MONSTER TRUCKS DOOD February 11, 2010 1 comment	By Aaron

Last Saturday, the finest event in sports came to Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium for an unforgettable night of competition, pageantry, and triumph. The world’s trials and tribulations were put on hold at exactly 7:30pm, when the lights were lowered, the crowd tore its teeth out with anticipation, and the grumble of the competitors’ guts grew into an eardrum-splitting frenzy not heard since that one time Mt. Olympus exploded and buried all those people in red-hot liquid diamonds. MONSTER JAM HAD BEGUN.


The competitors were many. Maximum Destruction. Blue Thunder. Superman. The Gravedigger. But at the end of the night, only one would stand atop the piles of twisted metal and broken limbs that used to be their enemies. Roughly a third of the audience were children when the night began, but everyone walked away men.

The competition began with qualifying races. Although the trucks were matched up two by two, the best times would then proceed to the freestyle, where the intrepid machine/man combinations would slake their thirst for destruction by eliminating old yugos and derelict school busses. Superman had early issues with his truck and had to be towed aside, much to the delight of Batman, who watched from above with a stone-faced satisfaction. After all the racing was completed, and the crowd was irresponsibly drunk, an old piece of shit motor home was wheeled out to the center of the field, a sacrifice to the gods of motorsports. Freestyle was to begin.

Since Blue Thunder was the fastest qualifier, the motor home was his to devour. After catching some routine air, he drifted into a crash course with the old trailer, and the crowd’s hoots became hollers. The sound of the raging engine was deafening as Blue Thunder charged in and turned the motor home into thousands of pieces of broken dreams. Blue Thunder then resisted the urge to crush the rest of the competitors with his eight foot diameter wheels and pulled aside to watch the rest of the mayhem. The remaining competitors got their turn on the track, catching major air, pulling wheelies, you know, basically trying to impress Brasky. A couple even ended up on their tops, upside down but unfortunately not on fire. Just when Maximum Destruction thought that his aerial acrobatics had earned him the ultimate laurels, the crowd mustered all of their remaining strength and screamed with the passion of 250,000 banshees, because they knew that one truck remained, the venerable, fearsome, devastating GraveDigger.

Even the picture of GraveDigger is bigger. I don’t know what they had been feeding GraveDigger (my guess is angus bulls, pure octane, and widows of base-jumping victims), but GraveDigger put on a spectacle of high flying, wheelie popping, shit-smashing excellence. The dead man’s delight made every other truck’s performance look like five year olds playing with Tonka trucks in the sandbox. Dare I say it, but they put GraveDigger last for a reason. Stacking the deck is legal in monster trucks, that is,  if your ace in the hole is a ten ton murderer ready to set fire to the world’s forests and sow salt in the greenest of pastures. After burning out the retinas of all who beheld his badassery, GraveDigger was awarded the highest honors, and somehow we were able to find our measly little car and teleport home safely.

Am I different now that I have seen the Monster Jam? Yes, without a doubt. If Bill Brasky weren’t busy fighting a hydra in the core of the moon, then he would have been at Monster Jam, and maybe he would have been changed as well. And where were you, while the monsters were running amok? Your excuse is not accepted. But all is not lost… Monster Jam can be enjoyed safely from your living room every day at 5pm on Speed Network. Verdict: second best thing ever. The first? Well, we’re not that kind of website.

Photos lifted from IJsselstein’s flickr. I didn’t take any pictures because we sat in the stratosphere.

Tags: brasky featured Florida monster trucks