His church doesn't even try to have Sunday services on Race Day. Instead, the congregation charges $20 a car to park in its lot, taking in about $6,000.

"It's the greatest spectacle in parking," Cushman Wood said.

Amen.

It's fan-tastic

A nationwide poll, sponsored by Sanofi-Synthelabo Inc., concluded this week that more than half (55 percent) of NBA fans watching the playoffs reported going to sleep later than normal on nights when they watched a game; of these, nearly 92 percent reported going to sleep an hour or more later than usual.

The group, however, did no research pertaining to the percentage of NBA watchers who were bored to sleep during the league's regular season.

Not-so-bad boy

The Hartford Courant reported this week on former NBA "Bad Boy" Bill Laimbeer's lack of enthusiasm for his job as an NBA analyst for ESPN.

"Two-thirds of what that kind of work calls for is negative," Laimbeer said. "The hardest part of the job is that you have to talk about people and teams and most of it is negative. I don't enjoy that. It was fun, but at times I worried about how what I said might affect people."

Yes, that Bill Laimbeer. Go figure.

Oops

NASCAR offered a public "my bad" to Craftsman Truck Series driver Carl Edwards this week after costing him a win at Lowe's Motor Speedway when officials unintentionally turned on caution lights.

"We made a mistake on this one," NASCAR official Wayne Auton said. He also said the results will stand.

Rehab assignment

The Associated Press reported Friday that after fans complained, the River City Rascals junked a "Sports Criminals Night" promotion that would have turned the stadium into a giant prison, with one fan each inning thrown into a "dugout jail."

Whatever happened to Dollar Beer Night?