Friends,
My nephew and his staff invited me to America’s Finest Okay Joyless Awful Substandard** City to be his guest at a brazen display of carefully choreographed vehicular nuttiness. I’m referring, of course, to monster trucks.
The circuit that the unnaturally huge truck owners belong to is well defined. The trucks themselves are brands since you can’t mention the series without Grave Digger popping up. If you haven’t perused the Hot Wheels aisle at Target in a while, you’ve surely missed the madness. Bad night for the guy running—at Qualcomm Stadium at Jack Murphy Field (barf) on the eve of the AFC Championship game in Foxboro—the truck called The Patriot.
You’ve never heard such booing. Even after the perky announcer guy implored the crowd to give the guy a break. “He’s from Santa Cruz…” Boo! “He’s a California boy…” Boo! “C’mon people…” Boo!
Chargers fans, it seems, are not the most discriminating bunch.
It turns out that the intermediary bits, the semi-final race heats, are deadly dull for even the six-year old demographic:
Things started picking up later during the “freestyle” event. Ninety seconds to crush as many cars and jump as high as possible for each truck.
But after we’d seen a contender set his truck on fire, it was time to go. Good thing, too. It was after ten, my host was sleepy, and we’d seen all we needed to see. Rollovers, crashes, fire, jumps, we’d taken in that, hot dogs, and all the exhaust fumes we could stand.
Good times.
– bob
P.S. Remember Jose Jimenez, the comedy persona of Bill Dana, who was popular in clubs and on teevee in the 60s? I guess you’d have to be over 40 to recall this stuff, but who in the Chargers P.R. office has this much of a tin ear?
Here’s a piece of his TV Engineer bit to help explain what’s going on here. Even he gave up the bit for its perceived racism. Three decades ago.
** SUNDAY UPDATE: Las Chargitas lost to the Patriots this afternoon. Apparently the booing didn’t work.