By MONTE DUTTON

On Wednesday, I pronounced myself unfit to go to ballgames. I went to one Tuesday night, but whether by the last throes of shingles, my horror at the shooting in Kansas City or watching the unexpected loss of the Clinton High boys, I didn’t feel well.

By no means did I have the day, or the night, off. Last night I was monitoring all available modern technology to see what was going on at four places: Clinton High’s gymnasium, Templeton Center, Kimmel Arena in Asheville, N.C., and Timmons Arena outside Greenville. I watched. I listened. I perused the streaming stats. I switched screens like a matchup zone. I wrote about the games as they were going along.

Back when newspapers were great, this was known as writing “runnings.” Four runnings at once is a consequence of life in the age of everything in a hurry.

Something funny happened. The UNC Asheville men’s basketball team, playing Presbyterian, had a player named Trent Stephney. In the Bulldogs’ running account, he hit a basket and was referenced as “Stephoney.” Virginia Military Institute had a player named Stephen Olowoniyi. I thought, wow, the typo must be “St. Olwoniyi” for “Stephoney.” As I tried to figure out how to fix this, I realized that I had inadvertently switched from a “running” on the VMI-Furman game to one on the Presbyterian-UNCA game.

I laughed nervously. This is how catastrophic errors occur.

This is all a long way of writing that it was late Wednesday night when it occurred to me that the Daytona 500 is on Sunday.

I checked on the South Carolina basketball game, which was obviously not worth watching, and I saw that Daytona 500 qualifying, which has never been as exciting as a cricket match, was going on. I had no interest in watching dozens of cars take laps on a track where they ran wide open all the way around. It was less exciting than watching cars draft down the Interstate with cruise controls on.

It means almost nothing. It mainly establishes the starting orders for the Thursday-night qualifying races, which mean only slightly more. When I started going to Daytona, the “Twin 125s” (now they’re 150s) were the single most perilous events. Various forms of hell frequently broke loose.

For 20 seasons, I spent half of every February writing about events leading up to The Great American Race at The World’s Most Famous Beach, which is also The Birthplace of Speed. All those slogans must be true because they are often festooned on banners and , undoubtedly, TikTok.

Mostly I’ve lost touch with what I did almost constantly from 1993 through 2012, which is to watch alleged stock cars go around and around at ridiculously high rates of speed. For most of the time I was one of the NASCAR gypsies, Daytona Beach, Fla., hosted a race in February and another in July on the closest Saturday to Independence Day.

Early on, I loved the Pepsi (nee Firecracker) 400 because it started at 11 a.m. (once 10 a.m.), and I could write a jam-up story and still be wading in the warm Atlantic waters by late afternoon and toasting the heroes by the time the sun went down.

Then they moved it to night so that a higher percentage of all the money spent in the area would be spent at the track, and my daily job started beginning early in the mornings and ending late in the nights. That race isn’t even in the summertime, “when the weather is high, you can stretch right up and touch the sky.” (Mungo Jerry, 1970.)

I still miss February Speedweeks, though. I miss the cool breezes and driving up to Saint Augustine Beach to watch friends play music and let me do so during breaks. I miss lots of great seafood and a movie matinee during one of the rare breaks – Whoa, the ARCA cars will be out practicing in a few minutes, and no telling what those fools are gonna try! – at the aforementioned birthplace of speed.

I miss the irreverence of sportswriters who had seen too much tragedy. My friend Larry Woody said of ARCA drivers, “They’re like mud turtles. You can’t kill ‘em.”

I haven’t talked to Woodrow in a while. Jim McLaurin is the funniest writer I know. Larry Woody is the funniest man.

Once when watching an unusually boring race at Atlanta. I said to Larry, “Look at the bright side. I just finished my income taxes.”

“I just taught myself Portuguese,” he replied.

I’d probably still be doing it if the market for the written word hadn’t collapsed. For all the travel – sometimes I’d have come out about as well hitch-hiking as dealing with airlines – life was fun. If occasionally I had to get home from Detroit through Manchester, Philadelphia and Charlotte, a day later than planned, well, as his fans used to say of Dale Earnhardt, Hey, that’s part of it!

I saw John Prine in Phoenix after sitting next to him on a plane a year earlier. I saw Arizona State play more football games than Furman. Near New Hampshire, I watched an Ivy League game. Near Dover, I watched the Naval Academy play Northwestern. I watched the Cubs play the White Sox at Wrigley and sat two rows behind Jerry Rice. The tipoff was that he was wearing a Cubbies jersey with “RICE” and “80” on the back. I sat a row in front of actor James Spader at Fenway Park. In neither case did I speak to the celebs. Our eyes may have met. I didn’t want to be tacky. I talked to celebs like Benny Parsons all the time.

I’m sure NASCAR is better now than I think it is. All the modern young drivers wouldn’t seem like such cardboard cutouts if I knew them a little like I used to.

Video killed the radio star.

By the end of my illustrious tenure, it seemed as if none of the drivers was much like all of them were in 1993. Sterling Marlin, Kenny Schrader, Dave Marcis, Rusty Wallace and Darrell Waltrip had been supplanted by brats with money who had never had to fix or pay for what they tore up.

I’m stereotyping. Who doesn’t?

I wrote two racing novels and created a hell-raising kid, Barrie Jarman, who was a throwback in spite of all his modern problems. Lightning in a Bottle did well. Life Gets Complicated didn’t. I have a habit of glutting my markets.

Provided I feel good again, I’ll probably go to see Chattanooga play Furman on Saturday. I reckon I’ll tape the 500, though.

It took me about five minutes last night to remember that Ryan Blaney, whose father was a favorite of mine, won the championship last year.

Oh, yeah. Great.

The past two weeks I’ve been suffering from shingles, which have curtailed my live coverage. On Tuesday night, I covered a game for the first time in a while. Even while laid up, though, at least one piece has been posted here for 34 straight days.

I still don’t feel so hot. A coach would probably list me as questionable. It may be a game-time decision.

Shingles has also knocked me off my financial rocker. I’m strapped for cash.

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