The Drift King
Plus: How you can help Sports Stories
Dear Sports Stories readers,
Before we get into this week’s newsletter, I’m going to ask you a favor.
I have spent the past few years working hard on my first book. It finally comes out next month. It’s called STEALING HOME: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between. I have to say, I’m super excited. This is a subject that has been near to my heart since literally high school. And if you enjoy this newsletter, and the style of humane, weird, historical writing in it, I can guarantee you will also dig the book. It’s even got a bunch of awesome illustrations by Adam.
We don’t ask you to pay or donate for Sports Stories because we do this out of love, but I am going to ask this: Please consider pre-ordering STEALING HOME, and please consider asking your friends, family, and any influential celebrities you may know to do so as well. One thing I’ve learned as a soon-to-be published author is that pre-orders can go a long way toward building momentum and buzz for a book: they encourage both publishers and retailers to get behind it.
If you do pre-order, we’re going to send you some cool swag: a signed baseball card featuring one of Adam’s illustrations from the book. My goal is to send out 1,000 of these cards before March 24. If you reply to this email with proof of purchase, or even better, post it on social media, I’ll mail one out personally to your address.
Everything you need to know to pre-order, including links to various online retailers, can be found here:
www.stealinghome.la
Thanks!
Eric
The Drift King
Let’s get one thing straight: race car drivers are athletes. The car is a piece of equipment, a tool, a baseball bat, a tennis racket. For the greatest drivers among us, past or present, a car is an extension of the body. But racing a car is also an amplification: it is our bodies at high speed, in high danger, in high pressure. The car grants us superhuman abilities and superhuman vulnerabilities.
This is the appeal of speed. This is the appeal of driving dangerously. The challenge of gaining total control of a vehicle on the brink of chaos. Suddenly your body is a combustible machine that weighs two thousand pounds, suddenly your body has four wheels and a million parts, and suddenly you are invisible inside the metal and glass, and the only that gives you away is the way the car moves.
Keiichi Tsuchiya could make a car move so that the whole world knew it was him inside. He did not invent drifting, but Babe Ruth did not invent hitting home runs, and Micahel Jordan did not invent dunking either. Keiichi Tsuchiya made drifting into art. He elevated the act. To drift is to release control, to let your tires ungrip themselves and the asphalt slide beneath you like it’s a sheet of fresh hard ice and the world for a brief moment pass by outside your window in slow motion.
“When you drift,” says Bow Wow in the movie The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,“if you ain’t out of control, you ain’t in control.”
But drifting is also the ultimate demonstration of control. When Tuchyia drifted in his Toyota AE86 it was a dance. It was all timing and rhythm and grace. Like a character in a movie, he got his start street racing. He conquered the underground and then conquered the tracks of Japan. He watched the technique he perfected grow into its own sport, its own culture. And he retired a legend. The Drift King.
Related Reading
Honestly the best thing I read about drifting in researching this article was a thread on a message board responding to the question “What is the point of drifting?” It was full of spirited and passionate descriptions of the act. If you’re not sold on the beauty of drifting, well, take it from the folks at GTPlanet.net.
Otherwise, you should just watch the transfixing videos of Tsuchiya. The most iconic is a film made in the ‘70s called Pluspy:
This has been Vol. 17 of Sports Stories by Eric Nusbaum (words) and Adam Villacin (art). If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please reply to this email or contact enusbaum@gmail.com. We’d love to hear from you.
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