Some of you may remember that we affectionately termed last week "Brawl Week" thanks to the WNBA fight, the ridiculous minor league brawl, the Danica/Duno towel throwing incident, and the West Ham/Columbus Crew fisticuffs. But I'm sure you also heard that that NASCAR bad boy Tony Stewart also got into a bit of a throwdown last Thursday night at O'Reilly Raceway Park in Indianapolis during a Midget race involving a race team that he owns.

Stewart's car, driven by Tracey Hines, was forced to a go a lap down after officials had deemed the team had taken too long to repair the car prior to the green flag coming out. Stewart, uh, sort of disagreed and supposedly went a little nuts and shoved an official in the process.

Considering how incidents like this are almost always overblown, I didn't think too much of it. Actually, that's not true, the reason I couldn't add it to the Brawl Week brigade was because there was no video of it. And you always have to have a video for a fight.

Luckily though, we finally have the video which was taken by a fan from the stands and passed along this weekend to a local TV station. And it turns out that Stewart did indeed get a bit handsy with an official. He also ripped a headset off another official as well.

So, what to make of this? I honestly don't think it's that big of a deal. Athletes sometimes get pretty emotional, even when they're not actually the one competing. Stewart definitely went a little further than a manager gets with an umpire, but he didn't do anything especially dangerous.

Some people have said that if Stewart were an NBA basketball player, he'd be about to get a mammoth suspension. But that's not a very good example, seeing as how Stewart wasn't actually competing in the race.

He's likely to receive a fine, and that's it. That might be partly due to the fact that NASCAR essentially lives off of its drivers, but really, in the grand scheme of things, this wasn't much of anything except a guy losing his cool. Besides, it's not like Stewart has a history of doing stuff like this, right?



Eh, whatever. It doesn't count because because it was against Jeff Gordon.