Two things to note before getting to my thoughts on Fourth Night… which might be called Awesome Night in the very near future:
1) I again live-tweeted the night of racing. You can read this at www.twitter.com/truedestruction It’s great if you like things 140 characters at a time with occasional spelling errors. I want to again mention that you do NOT need to have a twitter account to read this; you do, however, need to have a twitter account to follow the Behind the Destruction twitter feed, which I, of course, recommend all of you do. Special thanks to all those people who messaged me during the night with questions and took pictures of me talking into my phone.
2) The Behind the Destruction podcast recapping the Fourth Night of TDA action is going to be recorded on Wednesday and will be available for downloading later this week; think Friday. Steve Gursky Jr. and I will get into all the action, the drama and issues of the Fourth Night. I want to specifically thank Johnny Ryan for his work with me on the last two all-TDA podcasts. His expertise and insight were fantastic and very much appreciated. We hope to have him back on the podcast at a later day to talk shop again.
• • • • •
Just before the Fourth Night of racing I wrote a column about the ten biggest surprises of the TDA season. Now, granted, it was not a predictive article—it was a column looking back at things that had happened—but I found it truly fascinating that during Fourth Night almost everyone one of the things I was surprised about ended up getting turned on its ear. Fourth Night was effectively a ‘revert to the mean’ night. 9 out of the 10 things that I wrote that I was surprised were happening this year ended up not happening Fourth Night. And the only thing that did end up happening was the one I had ranked as the tenth of the ten biggest surprises (I wrote that all Mean Green Machine does is win the night or lose in the first round). This either means I truly have my finger on the pulse of the TDA or I am surprised by exclusively non-surprising things; I’m hoping it’s the former.
Consider:
• I wrote: no one had been accused of cheating. Nope, now they have been. I heard from drivers too numerous to count that they believed the same team (and same driver) was cheating.
• I wrote: Seek-N-Destroy’s Greg Messich was running well. That changed as he sat out the first round race against Stranglehold and Steve Gursky Jr. took his place.
• I wrote: Mean Green Machine is like a Rosie Perez Quote… sometimes when they win they really lose and sometimes when they lose they really win. Well, Fourth Night they won and really won.
• I wrote: Orange Crush’s Tom “Brickman” Lewis and Reckoning’s “Speedy” Steve Vollbrecht were racing their asses off. Fourth Night, both men had relatively quiet races.
• I wrote: Reckoning’s Brian Anderson didn’t have any race wins. Nope, that changed when Anderson grabbed the checkered flag against Stranglehold.
• I wrote: the scorekeeping hadn’t gotten better. And, yup, it got better.
• I wrote: Reckoning and Orange Crush were atop the standings. And they now aren’t. Reckoning is still in first, but Orange Crush dropped to a tie for third.
• I wrote: The Junkyard Dogs haven’t won a race. Now they have.
• And, I wrote: Damage, Inc. was in second place. And they dropped to a tie for third too.
All that was missing was me writing that I was surprised that no orange car ever came screaming onto the track in the middle of a race, immediately trunked another car and then drove off the track twenty seconds later (a scenario, might I add, which was officially awesome, but more on this in a bit).
In this respect, I enjoyed the hell out of Fourth Night. The races were good—the Junkyard Dogs vs. Orange Crush race was positively enthralling—the only off-the-track drama came courtesy of a couple of fight-ish like things in the pits and a roster move that ultimately ended up not happening. The scorekeeping was also so much significantly better than Third Night that mere words don’t quite do it justice. Sure, the relay of that information to the scoreboard is still a work in progress, but let’s focus on the positive: every team that collected more laps than their opponent went on to the next round, and, to the best of my knowledge, no one needed more than five laps to get the checkered flag.
The storyline of the night was unquestionably one revolving around the name ‘Decker’. In northern Illinois dirt track racing circles, the name Decker is synonymous with winning, hard-nosed racing and some occasional extra welds. Even so, I don’t think anyone would have ever been able to expect a night of racing like the Decker family had at the Route 66 Raceway. I’m going to go out on a limb and state that I don’t think one family has ever had a better all-around night at the races than the Decker family did Fourth Night.
