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But Glick’s forced retirement was not without warning signs…
To wit: Two years ago, LA Times stringer Mike Kupper's authored a puff piece paean to fellow scrivener Glick (“Ultimate Writing Machine,” 1/30/04), which was as fawning as it was inaccurate: The feature proffered many dubious claims, not the least of which was the assertion that Glick is the “most popular writer” both among those in “any pressroom” and “among readers, certainly as his prose speaks for itself.”
Popularity contests aside, while documenting many of the same events Glick covered, I find Glick is certainly a nice enough guy but often missed the real story, and is rife with error (i.e., his repeated tendency to claim Sprint Cars use engines with 410 and 360 cubic
centimeter's of displacement; ummm, it’s cubic inches). But whatever.
The real offense in Kupper's love song was the erroneous assertion that Glick was “the first to get former stock car driver Junior Johnson to open up about his young days as a bootlegger in North Carolina.”
In the “Ultimate Writing Machine,” Kupper says Glick began writing about motorsports in 1969. Had either Kupper or Glick started earlier, they may have been aware of the Tom Wolfe piece for ESQUIRE, published in 1965 and entitled “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson.” This same feature was developed into a movie with Jeff Bridges starring as Johnson.
Sample Junior Johnson quote, as reported by Wolfe: “When we growed up here, everybody seemed to be more or less messing with whiskey, and myself and my two brothers did quite a bit of transporting.”
There is plenty more in the Wolfe piece, but really, now that the LA Times has retired its Ultimate Writing Machine, they may want to trade it in for an Ultimate Fact Checking Machine -- Or failing that, like the NHRA and Shav Glick, at least attempt to come to terms with its own imminent obsolescence.
Which is, of course, mere wishful thinking: Glick’s replacement is Jim Peltz, a reporter laterally-promoted out of the LA Times Business section. Like most of the arbiters of the sport, it is doubtful that Mr. Peltz has an understanding of drag racing, much less media. 
| (Cole Coonce is the author of INFINITY OVER ZERO, as well as the forthcoming TOP FUEL WORMHOLE...) |  |
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