Dennny Hamlin kicks Bubba Wallace out of golf, hoops leagues

Denny Hamlin is saying all the right things about moving on from his pre-Daytona comments and whatever it was that happened between him and Bubba Wallace at the end of the Daytona 500, but his actions say otherwise.

NASCAR grudges still get settled with intentional wrecks and the occasional pit road donnybrook (see also: Kyle Busch vs. the whole 22 team at Las Vegas, 2017). Thanks to Denny Hamlin and Bubba Wallace, we can also add a new way to express one’s displeasure with a fellow driver: kicking them out of the recreational sports leagues you run.

Sure enough, that’s what Wallace says Hamlin has done to him, giving him the boot from the rec golf league he runs. Ironically, Bubba had mentioned he thought that might happen after they exchanged bumps and words after the Daytona 500.

A quick recap of the feud to this point: Hamlin kicked it off by upsetting Wallace, and a bunch of other NASCAR drivers, by telling the Pardon My Take podcast that 70 percent of the garage was on Adderall to help with concentration. Hamlin later clarified that he was joking, though not everyone thought it was funny.

After he claimed Hamlin ran into him at the end of the Daytona 500, Wallace (who finished the Great American Race second while Hamlin came in third) cracked wise about Adderall in reference to the driver of the No. 11 Toyota. That got Hamlin upset when he was asked about it in his post-race presser, and now here we are.

According to Wallace, Hamlin didn’t even reach out directly to inform him of his removal from the golf league, and then he removed himself from the basketball league Hamlin also heads up to save him the trouble of going through intermediaries again.

"“Both. I’ve been removed from both, although I didn’t get the direct text. It went through like five or six people, so that’s classy, I guess.”"

Worth noting in all this is that Hamlin claims it was Wallace’s actions on the very last lap of the Daytona 500 that led to his relatively unscathed Toyota (no small feat if you watched the race) getting a blown tire and additional damage. So both men clearly still feel wronged, as sometimes happens in these racing deals.

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But booting someone from your golf league via second-hand text message? That’s cold, man. We’ll see if that kind of new age equivalent to removing one’s glove to smack someone in the face carries over to the on-track action this weekend at Atlanta.