to choose sides, giving them a vested interest in what happens regardless if Tiger wins or loses.
Johnson doesn’t have this sort of foe to tweak emotions on either sideline. En route to last year’s title, his closest challengers were teammates (read: friends), and even they were a distant second and third. With no push from another driver, there’s no reason for his fans to cheer any louder, nothing for his detractors to necessarily dislike.
It would help to see Johnson pull off the racing equivalent of hitting a golf ball 240 yards, sticking it within 10 feet of the pin, which Johnson does all the time. Unfortunately, racing doesn’t lend itself to this sort of visual.
Two weeks ago in the closing laps of a qualifying race for the Daytona 500, all the leaders pitted for fresh tires. Johnson, gambling for the win, didn’t. When the race went back to green, Johnson, skating around the track on worn-out tires, managed to fend off all comers – even those who were on fresh rubber – to win.
This is the racing equivalent of knocking a monster 2-iron around a tree, over water, between two sand traps and onto the green. But all fans in the stands and those watching at home saw was Johnson’s car leading the way. What they don’t see was him fighting the wheel, keeping his car off the wall, pulling off a shot (going back to the golf analogy) that rolled 10 feet from the hole – not 50 yards short or into the water.
Then there’s the fist pump. One of the knocks on Johnson is that he’s too vanilla – that he doesn’t show any personality. That’s debatable. What’s not is that Tiger Woods, off the golf course, is as bland as a Saltine cracker, refusing to show even a thimble’s worth of insight into his personality. The only thing keeping him from getting stamped with the “vanilla” label is the fist pump – a spontaneous outburst of raw emotion that makes Tiger humanistic and pumps up the crowd.
Johnson doesn’t have this luxury – to stop what he’s doing to celebrate – not when he’s got Tony Stewart banging on his back bumper. For him, any and all celebration comes after the race when all the drama is gone.
When all these things are thrown together – the void of a rival, the inability to see the athleticism, the lack of opportunity to show emotion within the game, which is when it’s at its highest – it’s a recipe for one big pile of ambivalence.
“I was thinking about this over the weekend,” he said when asked if his dominance hurts NASCAR. “When you’re a kid and you pick a hero, you’re going to pick a person that’s dominating. With that in mind, it cannot be bad for the sport. I know it’s frustrating for people that aren’t a 48 fan. That’s athletics; that’s sports. It happens, but it’s not bad for the sport.”
Actually it is, though it’s not Johnson’s fault. It’s just the nature of the sport he happens to dominate.
Jay Hart is the NASCAR editor for Yahoo! Sports. Send Jay a question or comment for potential use in a future column or webcast.
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