Anyone with a brother or sister can attest to the lifelong competition that exists between siblings. That competition usually involves the battle for parental attention. The spotlight on sibling rivalry is never brighter than it is in sports. Examples are easy to find, from tennis to football to baseball to auto racing.
Tennis has the very popular and equally decorated sisters in Venus and Serena Williams. Serena owns more grand slam singles titles at 13, but Venus has won more overall singles titles at 43 to her sister’s overall total of 37. Equally popular and accomplished are the NFL’s Manning brothers – Eli and Peyton. Eli has the advantage in Super Bowl titles, having won two, including the most recent Super Bowl outing in February, while Peyton has only one championship. When it comes to the NFL’s Most Valuable Player award, there’s no contest as Peyton has claimed the honor four times while Eli is still searching for his first. And, with Peyton’s new contract to play for the AFC’s Denver Broncos while Eli Manning continues to be the signal caller for the NFC’s New York Giants, there is always a chance we could see a Manning vs. Manning Super Bowl in the near future.
NASCAR has had many sets of competing siblings throughout its 60-plus years of existence. Sibling rivalries have existed with Richard and Maurice Petty, Bobby and Donnie Allison, and Terry and Bobby Labonte. The sport’s current and most active sibling rivalry is that of brothers Kurt and Kyle Busch. The Busch brothers compete against each other on a weekly basis every season. Kurt has won a championship – scoring the 2004 Sprint Cup title – and has a slight edge in the career win column with 24 Sprint Cup Series wins to younger brother Kyle’s 23. But Kyle, who has competed in the Nationwide and Camping World Truck series on a regular basis, has more than 100 wins in NASCAR’s top three touring series.
This weekend’s Samsung Mobile 500 Sprint Cup race at Texas Motor Speedway is the next venue for the continuance of the Busch brothers’ sibling rivalry. Kurt arrives at the 1.5-mile Texas track as a former winner, having visited victory lane during the track’s November race in 2009. He started that race third and led 89 laps en route to the win. In 18 career starts at Texas, Kurt has finished in the top-10 a total of 11 times for a top-10 finish percentage of 61.1 percent.
The Busch brother sibling rivalry will start a new chapter this weekend as, for the first time, they’ll be playing for the same team. Prior to driving the No. 51 Phoenix Construction Services Chevrolet in Saturday night’s Sprint Cup race, Kurt will drive the No. 54 Monster Energy car in Friday night’s O’Reilly Auto Parts 300 Nationwide Series race on behalf of his brother’s Kyle Busch Motorsports team. This weekend’s Nationwide race is the first of many in which Kurt will compete for Kyle Busch Motorsports.
The elder Busch brother goes into Friday night’s Nationwide Series race as a three-time winner in only 13 starts in the series, including a win in his very first race. That came in the April 2006 event at Texas, when he led the final 70 laps to secure the victory after starting seventh. Busch has one other Nationwide Series start at Texas and that was during the April 2007 race when he scored an eighth-place finish after starting 18th.
While Saturday night’s 500-mile Sprint Cup race is considered to be the weekend’s main event, Friday night’s 300-mile Nationwide race commemorates the first of many in which the focus of the Busch brothers’ rivalry is the like-minded goal of winning – together.
TSC
