Why we're going to win the Battle at Bristol

I debated long and hard whether to post this or not, and after a week of thinking about it, I decided it was something i had to do.

I was watching the time lapse of the installation of the field for the battle at Bristol, and I noticed something that absolutely floored me. On the track, or on the service road around it, there's enormous sponsor logos painted on the tarmac.....(i tried to embed a picture, but I'm having trouble capturing a screen shot of it). Anyway, one of the sponsor logos on the track is UNOH, which is the University of Northwest Ohio, primarily a VoTech college, which my son Tyler was accepted to, and was to begin attending in the fall of 2014.

That's me and Tyler at the Pittsburgh game in 2012. As some of you know, we lost Tyler in a horrific truck accident April of 2014. What none of you know, was that he died a couple of miles from home, just hours after returning from a trip to UNOH for additional scholarship testing.

You may notice that Tyler has really long hair in this photo. He often took a lot of grief for it - called a hippie, or a girl, or things like that, and he never complained or gave anybody shit about it, but what almost nobody but his immediate family knew was that he grew his hair to donate it to Locks of Love to make wigs for cancer patients. 3 times he donated over 12" of hair after the age of 13 or so. Ironically, this gesture of his always reminds me of something we all know - Ut Prosim.

My wife, and I, and my daughter have made great progress in dealing with the loss of Tyler over the last 2-1/2 years; it is something we will be working on for the rest of our lives; and at least for me, just having TKP to come lose myself in is something I'll always appreciate.

So we've got an angel on the sidelines for the Battle at Bristol, so to speak, represented in 20 foot tall letters that say UNOH. I'm not sure if it's our side or not, but I don't care, because Tyler will be there screaming hello to me, my wife, and our daughter when we see that logo on TV.

I'll ask you all to hoist a beer or a bourbon in Ty's memory when you see that logo while we're beating the living shit out of Tennessee, and I wish all of you safe and happy travels for you and your families to Bristol and beyond.

EDIT: I forgot to give serious props to UNOH. They not only had an excellent Diesel Tech program which Tyler was to attend, but the president also presented us with a posthumous degree for Tyler, which he had no doubt Tyler would have earned, and also established a yearly scholarship in his name for a deserving student from Tyler's local school who wishes to attend UNOH