  Bubba Wallace is NASCAR's Future and the Future is Now When you clip a driver on the right fender coming from the inside, it's not considered a very Christian move in the world of NASCAR. A pass like that inevitably pushes your competitor's car toward the wall, and when you're going at speeds well over 140 miles an hour, the wall is the last place you want to be headed. That's what happened the day Dale Earnhardt died. Sterling Marlin just grazed him from the inside, and to the naked eye, it looks like the most unremarkable collision. The kind you might not even report to insurance. But at those speeds, the aerodynamics of a race car are wildly altered. It's visually underwhelming and technically chaotic. Earnhardt started to go perpendicular. He collided with Kenny Schrader, then the wall, and by the time the rescue team made it to Earnhardt's car, he was dead.
During the NASCAR All-Star race in July, Michael McDowell deployed a similar move against Darrell "Bubba" Wallace Jr., driver of Richard Petty Motorsports number 43 car and Wallace was pissed. He doesn't mince words. At the post-race interview, he called McDowell a "joke." Wallace said he couldn't "wait for the God-fearing text he's going to send me about preaching and praise and respect." In other words, Wallace does not appreciate it when someone threatens him with their notion of decency.
"Decency." Like "dinnertime" or "success," it is one of those words that has a different meaning to almost everyone. On the race track, decency means not wrecking your fellow man for personal gain, which is why in 2019, Wallace threw a bottle of water in fellow driver, Alex Bowman's face when he spun him out in Charlottesville. But Wallace is no stranger to breaking the rules of decency either. In April of this year, when NASCAR was on hiatus due to coronavirus, Wallace quit a NASCAR-sanctioned virtual event after being wrecked in a video game, losing a real-life sponsor in the process.
He certainly didn't hold his tongue this summer when, in June, Wallace advocated to remove the Confederate flag from NASCAR races. This was followed by the discovery of a noose in his garage. Then the FBI found had been hanging there for months. All of that was all punctuated by a tweet from President Donald Trump, asking if Wallace had apologized for the noose "hoax." "You know, as someone who's super passionate about being vocal and wants to voice their opinion, biting my tongue is hard," Bubba told me during an August Zoom call. "For me I always wear my heart on my sleeve, and if you disrespect me then it's..." he trails off, pausing for a moment. "[People] shouldn't. I always say you shouldn't swoop down to their level, but I have no respect for you." He's plenty frustrated, sure. But in a Twitter battle with the President of the United States, he was admirably measured. In this time where he's been, perhaps unwantedly, thrust into the spotlight, it's clear his next move would matter. It would matter a lot.   Remembering Arnold Schwarzenegger's 'Commando,' the Most '80s Action Movie of the '80s Back in the fall of 1985, it was impossible to be bigger than Arnold Schwarzenegger, both in terms of movie-star wattage and sheer Joe Weider muscle mass. In the decade between 1982 and 1992, the seven-time Mr. Olympia-turned-unlikely-Hollywood heavyweight cranked out Conan the Barbarian, The Terminator, Predator, The Running Man, Total Recall, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. That's a pretty amazing run of red-meat spectacles right there. Still, there's one film from that period that tends to get overlooked far too often. It's Commando, and Chris Nashawaty has some feelings on its 35th anniversary.
 The 2020 Tax In 2020 we've already been taxed far in excess of anything the president will ever pay. There's the tax we've paid in American lives, more than 200,000 now, because of the president's refusal to focus on the coronavirus pandemic. There's the tax we've paid watching our jobs evaporate in the spring, the unemployment supplement disappear in the summer, and the absolute inability for Congress to get it together enough to send us another meager check to help make ends meet in the fall. There's the tax on black bodies, one that's paid in lives lost at the hands of police and the virus, dual pandemics that wound around each other like snakes this year, making it impossible to see where the injustice of one stopped and the other began.There's the tax our children will pay for years to come because no adults could put them first in dealing with the pandemic, shunting schools to the bottom of a list of reopenings that saw bars and crossfit gyms take precedence over our children's future and safety. The debts of all these taxes add up to the toll we all are paying now, as we see the entire year crumble away. Dan Sinker explains why Donald Trump is the only one laughing this year, because we've all paid an enormous tax for his failures.  'I Almost Took Myself Out of Here': Kid Cudi Opens Up About Hitting the Bottom, and Coming Back Four years ago, Kid Cudi was balancing his role as a famously productive rapper and trying to keep a still-nascent acting career in the air. He was anxious. He was self-medicating. He was burning out. So, after nearly a decade in the spotlight, he hit the brakes. "I think it was just everything finally catching up to me," he says. Cudi checked himself into a rehab facility, fending off public speculation (and some disses from Drake), and stayed quiet. He didn't know when he'd be back. Now, Kid Cudi is on seemingly every screen that's left broadcasting through the pandemic and, somewhat counterintuitively for a 36-year-old rapper, enjoying a commercial peak musically. In addition to a chart-topping single released in April, he's booking roles in film and TV projects like never before in his career. It's "like a rainstorm," he says of the string of acting appearances he's made recently, from Westworld to Bill & Ted Face the Music to, most recently, HBO's We Are Who We Are. "A monsoon." In a rare interview, Cudi opens up to Brenden Klingenberg about his darkest days, his new role, and his relationship with Kanye West amid the MAGA of it all.
 For Decades Judas Priest's Rob Halford Hid Who He Was. Then He Liberated Himself. Before he became a queer icon and global superstar, Rob Halford was just another working class theater kid knocking around Walsall, UK, a little town nestled in the industrial West Midlands whose proximity to Birmingham would end up charting the course of his life. In the 1970s, that smoke-streaked, hardscrabble corner of England brought heavy metal into the world, and as the vocalist for Judas Priest, Halford would soon find himself on the vanguard of a bone-rattling new sound that would launch him and his band into the spotlight, and change rock music forever. For decades, it would also force him to live a painful, lonesome lie. Kim Kelly caught up with the rocker to talk about it all.  Some Personal News: Introducing Esquire Select, an Exclusive Club We Invite You to Join If you enjoy the work Esquire does every day online, and in every print issue, we're now asking you to chip in to support it. Starting now, when you land on Esquire.com you'll get a message that you're reading one of your four complimentary articles for the month. Once you've read four, you'll have to sign up for our new membership club, Esquire Select to keep going. Esquire Select comes in many forms, but our All Access option gets you an annual print subscription, unlimited access to Esquire.com, unlimited access to Charles P. Pierce, and exclusive, members-only access to deals and discounts from Esquire's favorite brands. Here's everything you need to know about Esquire Select.
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Sunday, October 04, 2020
Bubba Wallace is NASCAR’s Future and the Future is Now
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