They Raced In Open Cars

Every so often, you will see clips from the days when racing cars went round and round with driver and mechanic sitting there in an open vehicle. If it went into a roll and/or flew off the track, they’d be lucky to survive; if they did, they probably never walked another step again. Exactly why they’d put themselves into this situation is beyond me and I can’t even guess what was in their heads, aside from rocks.

There’s a tv show called “Maximum Exposure,” MaxEx for short, which has video clips of people doing all sorts of mind-numbing stupid things. Some of them are crooks, others are daredevils, while the rest are just “watch this!” people. Once in a while, you will see someone who is doing extreme skiing, going down a pretty near vertical slope. They started on their skis, standing up, but something catches them and they spend the rest of the trip rolling through the snow, bouncing off cliff faces and generally getting pretty banged up before they come to a stop.

Unfortunately, earlier this week, Buffalo Bills football player Kevin Everett sustained a life-threatening injury which, at best, will leave him fairly crippled. From what little I know about football, it appears to have been a freak accident, a wrong move at the wrong moment. It might never happen again in this exact way.

We’ve made auto racing amazingly safe; skiing is still up to the individual, and some of them seem to ask for what they get. But two people colliding, a vulnerable head and neck hitting another large object, is still so potentially life-changing.