Only Losers Drive '95 Hondas

By MATT WELCH

Yesterday morning all over the nation's worst airwaves, New York Knick coach Jeff Van Gundy got absolutely trashed by callers -- not for his playoff strategy, or for his insufferably weary demeanor, but for his car.

Seems the day before, in a bizarre accident, the Knicks' chartered plane jet-blasted a bunch of the team's parked cars, tossing them in the air and bouncing them on the tarmac like basketballs. News reports of the incident mentioned that Van Gundy's car was a 1995 Honda Civic.

"A '95 Civic?!" one guy said on the nationally syndicated Jim Rome show. "What kind of trash is that? Man, my wife even got a '97 Jeep Cherokee, and she's unemployed!"

Being a sports fan in this country is not for the squeamish. Not only do you have to put up with stone-dumb frat-boy sportswriters and sickly smug boomer broadcasters like Bob Costas, but every sporting event broadcast anywhere is riddled with commercial after commercial -- many of them literally insane -- for those SUV thingies you people like so much. Driving around in my $800 dollar 1988 Plymouth K Car today I heard a dealer on the radio jabbering about how "car sellers come from around the world to figure out why Fuller Auto (or whatever) is the largest certified pre-owned Lexus dealer in the world!" Great, buddy!

I was out of the country when "used" became "pre-owned," and the phrase "low low price of just $31,000" entered the lexicon, so I am clearly several degrees out of touch. I can't for the life of me figure out how -- especially in Southern California, where there are 20 million cars lying around -- people happily cough up a year's salary just to avoid the terrible shame of driving a five-year-old car that you can actually park. (And then complain about how "expensive" stuff is, like ice cream sandwiches at a ballgame.)