Guest Column By Cathy Elliott

Juan Pablo Montoya is already talking when he walks through the door of Alsace 1, AKA the teleprompter room, at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas on Wednesday morning of Champion’s Week.

“I don’t want to read this stuff,” he says as he strides to the front of the room. “Can’t I just talk?”

The teleprompter room is the place where all those smooth, carefully worded speeches you will hear on Friday night at the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series awards ceremony come together.

Long gone – and lamented, by some – are the days when celebrities would pull handwritten speeches out of their pockets at awards show when their names were announced, stumbling over the words and invariably forgetting to thank someone really important, who probably never let them live it down.

Nowadays, drivers work with their public relations staff members prior to Champion’s Week to construct concise, prepared speeches. It’s like assembling the ingredients to cook a perfect meal: Take equal parts of congratulating the champion, thanking the owner, the team, the sponsors, the family, and the fans, mix well and serve.

Visible to the speaker but not the listeners, the words scroll across the teleprompter, which looks to me like an ordinary TV set. The driver reads them, the audience applauds and that’s it. Bring on the dessert.

But like all of the world’s great chefs, Montoya prefers not to adhere too closely to the recipe.

“I just want to say it, not read it,” he says again. “It doesn’t sound natural when I read it.”

“Ideally, this is how we would like all the speeches to be done,” says Herb Branham of NASCAR’s Public Relations department, who works with the drivers and other celebrities on their remarks. “They would just have some bullet points, important things they need to mention, and from there they can go where they want, tell a story or whatever.”

Of course, Montoya is given the green light to “just talk.” As if he needs anyone’s permission.

He takes his place behind the podium and lets it fly. It has a stream of consciousness vibe, how one might imagine an actual conversation with him might go.

He acknowledges Jimmie Johnson, noting that “I’ve been in NASCAR three years and he’s kicked my [three-letter word meaning derriere that rhymes with ‘gas’] all three years.”

He thanks what sounds like a trio of bands from the 1960s – “Target and Partners, Brian and the Team, and Connie and the Kids.”

He thanks his team owners, Teresa Earnhardt, Felix Sabates, and particularly Chip Ganassi – “I’ve known Chip for 10 years. I won my CART Series championship with him in 1999. He’s crazy.”

A speech that is systematically written and then read aloud in front of a large group all too often sounds, for lack of a better word, stiff. It isn’t anyone’s fault. That’s just the way things are. Professional athletes aren’t movie actors, paid to make words on paper sound like normal dialogue. Nor are they motivational speakers whose purpose is to make crowds jump up from their seats and get excited; NASCAR drivers use stock cars for that particular job.

One of the best things about JPM is his knack for keeping things real. It’s refreshing and makes him fun to be around. He uses all the correct ingredients in the proper amounts. He just likes to spice things up a little bit.

In Montoya’s case, the term “speech rehearsal” is a misnomer. When he stands in front of you and talks about NASCAR and all the people associated with it and what it has meant to him to be a part of this sport, you believe his words come from the heart. He isn’t reading something to you, or parroting phrases he has memorized and then practiced for hours to perfectly recite.

He’s just talking. And that’s something worth listening to.