I don’t know what you mean by that, Spoke. I am not a racing fan. The only reason I’m familiar with Earnhardt is because I live in an area where hearing about him is fairly inescapable.
I don’t think anyone is blasphemous here. I just saw your note that he never fed the poor, and so I checked. It turns out that he was a very charitable man. I saw RickJay’s note about the accident, and so I checked. It turns out that there is not a more common cause of death among athletes.
Do you think I should have kept the facts to myself?
This thread deals with Earnhardt-mania and his actual charitable activities – please note the exchange between myself and gobear about halfway down for a little (undocumented) background on what Dale Earnhardt did.
[quote]
Accidents are the most common cause of death among athletes.[/quote
Yes, but in his particular sport, accidents are expected, so it would make sense to use available safety percautions, right? Nope, not for him. He was too macho. Now he’s too dead. I will say this, though – in his death he probably saved other lives, as there was a huge rush to get the HANS devices right after he was killed.
Just wanted to point out, the prevailing opinion is that the HANS device would not have saved Dale’s life if he were wearing it. When you smash head-on into a concrete wall at 200 mph, your internal organs tend to get all smooshed to jelly. All the safety gear in the world can’t prevent that.
Anyone remember when Kurt Cobain died that there were a few copycat suicides among his fans? How about when Selena was murdered and you couldn’t swing a dead cat in Texas without hitting a vehicle with Selena’s name written on the window? And of course the King, Elvis the Pelvis, who rules all when it comes to dead hero worship.
None of these people really offered more to humanity in general then Dale did. Yet we still had examples of people who took it way to seriously. Maybe we get attached to entertainers and when they die we feel the pain of our own mortality. Nah, that couldn’t be it.
The prevailing opinion among whom? NASCAR has certainly tried to put that forth as an official line. But all the independent analysis I read about said otherwise.
But that’s not what happened to him. His internal organs were pretty much fine (or at least not fatally damaged). It was his skull and spine that took the beating.
