Opinion: Champagne-dousing athletes, speedy cars defy logic

A couple of things most everyone seems to take for granted make absolutely no sense to me.

Drinks on me

One is the traditional champagne celebration in the dressing room of the team winning the World Series. This year, it was the Boston Red Sox doing the celebrating.

Players, coaches and team employees sipping a round of champagne to toast the victory would be a perfectly civil observance by a group of millionaires after defeating another group of millionaires.

Since the media cover post-game celebrations, the TV audience knows that very little champagne is actually consumed. Most of it is poured and squirted on each other.

Red Sox players showed enough IQ to wear goggles to protect their eyes. Why not? Champagne is an alcoholic beverage intended to be sipped, not dumped on each other. Large amounts of the stuff are likely to harm the eyes.

I saw a news photo of a star player taking what looked like a gallon of champagne right in the face. I had to look at the caption to identify the player.

While the championship game is being played, workers are busy covering the dressing room walls and ceilings to protect the facilities. Anyone who ventures into the dressing room, be it media, team and league officials, is apt to get a champagne bath.

Boys will be boys?

Since Springfield Business Journal’s middle name is business, I have a question of business professionals: If you had people working for you so valuable to your enterprise that you pay them very well, would you want them to party in such a way as to risk personal injury?

There are risks, such as eye damage, falling on champagne-slick floors, cuts from broken bottles, or being bashed in the head by bottles flung around by men.

Before irate fans accuse me of picking on the Red Sox, if the Colorado Rockies had won the World Series, I would be writing about them.

In my humble opinion, it is a juvenile and asinine practice that makes no sense.

The fast lane

If locker room champagne celebrations make no sense, car manufacturers trying to outdo each other by developing faster cars seems to be off the chart of idiotic practices.

I’m not certain why, but I read car magazines. I have owned my present car for 10 years, with no plans to buy another one. This doesn’t keep me from reading about cars and dreaming about the ones I would love to own.

Car magazines report car news; therefore, they write about faster and faster cars coming on the market. Already congested roads make the quest for excessive speed to be senseless.

Car magazines use macho names to describe fast cars: Rocket, Thunderbolt, Blaster and Missile, to name a few.

Longtime Rusty Saber readers know that I once owned a Porsche. Its top speed was supposedly 150 mph; I wouldn’t know. Once on a stretch of road I had to myself, I ran it up to 100 mph and immediately slowed down because, at that moment, I couldn’t think of an intelligent reason to go that fast.

One magazine writing about a high-performance car stated the top speed of the car wasn’t known because the manufacturer had electronically limited it to 168 mph.

Another car not yet on the market was reported to have a top speed of 192 mph, but it will be electronically governed at 186 mph. Occasionally, a 200-mph car is mentioned. To me, owning a graphic high-speed car isn’t the issue. The question is, where could one drive it and live to tell about it?

Regular cars get along OK with horsepower ratings somewhere well under 300. The high-performance cars and even large luxury sedans will have ratings near 400. Some heavy-duty super cars report ratings of more than 500.

One magazine reported a particular car’s time from zero to 140 mph to be 15.1 seconds.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be near this car once it is up to speed.

Some things make no sense at all. None.

Joe McAdoo is former chairman of the communication department at Drury University.