Saturday, February 21, 2015

NASCAR does right thing by suspending Busch

NASCAR suspended Kurt Busch indefinitely Friday night after a Delaware official said in a 25-page written opinion that he believed Busch had "manually strangled" his former girlfriend during a confrontation in his motorhome last September.

Busch won't race Sunday in the Daytona 500, and I believe that's a good thing the way things stand now. I am critical of NASCAR pretty frequently -- its championship format still isn't right -- but in the Busch case I thought the organization got it right with this suspension. It waited until there was at least some independent finding of a likely act of domestic violence, and then it acted. You could say that this should have happened sooner, but there was no Ray Rice video in this case. You needed to make sure Patricia Driscoll's story had enough of the ring of truth to act.

Now I hope NASCAR keeps some teeth in this. Busch doesn't need to be back on a racetrack anytime soon, and a quick reversal on appeal would only confuse the process. Busch kept saying he was waiting for answers when myself and some other reporters tried to talk to him in Charlotte, in late January. Now he has gotten some, although not the answers he would want. For now, Kurt Busch is and should be out of the sport. Bravo to NASCAR on this one.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Scott, I don't understand how you can take sides in a he said-she said domestic squabble. I'm not a Kurt Busch fan but the way things are set up now it's dangerous for any male athlete or celebrity to be in a room alone with another human being. One accusation and you are ruined. Busch may get his job back but he will never recover from the media witch hunt that is sure to follow.
There's nothing more dangerous than a woman, except a woman scorned. In spite of evidence that Driscoll put her hand on a bible and was caught in numerous lies, she gets the benefit of the doubt. I am beginning to despise our system of law that changed from innocent until proven guilty to guilty until overwhelmingly proven innocent.
Something has to change.