You see, I’ve got this list. No, I’m not trying to be Earl Hickey, and no, I’m not Steve Buscemi in “Billy Madison.” It’s a list of “things to do before I turn 24,” and the most important line item is number five: Go to a monster truck rally. (My list rules.)

So when I saw the first commercial for the Chicago edition of “Monster Jam,” to be held on February 18, the first commercial I’d ever seen for the event in any city but Pittsburgh, I knew—even if I had to go alone, even if Playboy threw a party in my apartment at the same time, even if they decided to play a second Super Bowl featuring the Steelers—I had to go.

Fortunately, none of those things happened. When I sent out a quick email asking for companions, my buddy Joe had his four-inch pewter belt buckle on before I could hit send (Two girls from college came, too).

Real quick: If you think this is going to denegrate into an excuse to beat on rednecks, well, it’s not (not totally, at least). I’ve wanted to go to a monster truck rally since I was about six, since I’d watch the Carolina Crusher and Bigfoot battle it out even BEFORE the Smurfs came on each Saturday morning. I don’t usually love racing, but they made it so…BIG. And there’s something about Monster Jams that is just very Pittsburgh to me; that probably has to do with the fact that the events are 85% more popular in Pittsburgh than they are anywhere else (I’m guessing, but that sounds about right). Plus, the crowd is hilarious.

But would it live up to the hype I’d created in my mind? Would it be worth the trip, or just be worth the ability to SAY that you went as you launched into a barrage of jokes about Quad Wars?

We arrived at the Allstate Arena in Rosemont, Illinois, just in time to take three laps around the arena trying to find our seats. Seriously. The place is so poorly marked that even when we got to our seats—in section 201, aisle 3, row F—no one around us was sure they’d even made it to the right chairs. If we weren’t in the right spot, the true ticketholders were probably caught in a vortex somewhere under section 116, so we were probably safe.

Needless to say, anything we saw from our now-found seats was going to be awesome after our “Day After Tomorrow” trek to find the suckers, but we didn’t have to settle. Around the outside of the arena floor sats ramps separating cars ready for the crushin’. In the center was a big hill shaped like a volcano. And lining the entrance were two torches, flickering to the soundtrack of every crappy rock band of the last 10 years (I’m not kidding: Nickelback, Staind, Linkin Park, even the Goo Goo Dolls—inexplicable, I know—made an appearance). But while others were noticing these things, I threw this one out:

“Are those gun mufflers?”

They were. And they were necessary. Because when the trucks fired up backstage, the place was loud. Made me think my cell phone was ringing loud. Made the slushie of the kid behind me melt from the rattling and get all over my jacket loud. When the trucks finally came out, it was so deafening that I couldn’t even hear myself cheer.

Monster truck racing has rules, but they’re pretty simple: The first one around the track three times wins. Or whoever gets around the most in a certain amount of times wins. Or something. The truth is, it doesn’t matter at all. Once the trucks start flying off cars and around the circle, they could be chasing an automated bunny, and all you would care about is the noise and the sheer enormousness of it all.

And the trucks are enormous, even if their names aren’t as cool as they once were. Sure, there were some old school-types—Predator, Prowler, Maximum Destruction—but some have become like NASCARs, named for companies instead of animals or amounts of stuff that’s breaking. There was the Bob and Tom truck, named for the radio show and the 1-800 Safe Auto Minimizer, out to crush your car insurance rate right after crushing your car.

Then there’s Grave Digger. The most recognizable monster truck on the planet, this black-and-green bad boy could come out and drive straight into a wall and everyone would love it. The entire crowd went INSANE for this truck, and it pissed me off. The guy doesn’t have to do any work to receive adoration, and it comes based on the fact that people recognize him alone; case in point, the Digger was DQ’d from the race, and the WWF crowd gave him a standing O as he drove out of the arena. I hate everything.

Anyway, I have no idea who won the monster truck racing portion of the evening, probably because I took the break in sperm-killing noise to check out the crowd. I’d wondered what to wear before coming to this event—I skipped wearing my own enormous belt buckle so that Joe and I wouldn’t be accused of ridiculing people—and learned that the following are appropriate: racing clothing, Iron Maiden t-shirts with holes in the stomach, really ugly faces (especially if you’re children; and you thought I was making up the sperm-killing noise part) or gravity-defying pants that make no sense at all and almost make me stop staring at your perfect fake breasts. These pants were ridiculous, combining tight light jeans in front with tight dark jeans in back, paired with white pants on the sides. And the whole thing was held together with string. Joe was so impressed that he not only dubbed them “the greatest pants in history” and “worth the price of admission,” but he talked about them to our female friends on the ride home. So these were some special slacks.

It was at this point that the show trotted out “Quad Wars,” a feature you may remember from Monster Jam’s myriad “Kids are Just Eight Bucks” commercials. And you know what? Quad Wars mostly sucked. I liked racing go-karts as much as the next kid when I was 14, but I sort of lost interest when I could drive a car and kiss girls and the like. So even with a tackling incident in the “tag team” portion, watching 20-year old kids race them didn’t do much for me. Sorry.

Fortunately, the Monster Jam folks know how to fix a dud, and they trotted out Freestyle Motocross very soon after the “Wars” had concluded. The whole thing was awesome—imagine watching the X Games event where kids do flying tricks on dirt bikes, only there’s no interviews in between, and the tricks are done every 15 seconds instead of every five minutes. Just completely perfect, and the girls were totally impressed. I would spend more time talking about it, but they trucked out a red car at this point, and as the Motocross kids went back to the dressing room, out came…

Now, I’m not ten years old, but watching a crane that’s painted like a dragon chew up and breathe fire all over a red sports car while sound effects from Godzilla loop in the background for 20 minutes may just be the coolest thing I’ve ever witnessed. Of course, I suspected that my whole obsession probably has something to do with the fact that when I was 10, I used to draw pictures of Truckasaurus fighting Charles Barkley, but everyone was mesmerized by this. At this point, I turned to the girls and said, “And you guys go to plays!” Just then, the kid behind me (he of the blue slushie) stuck his head between the girls’ shoulders and said, “Now THIS is kids’ entertainment!” And they had to agree. With both of us.

The monster trucks rolled out again for a minute each of freestyle, but the excitement of the evening had already climaxed. Sure, we screamed our heads off when the Safe Auto truck rolled on its roof (as Allstate is a small arena, this was tough to do). But in the “by applause” voting for the night’s “winner,” Grave Digger won in a landslide, despite a pedestrian performance at best. The truck could have come out and blown its engine and it would have won. My friend Sara summed it up: “It’s because he’s Grave Digger.”

It didn’t seem like a particularly poignant quote until later in the evening. As we watched Nate Robinson fumble his way to a “on my 17th try” victory in the Slam Dunk contest behind wild, unreasonable fan support, it was clear why: It’s because he’s Grave Digger.

----Greg

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