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Fireball Off the Couch and Off the Pace

MUDCAT FALLS -- Team, sponsor, speedway and NASCAR representatives & officials have been meeting behind closed doors, engaged in tense discussions regarding the startlingly awful on-track performance of four time Cup champion Fireball Richards, who has yet to place in the top forty this season after twelve races.

"It ain't that our car ain't fast, cause Ol' Fireball would be hollerin' up a blue streak 'bout it on the radio ifen it weren't," explained Crew Chief Earl "Lugs" McCrackle, "but, matter-of-fact, we don't ever hear from him during the race no more, ceptin' to make compliments on the other drivers or to share Castaneda-like philosophical-type platitudes on life."

Richards was ordered to undergo anger management treatment during the off season after a confrontation with arch rival Humpy McCoy in the Waldorf Astoria parking garage following last season's Banquet of Champions in New York City. The feud between Richards and McCoy has flared numerous times over the past decade as the competitors often found themselves door-to-door, swapping paint on and punches off the track.

The goal of anger management is to reduce both the emotional feelings and the physiological arousal that anger causes. Patients cannot get rid of, or avoid, the things or the people that enrage them, nor can they change them, but they can learn to control their reactions.

"We certainly have made considerable progress with Mr. Richards in the past several months," said Gunther Uberflassen, Director of the Anger Neutralization and Gestalt Stress Therapy Center Franchise of Calabash County. "He came to us with very serious road rage problems and aggressive-compulsive competitive issues, which we have been able to counter with several of the patented mood & personality altering techniques developed exclusively by ANGST, as well as liberal applications of the very best pharmaceuticals that modern medical science has to offer."

Local attorney Steve Dallas declined to comment on rumors circulating the speedways at record speeds that Mrs. Brook Babbles-Richards, a former Miss Winston, has retained his firm to file for divorce from Richards.

"He's just a little too dang happy any more for my tastes and I think it's the lithium an' the Zoloft an' the Prozac an' the saltpeter -- an' whatever other additives they been putting in his psychotic engine oil," said McCrackle. "The Fireball I knew would just as soon whack you over the head with a track bar ratchet as give ya the time of day. Now he don't even want to be called 'Fireball' no more. He says his name is Brahma Vishnu Percival. Now what the hell kind of name is that for a Cup driver?"

Fireball's sponsor, RK Meat Packing Company, one of the nation's leading suppliers of hot dogs to public schools, universities, professional sports venues and convenience stores, declined any comment on the matter, though a spokesman noted that same track venue sales of hot dogs and bratwursts are off 17% from last year's numbers.

"This is a heck of a mess we got ourselves into here," concluded McCrackle. "Even the safety boys complain about getting his beard untangled from the HANS device."

Richards finished forty-first in the Coca-Cola 600 at Lowe's Motor Speedway, one hundred sixty-two laps behind winner Jimmie Johnson.


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