Chuckwagon fans weigh in

By Ron Kantowski

Thursday, Aug. 28, 2008 | 4:28 p.m.

NOW:

My Tuesday column in the part of the Sun you can hold in your hand, about sporting events that should have succeeded in Las Vegas but did not, sparked a lot of feedback from auto and hydroplane racing fans.

I also heard from three people who wanted to see championship chuckwagon racing reinstated.

I don't think they were serious, because if there's one thing I have learned from covering sports in Las Vegas for 21 years, it's that chuckwagon fans are known pranksters.

The chuckwagon races also were held downtown, in 2002. Competitors loaded a stove and tent poles and drivers named "Cookie" into horse-drawn covered wagons and then raced around an obstacle course. You had to see it to believe it, and even then, you might not believe it.

This might be the best way to describe it: If you broke into Jeff Goldblum's laboratory in "The Fly" and put Mario Andretti in one of the chambers and Walter Brennan in the other -- then threw the big lever setting off lightning bolts -- what you'd probably eventually get, after all the morphing, is chuckwagon races.

Chuckwagon racing lasted just one year here. No reason was given for its demise, although I think it had something to do with the giant dogs, who kept slipping on the linoleum on the kitchen floor, like in the TV commercials.

Fans of the "Big Valley" and others claim chuckwagon racing is extremely popular in Western Canada.

But then so was the rock group Loverboy.

THEN:

The Democratic National Convention reminds me of being a kid, and staying up late at night to play "Landslide," one of those Parker Brothers games. I think the object of the game was to collect enough "vote" cards to carry California. But when we got tired, we'd secretly pass vote cards to our friends, under the table, so the kid we didn't like wouldn't win.

The under-the-table part was just like real politics, although we didn't know that at the time, because most of us were only 11.