Susan Cocking's Outdoors

PINKS All Out

This blog has absolutely nothing to do with the outdoors, except to the extent that my favorite television shows, PINKS and PINKS All Out (SPEED ch. 40 on Comcast) are conducted outdoors.

For those who don't watch the SPEED channel,  PINKS and PINKS All Out are reality shows about amateur drag racing.  In PINKS, creator/host Rich Christensen finds racers willing to put up their titles, or pink slips, in a best three-out-of-five series. They negotiate for  car lengths, use of nitrous oxide, and lanes.   In PINKS All Out, an off-shoot of PINKS, as many as 400 amateur drag racers show up at a track like Moroso or County Line for a chance to make it to the  final 16 and ultimately win $10,000 and  NAPA tool chest. There's no negotiation and no one has to put up his/her title.  Christensen does an arm-drop to start them; his two technical advisors, brothers Nate and Adam Pritchett, group the cars by 1/4-mile times, and then decide which group is likely to have the tightest racing in the finals.    They don't necessarily pick the fastest cars.  At last weekend's taping at Gainesville Raceway, the 11.5 group got picked.  They all blushed, stammered, and stuttered like stunned Miss America contestants.  It was fun to watch.

For those who DO enjoy the shows, I hereby offer answers to frequently-asked questions.

Q. Does Rich Christensen know anything about race cars, or even cars?

A. No, and he freely admits it.  That's why he has a battery of technical advisors consisting of racers and high-performance car shop guys to help him. Rich created PINKS because he thought it would make compelling television, and encourage racers to stay off the streets and compete on the country's small drag strips, some of which are closing for lack of interest.

Q.  How come SPEED keeps running the same PINKS episodes over and over?

A. Because they don't have any more new episodes to air.  Christensen said it is very difficult anymore to find racers willing to actually put up their titles in a drag race.  Some try to cut private deals with their opponents or intimidate the PINKS cast into agreeing to let them off the hook -- which Christensen adamantly refuses to do.  In Kansas City recently, Christensen said he felt he was "disrespected" by some prospective PINKS racers pressuring him to bend his rules.  Things got ugly, and as he put it, "my guys started taking off their watches; we thought we were going to throw it down."   Fortunately, violence was averted.  The good news is,  nine new PINKS All Out episodes are being shot this year, including last weekend's in Gainesville.

Q. Who  won?

A.  Wouldn't you like to know?

Q. Does the PINKS All Out crew pre-select the group of cars that make the final 16?

A.  Not that I could see.  At Gainesville, it took them over six hours to run two time trials for all 400 and some cars that showed up.  Nate and Adam were observing and keeping notes the whole time.  They chose the 11.5 group because the 16 racers posted the second-closest time spread in All Out history.

Q.  How do the Pritchetts know whether somebody is  sandbagging?

A. Easy....if the racer's second time trial is not within a pre-determined margin of his first pass, then he's out.  Period.  Same thing for the final 16.  If any of them run too fast based on their previous test runs,  they are gone.

Q. Does SPEED really give the All Out winner $10,000 in cash?

A. Yes.

Q. Is Rich Christensen really lIke that, or is it just for show?

A.  He's really like that.....very tightly-wound, hyper, and impatient, both on and off the camera.  And you would not want to challenge him to a bench-press competition.

Q. When will the Gainesville episode be broadcast?

A. SPEED anticipates August.

Why there are still animals to hunt

Sometimes I think animal right activists underestimate the skill, cunning and what some would call "genetic intelligence" of the supposedly dumb creatures they are trying so hard to protect from humans.

What prompts this observation is a hunting trip I took last week to a private lease in Okeechobee County with some acquaintances.  One was determined to shoot a hog with bow-and-arrow and a wild turkey with a shotgun; the other bow-hunted for turkey, which is one of the most difficult things in the world to do.

Neither was successful.

The would-be hog killer and I sat quietly in a tree-stand for nearly three hours in late afternoon, hoping a wild hog would be drawn in by the corn scattered by a mechanical feeder.  Just before dusk, a sow approached from an open field, accompanied by three piglets.  But they didn't come rushing in all pig-like to scarf up the corn.  Instead, they circled around behind our tree-stand, stayed close to the safety of the palmettos directly behind us and looked around.

The piglets could clearly see (and smell) the corn on the ground directly in front of them, and started to move toward it.  But the sow grunted at them and they stayed put, warily circling the clearing and using the cabbage trees for cover.

My hunting buddy could see that these supposedly dumb wild pigs were not about to just run out into the open.  So he stood up, drew back his bow, and let an arrow fly at the sow standing under a cabbage tree. 

She oinked in a panic, jumped, and kicked up a dirt cloud in her haste to get away.  It was a clean miss.  The arrow was embedded low on the tree trunk where it had passed under the sow's belly.

The next morning before dawn, my friend and I concealed ourselves in a camouflage tent blind at a crossroads where several gobblers had been spotted milling and scratching the previous afternoon.  My friend made some good imitation gobbler and hen calls with his wooden box call and even got a gobbler to answer him more than a half-dozen times.  He readied his shotgun for the approaching bird.

But the alpha-male turkey never came close to shooting range.  In between the human-turkey dialogue, I heard the unmistakable cluck of a hen.  After that, we never heard the gobbler again, despite repeated calling.  Small wonder.  He was obviously getting busy with the real thing.

On the other side of the lease, my other friend had somewhat better luck.  He managed to call a gobbler to within 15 feet of his blind -- easy shooting range for a bow. But when he shot, the arrow whistled between the strutting bird's puffed-up feathers, scattering a few of them, then embedded itself harmlessly in the ground.  The gobbler quickly escaped.

If hunting were the massacre animal rights activists claim, this lease would be littered with the bodies of turkey and hog. 

Thank goodness we provisioned ourselves from Costco before the hunt.