Earnhardt shortened his odds of living to see 50 driving stock cars on the cusp of madness for his entire career. Earnhardt's being killed on the last lap of the Daytona 500 is tantamount to Joe Montana dying in the final minute of a Super Bowl, or Mark McGwire going down in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series. The readily apparent difference is that neither football, for all its inherent risk of bodily harm, nor baseball, despite the potentially lethal nature of the ball, are death-defying pursuits.
Auto racing is, however slickly packaged and cleverly marketed it has become.
This remains a blood sport, pure and simple. Remove the specter of the grim reaper from the speedway and you've got a bunch of people going real fast in circles. When Murray wrote those words, Indy cars were rolling incendiary devices with their fuel-laden flanks virtually unprotected. Drivers who weren't killed were often badly disfigured by severe burns on their faces, arms and hands. The inherent design flaws in that era's open-wheel racers were criminal.