Jordan, Hamlin vs. NASCAR: Stock cars will never be the same

If you are anything like me (and considering you are reading this story on the ESPN NASCAR page, I’m assuming that we share at least one pretty sizable common interest), then you are someone who has to fight the temptation to peek ahead at the ending before we get there. You sneak a look at the final pages of a book or the final frame of a Sunday comic. You struggle to not look up the box score of a sporting event you aren’t able to watch live, ultimately too impatient to wait until you get home to fire up the DVR.

I genuinely try to be all about the journey versus the destination, but that’s an impossible mindset to adhere to when you know that destination is so astronomically huge that it might very well alter the way lives are lived and business is conducted from that moment of arrival into all the moments that follow.

That is exactly the type of destination that stock car racing finds itself journeying toward now, following a road map disguised as legal documents. In a court battle that officially began a week and a half ago, NASCAR is being challenged by one of this millennium’s greatest racers, the greatest basketball player who has ever lived and a longtime NASCAR team owner who, like nearly all who came before him, has raced with the twin goals of winning trophies on Sunday and trying to break even at season’s end.

Team 23XI and Front Row Motorsports versus NASCAR and its chairman, Jim France, is a battle over power, money and the truth. An antitrust claim that the defendants have entirely too much of the first two and have never shared enough of the third. Beneficiaries of what the plaintiffs say is an antiquated dictatorship of a business model, fundamentally unchanged since France’s father, NASCAR founder Bill France Sr., Jedi mind-tricked a roomful of racers into handing him unfettered control of their newly formed sanctioning body on Feb. 21, 1948.

Oh, and while one side files injunctions (as 23XI co-owner Denny Hamlin & Co. did on Wednesday) and the other side files to have the hearings surrounding those injunctions delayed (which NASCAR did in response), all parties involved, not to mention all those who will be affected by…