Noose wasn’t directed at NASCAR’s Wallace, proving once again that life is complicated

NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace was not the victim of a hate crime. Instead, he turned out to be the unknowing central character of a massive misunderstanding.

NASCAR said Tuesday that the noose spotted hanging from Wallace’s stall Sunday in Talladega was actually “a garage door pull rope fashioned like a noose” — and that it had been there since at least October 2019.

Wallace and his No. 43 team were completely blameless, NASCAR president Steve Phelps emphasized in a conference call with media. “I want to be clear about the 43 team,” Wallace said. “The 43 team had nothing to do with this.”

But the noose’s placement wasn’t directed at Wallace and, in fact, the noose had been attached to that garage door for at least eight months, officials said. The 15 agents that the FBI assigned to the case figured that out in less than two days.

Said the FBI statement in part: “The FBI learned that garage number 4, where the noose was found, was assigned to Bubba Wallace last week. The investigation also revealed evidence, including authentic video confirmed by NASCAR, that the noose found in garage number 4 was in that garage as early as October 2019. Although the noose is now known to have been in garage number 4 in 2019, nobody could have known Mr. Wallace would be assigned to garage number 4 last week.”

So while a lot of emotion surfaced Monday in Talladega, Ala. — as Wallace’s No. 43 car was pushed to the front before the race by every driver — it was ultimately based on an untruth.

“Everyone’s belief was that someone was attacking a member of our own family,” said Phelps, who took no questions after his statement Tuesday. “It turned out that was not the case.”

This is embarrassing for NASCAR, although Phelps insisted he wouldn’t do anything differently if he had to do it over again.

Nevertheless, NASCAR had the world thinking for 43 hours that someone on the inside of the sport had placed a noose in Wallace’s stall to send a hate-filled message to the Cup Series’ only Black driver. Phelps, though, spun Tuesday’s twist as “fantastic” news.

“For us at NASCAR, this is the best result we could hope for,” Phelps said. “It was disturbing to hear that it was thought that one of our own had committed this heinous act. It is fantastic to hear from the FBI definitively that there was not a hate crime.”

So the noose — which had been seen by a member of the Wood Brothers racing team last October — had nothing to do with Wallace. NASCAR is still investigating why it was there at all -- and Wallace said on CNN Tuesday night it was a “straight-up noose” -- but the FBI is gone.

It’s weird, right? It’s also life.

Life is often messy — neither right nor wrong, neither heavenly nor hellish, neither black nor white. We like it to be one or the other, because that’s easier to process. Heroes. Villains. Good guys and bad ones. But the answer to so many of life’s questions turn out to be “It’s complicated.”

The person I feel sorriest for in the whole affair is Wallace himself, who only knew what NASCAR told him about the noose despite the current histrionics of the “Bubba was in on the whole thing!” crowd. Wallace has ridden an emotional seesaw for three days now, and really for the entire month when you include the successful charge he led to have the Confederate flag removed from all NASCAR properties.

Wallace cried Monday before the race, overcome at the sport’s beautiful embrace. He tweeted about how his mother said someone was just trying to scare him with the noose.

Now it turns out the noose wasn’t pointed at him at all, and Wallace is left to have to fend off the bad jokes and the conspiracy theorists. He admitted on CNN he had been looking at social media, which surely isn’t a good idea these days.

On Twitter Wednesday, Wallace praised the investigation and the show of unity among drivers Monday and wrote of the incident: “I think we’ll gladly take a little embarrassment over what the alternatives could have been.”

And of course the media that reported on NASCAR’s original statement about a noose being found now must backtrack, too. ESPN’s Marty Smith had an emotion-soaked monologue about the noose on “SportsCenter” that went viral Monday night but is suddenly obsolete. I wrote in my column published on The Charlotte Observer’s front page Tuesday that the noose’s placement in Wallace’s garage was one of the most “repugnant acts in the sport’s history.”

Turns out it wasn’t, because it didn’t actually happen that way at all. The noose’s origin story is mysterious. And while you still wonder (and NASCAR is still investigating) why someone would fashion a noose out of anything, for any reason, it wasn’t directed at Wallace.

So the hate crime wasn’t real. But I will still remember the pictures of those drivers standing behind Wallace on Monday.

Although what galvanized them turned out to be inaccurate, those were still powerful images from a sport that is trying to change its stripes.

The noose incident will be remembered for a long while. Those pictures will be remembered even longer.