Get Over It: Gossage Does It Again, Media Whines

Texas Motor Speedway president Eddie Gossage is widely known in NASCAR circles as one of the most notorious promoters since Humpy Wheeler. From promoting races like boxing matches between two feuding drivers, to offering Dale Earnhardt Jr. a large sum of money to race IndyCars at the track, Gossage always finds a way to put himself in the news as the next Texas race approaches.

This time, however, he's found a sure-fire way to ruffle the feathers of the media, when a planned April Fool's joke went awry.

Gossage offered a local DJ $100,000 on March 30 to legally change his name to "TexasMotorSpeedway.com" for one year, and to get a tattoo of the URL somewhere on his body. The track's Twitter account even posted a photo of the check that Gossage was ready to hand out upon the DJ's acceptance of the offer.

On March 31, Terry Dorsey, the Dallas DJ in question, accepted the offer on his radio show. The track sent out a press release detailing the deal, and posted it to its website. Multiple journalists within the racing community did their jobs and wrote about the deal.

Hours later, however, word began to spread that the whole thing was an April Fool's hoax. Numerous journalists well-known within the sport, from Terry Blount at ESPN.com and Jeff Gluck of SBNation.com, began complaining about the stunt, citing the usage of official track letterhead to send out the press release and the date on the calendar.

I have three words of advice for the press corps: Get over it.

I'm pretty sure that Gossage and Dorsey were planning to announce tomorrow that the whole thing was a fake. It seems clear to me, if nobody else, that the plan for this stunt was to do it over three days: the offer on March 30, the acceptance on March 31, the admission on April Fool's Day. It was meant to be a joke of extraordinary magnitude, and, well, it was.

Blount quickly deleted his post on the subject, and called the prank "inexcusable" and "a huge blow to TMS credibility." Gluck said the event left "a bad taste in (his) mouth" and responded to Red Bull's congratulatory tweet to TMS with "Uh, no. WRONG." But many of their media colleagues aren't so bothered.

Blount's cohort at ESPN, David Newton, asked a very good question on his Twitter account: "Did anybody bother to talk to the folks at Texas Motor Speedway or the radio host before the hoax got this far?" Nate Ryan of USA Today echoed those sentiments, and brought up the 2008 TMS prank, which suggested the track would build a $900 million retractable roof.

Blount and Gluck should be well aware of Gossage's history, each having covered the sport for a while now. They just appear to be upset because their serious coverage of the event has hurt their own credibility. Gluck's final comment, "Maybe if Texas used its energy to improve the racing instead of tricking people into coming to the track, everyone would be better off," was exactly the personal kind of comment that seemed out of line in the situation.

It's not as if this prank was designed to maliciously wound NASCAR reporters' credibility. It got all of us going. And even if it was, I'm not too bothered by it. I'm sure it's annoying as sin for these folks to have to field the same questions from different people every day for two weeks before their event, and to play a joke makes it interesting. I want to go into the business for a living; I'll take my bumps and bruises and occasionally look stupid. (I certainly have reported things that were totally untrue before.) It also reminded us journalists of the cardinal rule of reporting: always, ALWAYS verify your sources.

Happy April Fool's Day, everybody. Look out for pranks... and my exclusive interview with Michael Schumacher on why he's joining Richard Childress Racing for the 2011 NASCAR season. You heard it here first!