When Trucks Fly | The New Yorker

Hayes said he sometimes follows the Cat-equipment rodeo, the Olympics of heavy machinery. “I have done a quarter flip on an excavator,” he told me.

“I’ve picked up eggs,” Boston Rob said.

Hayes went on, “The longer you’re in them, the more time you have to think of stupid shit to do with them.”

The thing that makes a monster truck is the tires. They must be at least sixty-six inches tall, which happens to be the height of the average American. The appeal has a certain timelessness: people have always liked really big stuff, particularly of the unnecessary variety. Stonehenge, pyramids, colossi, Costco. For perhaps obvious reasons, this is usually a male impulse. With trucks, it’s also an American one, which has a lot to do with excess time and income, and our collective imperialist leanings. Then there’s the land itself. We’ve had to carry lots of people and lots of mail over vast and varied terrain. Marty Garza, a monster-truck historian, discovered that by 1894 some guys in Rochester had built a carriage with nickel-trimmed details and enormous wheels which they called their “monster truck.” Two years later, Gottlieb Daimler invented the pickup.

“What about me would possibly make you think I regularly shave my legs?”

Cartoon by Brooke Bourgeois

Like the wheel, monster trucks were conceived by multiple men, but the godfather of monster trucks is Bob Chandler. Chandler, something of an engineering savant (“I actually compare him to Einstein,” his daughter, Ann Trent, told me), owned a four-wheel-drive shop outside St. Louis. He liked to go off-roading in local creeks and mud pits. Over time, as he went looking for more things for his Ford F-250 to conquer—abandoned coal mines, slag heaps—the truck got bigger. Eventually, he added giant tires from a fertilizer spreader. (To accommodate them, he once used an axle from a military rocket launcher.) “My wife would say, ‘Why do you have those bigger tires?’ ” Chandler told me. “I said, ‘Because I can.’ ” He called the truck Bigfoot. He parked it in front of his shop, as advertising. “One day, he called me and said, ‘Hey, I want to crush cars,’ ” his former business partner, Jim Kramer, told me. “My exact reaction was ‘What the hell do you wanna do that for?’ ”

Kramer nevertheless filmed Bigfoot driving over a few junkers. The tape got around. People went crazy. In 1983, Chandler took Bigfoot 2 to a tractor-pulling show at the Pontiac Silverdome, in Michigan. In front of sixty-eight thousand people, he drove it onto the roof of an old car. The crowd’s reaction was almost religious. People wanted to touch it. Thousands rushed the floor. “My son was in the truck with me, and I said, ‘Roll up your windows,’ ” Chandler said. He was worried they might be crushed themselves.

Before long, monster trucks were everywhere. Upstarts used tires from Alaskan military transport vehicles, desert oil prospectors, and swamp trucks. Chandler put a set of ten-footers on Bigfoot. The truck, fully kitted, weighed about the same as a regional commercial jet. Variety abounded. There were monster trains, monster tanks, monster Vanagons, monster school buses, and a monster ambulance called the Whambulance. A truck called Mad Dog drove across the Lake of the Ozarks; sixty-six-inch tires are so buoyant that the trucks float. The trucks had names like 5 Ton Turd, Mt. Crushmore, Crush Socialism, Alcohaulin, Bad Pig, BlownIncome, Fat Landy, Jumpin’ for Jesus, DT-Maxxx, and Bobby Wasabi’s Wasab-A-Saurus. In Mexico, drug cartels have recently outfitted monster trucks with battering rams and machine-gun turrets to use in shootouts.

Monster-truck ads were often the ones in which a man screamed “Sunday!” over and over again. That’s because shows were often in the kinds of places where businesses were closed on Sundays. Jan Gabriel, who popularized the “Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!” tagline, did it originally for a drag race, but he later made millions of dollars selling monster-truck VHS tapes, and died on January 10, 2010—a Sunday. The industry attracted a particular crowd. One monster-truck pioneer kept as pets two black bears, which he named Sugar and Spice.

At first, crushing was enough. Soon, promoters added drag races, small jumps, and gimmicks like tug-of-war. Monster Jam used to ram trucks through R.V.s filled with flour; they’d explode like a powdery firework. Before my trip to the Meadowlands, I’d assumed that the whole point of a monster truck was to smash stuff, but my understanding was outdated. Monster Jam still likes wrecking a truck or two, but Dalsing, the global-operations director, told me that the latest thing is what he calls “technical, big-air events.” This involves launching vehicles that are about the same size and weight as an African bush elephant as high into the air as possible. Seeing this in person leaves an impression. Bari Musawwir, a superfan (“I used to make engine noises at the grocery store”) who became a driver, told me he witnessed the first monster-truck backflip landed in competition, in Jacksonville, in 2010. “I remember grown men hugging in the stands,” he said.

The day after the dirt was loaded in at MetLife, I met Matt Delsanter, the technician for a truck sponsored by a chain of hair salons, called the Great Clips Mohawk Warrior, whose roof has custom-cut broom bristles shaped like spikes of hair. Delsanter wears his hair in a nearly identical Mohawk, which he spikes on event days. When I arrived at the pit area, in the parking lot, he was buffing out the truck and conferring with a mulleted mechanic named Craig, who greeted me with “Mahalo.”

