Danica goes all out for race fans

It was the great sports writer Jim Murray who once wrote "a whale is the most humbling sight a man can see." This must have been when Jim was going through his marine biology phase and the Dodgers were idle.

Watching an auto racing diva sign autographs for 90 minutes in a convenience store parking lot in a dodgy part of town also is humbling. But Danica Patrick managed to get through her appearance at the 7-Eleven on the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Charleston Avenue on Wednesday afternoon without getting stabbed, or propositioned in a tawdry way. 

This particular 7-Eleven, it should be noted, also is located within a roll of crime scene tape from the Arts District, where guys with berets hang out on the First Friday of every month. But on Second Wednesday, I didn't see a lot of berets. I mostly heard sirens.

Danica -- this is the way she pens her signature, sans surname, like Cher and Madonna and Beyonce and the other divas -- was running a few minutes late.

If you keep up with auto racing, or work in a place where most of the employees wear overalls and calendars feature scantily clad women hanging on the wall, then you probably know Danica is leaving the IndyCar series to drive in NASCAR full time.

Her last IndyCar race will be at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Sunday, unless they change the starting time of the Indianapolis 500 back to 11 a.m. so she can drive at The Brickyard and at Charlotte on the same day.

In this case, she would sell twice the number of T-shirts with her picture on them and generate twice the amount of publicity on "Entertainment Tonight." This, I suspect, could happen, provided curmudgeons such as A.J. Foyt and Bobby Unser aren't consulted.

Anyway, Danica was running late Wednesday, and then a siren wailed.

Uh-oh.

An ambulance, motoring along like Dario Franchitti or "Mother, Jugs and Speed," if you recall the old movie starring Bill Cosby, Raquel Welch and Harvey Keitel as independent ambulance company drivers, sped past the Gateway Motel, where rooms Sunday through Thursday go for $26, though the sign didn't say whether that was nightly or hourly.

But it was a false alarm. Or perhaps only a flesh wound. And seconds later the most famous one-race winner in IndyCar history (sorry Bud Tingelstad, Stubby Stubblefield and Tommy Hinnershitz) walked right past me. She wasn't all sexed up, like in those commercials for Peak Antifreeze.

But even without heavy makeup and tresses, Danica is attractive, because let's face it, if she wasn't, around 300 people wouldn't have shown up to get her autograph.

The line at the 7-Eleven was much longer than the one a couple of blocks up the Boulevard at the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop, TV home of Richard, Rick and Corey Harrison and sidekick Austin "Chumlee" Russell, who is to the History Channel's "Pawn Stars" what Howdy Holmes or Dr. Jack Miller, "The Racing Dentist," were to IndyCar series of seasons past.

(Holmes, whose grandmother owned the Jiffy Mix biscuit company, did start in the front row at Indy one year. But they flagged the Jiffy Mix Special off the track, with Howdy still inside, after all the other cars had finished and Howdy was still running, 15 laps in arrears.) 

Danica was dressed in a white polo shirt adorned with the logos of her sponsors (of which 7-Eleven is one), black slacks and fancy flip-flops. Giant Jackie Kennedy sunglasses were strategically placed on top of a head of long brown hair.

She was not wearing a Kevlar vest, and there were nervous looks on the faces of some in her entourage, especially when a guy drove up for a Super Big Gulp in an old Honda Prelude that had been outfitted with gargoyles and other frightening accouterments.

There was another anxious moment when a guy dressed as a giant tree joined the autograph queue. There was a collective sigh of relief when he changed his mind.

It might have been just me, or the sun on a 90-degree day beating down on her, but the longer she signed, the more fun Danica seemed to be having. Downtown can be like that.

By then, most of the people waiting for the bus had gotten on, and she was interacting with the youngsters as if they were her own.

Every person standing in line got at least one autograph, and everybody seemed pleased, except for the woman who came charging down Las Vegas Boulevard just as Danica was putting the cap on her Sharpie.

She was too late.

Her CAT bus was headed toward Sahara Avenue, belching clouds of diesel fumes in its wake.

Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.