WRONG PLACE, WRONG GUY, WRONG TIME

            FORT WORTH, Texas – For the first time, Sam Hornish Jr. played a role in the Chase on Sunday.

            He’s not in it. He didn’t take Jimmie Johnson out of it. But it wasn’t for lack of effort. It wasn’t for lack of timing.

            In general, NASCAR hasn’t gone well for Hornish, who is in 30^th place in the Sprint Cup point standings. The one-time Indy-car superstar wanted to have an impact as a stock car racer, and that he did.

            What does a man say after wrecking the champion apparent, Johnson, .on the third lap?

            Probably not, “The big thing for us today was trying to make it to the end, try to be real patient,” which is what Hornish said after a race that ended after 334 laps, not three.

Contact with another car, David Reutimann’s Toyota, contributed to the wobble that turned Hornish into the NASCAR equivalent of Mr. Magoo. The crash couldn’t be blamed on Reutimann, because it appeared as if his contact with Hornish occurred not because he drove into him but because Hornish slowed to correct his slip-sliding Dodge.

            But Hornish was unlucky. So were the hapless comic-book burglars who found themselves facing Superman in the alley behind the Metropolis pawn shop. So were characters concocted by Charles Dickens and, for that matter, Red Skelton.

            Hornish, though, is no street urchin. He’s won the Indy Racing League title three times and the Indianapolis 500 once.

It was Johnson who coyly, in that California cool way of his, noted that Hornish is unlucky a lot. Johnson didn’t bludgeon Hornish with his remarks. He sliced off all his buttons with three swishes of his burnished sword.

            Hornish has made his share of mistakes, some probably worse than this one, but he’s never had the misfortune to screw up this badly in a setting of such high visibility. This wasn’t just a mistake. It was the bank robber being caught because he forgot to put gas in the getaway car. It was the businessman caught with his secretary’s lipstick on his collar. It was the knucklehead kid ambling into first period with a joint stuck above his ear.

            It was a thorough debunking of the old showman’s theory that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

You may contact Monte Dutton at mdutton@gastongazette.com.