Shame on you Key West, and NYT, and Geico, and Anheuser-Busch

From the November 17, 2008 New York Times, dateline Key West, one of my favorite spots:

The rescue boats put in Sunday at dawn. The radio was calling for six-foot seas.

“A lot of people say, ‘Yeah, I like it rough,’ ” said the racing promoter, John Carbonell. “But I raced myself for 10 years, and you say: ‘Good Lord, what am I doing out here? Get me back. I’ll go to church every Sunday.’ ” . . .

55 teams qualified to enter the Super Boat International World Championship here. Their sport, once dominated by tycoons who raced far out to sea beyond view, was refashioned in the 1990s to draw spectators and advertisers. Courses were designed to run laps passing 100 feet from the shore.

The modern racing vessels were named for their sponsors, Cintron and Lucas Oil and the like. The smallest measured 25 feet with a single 525-horsepower engine; the largest 50 feet with twin engines capable of accelerating from a standstill to 190 m.p.h. in three-quarters of a mile. They had no brakes. They burned a gallon of ultrahigh-octane fuel per engine per minute. They were piloted by teams of two, a driver to steer and a throttle man to accelerate.
“It’s all a guy can do to hold on to the steering wheel at that speed,” Carbonell said. . . .

At the world championship, which began Nov. 2 in the Florida Keys, . . . [f]ew stood a chance against the new turbine boats, capable of speeds exceeding 200 m.p.h. but prone to immolation.
“If they make a mistake at that speed,” said Reggie Fountain, a retired racer, “they’re dead.”
Of the turbines, the most dominant was Miss Geico, sponsored by the insurance company. The Geico team traveled on a fleet of semis with a ground crew, a helicopter, inflatable mascots, a merchandise shop, golf carts, motorcycles and tents. The driver and the throttle man, Marc Granet and Scott Begovich, in their early 40s, had been plucked from the pleasure-boat racing circuit in Florida. . . .

With the money Geico was spending, Granet and Begovich were expected to win. Their greatest rival was Mike Seebold, 49, from Frontenac, Mo. His team was sponsored by Anheuser-Busch. Seebold drove a 50-foot Mercury named Bud Light with dual 1,200-horsepower petroleum engines. He had to rely on a steady hand to keep pace with the turbines.

His strategy had worked at the 2007 world championship. The Geico boat broke down in all three races, as Seebold won.

“We went home with our heads hung, and they went home the king,” Granet said, “and we’ve had to live with that all year.”

But through the summer 2008 season, the Miss Geico turbine had beaten the Bud Light petroleum engine in most races. For Seebold, the pressure was manifest. In July, the directors of Anheuser-Busch accepted a $52 billion offer for the company from InBev, a Belgian-based brewing concern. The new owners indicated they did not plan to continue the racing sponsorship. Seebold’s team needed to win a new patron. . . .

In the first two days of racing, Bud Light and Miss Geico each took a checkered flag. With the final race approaching, the stage was set for a showdown. . . .

Offshore buoys set a course of 83 miles — 12 2/3 laps around three turns. The first turn, known as the Wall, marked the treacherous passage between choppy and smooth waters.
“It’s probably the most violent race I’ve ever raced in,” said Bob Vesper, the driver for Team Warpaint from Hammonton, N.J. “It’s like a washing machine.”

In the harbor, cranes lifted the vessels into the water. Atop Miss Geico, Granet cracked the seals of glow sticks attached to the hatch to provide a guiding light to rescue divers. Wearing an F-16 pilot’s helmet, he dropped past a St. Christopher medallion into a seat molded to the contours of his frame. Begovich slid down to his left, facing 14 gauges and four override buttons.

In the sky, helicopter pilots scanned the waters for endangered turtles and manatees. Along the shore, girls covered their ears. The boats roared into the straits, roiling the clear turquoise waters with rooster tail plumes. In staggered starts, Seebold led the petroleum boats with Bud Light, counting on a fire among the approaching turbines.

But no fire came. Granet led the turbines with Miss Geico. Through six laps, he passed the petroleum boats one by one, steadily advancing on Seebold. Coming out of the second turn, he closed the distance to about 300 yards. At the harbor turn, he overtook Seebold.

When the race was done, Seebold knew his beer company sponsorship was gone for good.
“For it to be over just like this, it’s a little hard to swallow,” he said in a hotel parking lot after the awards ceremony. “Life goes on. You’ve just got to find something American in this American country, which is hard to find.”

Editorial comment: It is time for major daily newspapers, and big corporations that seek to build goodwill through sponsorships of sporting events, to revise their concept of what "something American" is, or ought to be.

As retired Army Colonel Andrew J. Bacevich (a Vietnam vet who lost his son in the Iraq war) has observed in his recent book, The Limits of Power, "[w]hether the issue at hand is oil, credit, or the availability of cheap consumer goods, we expect the world to accommodate the American way of life. The resulting sense of entitlement has great implications for freign policy. Simply put, as the American appetite for freedom has grown, so too has our penchant for empire. . . . Here is the central paradox of our time: While the defense of American freedom seems to demand that U.S. troops fight in places like Iraq or Afghanistan, the exercise of that freedom at home undermines the nation's capacity to fight. A grand bazaar provides an inadequate basis upon which to erect a vast empire."

Indeed! Especially when the idle, thrill-seeking rich in that vast empire are burning a gallon of gas a minute!