Will Jeff Gordon be displaying his dancing moves again?
FONTANA, Calif. — Don't look for Jeff Gordon to be showing his dancing moves on television.
Gordon was a guest celebrity at American Idol, the television singing competition, while in California for this weekend's race at Auto Club Speedway. He has appeared on non-sports-related television shows in the past, and he has demonstrated a knack for break-dancing, so it was perhaps a logical question Friday when he was asked about the possibility of being a competitor on ABC's popular Dancing with the Stars program.
"I'm open to doing fun things," Gordon said. "That is not fun to me. Honestly, I would do it for my wife because I know how much she would enjoy it. And it would give us the opportunity to maybe take some ballroom dancing classes or something.
"But my back is the problem. I just feel like I would struggle too much with injury to my back. I'm not afraid to embarrass myself. I've been known to do that once or twice. I'm not afraid to laugh at myself. I'm not afraid to take risks, but I wouldn't do it if I felt like I couldn't do a halfway decent job at it."
Gordon, who startled many by showing his break-dancing skills at a fan event in Las Vegas a few years ago, said he has "retired" from that activity.
"One, I'm not limber enough, and then every time I do it I end up hobbling around for about two weeks," he said. "It is all I can do to just sit down for four hours (in a race car) every weekend."
Gordon will be doing that sort of work here Sunday in the continuation of his final season as a Sprint Cup regular. He and the other 41 drivers in the field might be chasing Kevin Harvick, a winner two weeks in a row and on the kind of hot streak rarely seen in the sport.
"It is certainly obvious that those guys (Harvick and his team) still are carrying a tremendous amount of momentum from last year," Gordon said. "Last year at this time I think that they showed a tremendous amount of speed, but they didn't have the team and the chemistry and all the parts and pieces really clicking together. They were making a lot of mistakes. They figured that out the second half of the season when it really mattered most.
"At the same time, it is a long season and you can get complacent. It is the rest of our jobs to find ways to outperform them and get better, find their weaknesses or find what their strengths are and try to build that into our own program. Right now we want to win races, but we really want to just get some consistency and put the results together that I think we are capable of. Then once we do that then we can start thinking about how we can beat the No. 4 car (Harvick)."
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PHOTOS: Behind the wheel with Jeff Gordon