Monster Jam has multiple tours, and each of them competes weekly. The mechanics travel from city to city with the trucks, which are transported on big rigs. (One time, a mechanic rode in the back of the trailer, buckled up in the monster-truck seat.) The trucks always sustain some kind of damage, often catastrophic, and the technicians have to get them ready to go by the weekend. Delsanter tapped Mohawk Warrior. “I’ve probably sat in that seat more than I have on my own couch,” he said.

He continued, “I’m about to put the big tires on, if you’d like to see that.” The tires weigh six hundred and forty-five pounds each. He rolled one over and grabbed an enormous wrench gun. “Big tools for big trucks!” he said. Then he showed me around the trailer, which serves as a mobile auto shop. A modern monster truck has as much in common with a pickup as a pickup has with a golf cart. At its simplest, a monster truck is a steel-tubed roll cage sitting atop a drag racer. The engine supplies as much as two thousand horsepower. Trucks have gone more than a hundred miles an hour. Instead of diesel, the engine burns methanol, at a rate of three gallons a minute. The motor lasts only thirty hours before a piston explodes straight out of the engine block. The trucks sound as loud as you’d imagine, although, a few years ago, Chandler created an electric Bigfoot that didn’t make any sound at all.

Today, a lot of monster trucks don’t look like trucks. They have fibreglass shells that are molded into pirate ships, dragons, or zombies.“The trucks are built almost identically,” Delsanter said. The technicians’ magic is in adapting to the dirt. If the track is tacky, Delsanter balloons the tires. If it’s marbly, he likes them flat, for traction. On a sandy track, some mechanics tighten the sway bar. The right touch can make the difference in a race. Delsanter is very competitive.

“Matt, he’s ate up if we don’t win,” Bryce Kenny, Mohawk Warrior’s driver, told me. Kenny drives full time, but some drivers work day jobs. (Some across the industry make as little as five hundred dollars a show. A few stars can make six figures.) Brandon Vinson, who won the racing at last year’s World Finals—the sport’s Super Bowl—owns an earthmoving business. Another driver, Kayla Blood, works as a real-estate agent. Kenny grew up on a drag strip. He raced a dragster that was his grandfather’s. In 2011, after the Great Recession hit, he had to give it up. He found a job as a corporate headhunter to try to buy it back. “I thought, I’ll just go create wealth so that I can run it myself,” he said. When Monster Jam called, he decided to take a thirty-per-cent pay cut.

Kenny and Delsanter are unusually loyal. Delsanter says he’d refuse a promotion in order to stay on Kenny’s team. He worries constantly about truck safety. High jumps can carry more force than a highway crash. “It can get very violent,” Kenny told me. “Me, I got this big old giraffe neck. My dad’s a chiropractor, though, so that’s like the best thing ever.” Delsanter calibrates the shocks, which are filled with nitrogen gas, to the right stiffness. “It’ll knock your fillings out if you’re driving over a speed bump, but thirty, forty feet in the air you’ll feel like you’re on a La-Z-Boy,” Delsanter said. The machines tend to break down in unexpected ways. “These trucks are sentient,” Delsanter said. Sometimes he talks to his. When Mohawk Warrior won its first event, this spring, “I gave her a little pat,” he said. “I was, like, ‘You did it, girl, you finally did it.’ ”

I, too, worried for Kenny. Standing next to the truck, it was difficult to imagine it up above the parking-lot lights, airborne. The show was the next evening. In the afternoon, I hung around the pre-game “pit party,” where fans check out the trucks and get autographs. A tent run by Morgan & Morgan, “America’s Largest Injury Law Firm,” offered a raffle for a hundred dollars.

A typical Monster Jam event has three parts: racing, two-wheel skills (wheelies and other stunts), and freestyle, the grand finale. In the stadium, the dirt crew was manicuring. The track looked great—a spiral of ramps surrounding a huge tabletop of packed dirt. The biggest jumps were ten feet tall. The first two tiers of seats were full—nearly fifty thousand people. “We sell four million-plus tickets a year,” Dalsing said. “That’s more than Taylor Swift.” Monster Jam had appointed, as grand marshal of the event, Jason Biggs, the actor from “American Pie.” He’s a longtime fan. He took a microphone and announced, “This! Is! Monster Jam!,” and the racing began.

I’d heard some rumors that Monster Jam shows were rigged, but Dalsing was adamant. “We’re not W.W.E.,” he said. The company is trying to present monster-truck driving as a legitimate sport. Dalsing recently forbade drivers to call events “shows.” “I’ll fine them a dollar,” he suggested. (He would donate the proceeds to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital.) It soon became clear to me that scripting events would be difficult. Trucks break down. Weird things happen on the dirt. Kenny, for example, won his first-round race, over Kayla Blood, by six one-thousandths of a second. He reached the finals, and then almost forfeited because of a balky battery. Delsanter had to run into the hot pits with jumper cables. Mohawk Warrior edged out Grave Digger, Monster Jam’s most famous truck, in a photo finish.