For starters, Mean Green Machine helper/support staff member/general mischief maker Megan Decker came into the night leading her division in points at Sycamore Speedway. She cheered on her one brother Derrick, who ran in the figure-8 race and came in second, her other brother, Ryan, who won the night with Mean Green Machine and her father, who won the amateur race. I mean, holy shit. The Deckers had such a good night, I can’t even come up with a good joke about how they could have made it better (maybe a little Decker could have won the kids race?). I’m convinced that the only reason that a Decker didn’t win the truck race was because a Decker wasn’t racing. In this respect, it was quite generous of them to allow the other people to try and win something.
As an aside, I can’t be the only one wondering about how an all-Decker team would do in the TDA next year, can I? If the league is looking for another exhibition race for next year, I can think of many worse things than a Decker vs. Gursky or a VanAllen vs. Milette family demo battle.
Saturday afternoon passed slowly and quite uneventfully. A lot of drivers were running a little bit behind schedule—numerous drivers were still working on their cars on Saturday, one was even dropping in an engine that he had gotten late Friday night thanks to a delay by his engine builder—and the pits were silent. It was quiet… almost too quiet. Then the races started and this all changed.
It quickly became a night of firsts, which was interesting given that it was the fourth night of racing in the season.
Damage, Inc and Reckoning started it off in a battle of the only two teams who hadn’t lost in the first round this year. Reckoning came out on top and pushed their streak to an amazing 13 first round wins in a row.* That means for 13 straight nights of racing, Brian Anderson and his Reckoning teammates (including “Speedy” Steve Vollbrecht, Nick and Wally Hartung, Nick Ritter, Steve Gursky Jr. and Sr. and Chris McGuire) have come out .500 or better on the night.
* This 13 straight first round wins could seem like some stat cherry picking, but let me explain why this is so impressive. As there are eight teams in the league, it means that exactly half of them, four, lose in the first round every night. By simple math, you’d expect a team to go 7-6 or 6-7 over the course of 13 first round races. And Reckoning has blown this percentage away. I’ll talk about their 11 finals appearances in the last 13 nights at a later date.
When Seek-N-Destroy faced Stranglehold, it marked the first cameo appearance by Gursky Jr. this year You might have noticed him, he was the guy in the red car who looked like a bat out of hell… when his car wasn’t giving him trouble. Stranglehold ultimately won the race, getting their first win of the season, leading Levi Turnbaugh to deliver the best joke of the season, asking Gursky Jr., “So you came out of retirement to lose to Stranglehold?”
The Junkyard Dogs then beat Orange Crush for their own first win in one of the most entertaining and jaw-droppingly heated races of the year.
The night also saw the first amateur race in history, the first car I can ever remember driving onto the track in the middle of a race (hi, Mike Leodoro!) and the first set of fisticuffs of the year.
A lot of people have been asking me about the ‘fight’ and, for the most part, there isn’t much to talk about. Adrenaline high, championship ending losses on their minds, things were said, things were done and a few punches were thrown. Like training camp fights in the NFL, it just wasn’t that big of a deal.
What was a big deal, however, was Leodoro flying out onto the track in the middle of the amateur race. And it has to be one of the top three moments of the season thus far for me. To paraphrase Chris Rock, I’m not saying Leodoro should have driven out onto the track in the middle of the race… but I understand.
I’ve known Leodoro for a couple of years and he has always wanted to get on the track in an actual demo. Unfortunately, he was helping Orange Crush and there weren’t any openings for an untested, unproven rookie. When I shot the first Behind the Destruction commercial earlier this year in May, Leodoro was talking warmly about the amateur race in August that he was going to be racing in. He had the car he was going to use picked out and was excited as hell. In May.
As the months passed, I spoke to him a number of times and his enthusiasm was growing. The night finally arrived. He drove up to the staging area, fired his car up, got ready to go onto the track and his shifter broke rendering the car useless. I’ve been in similar situations before where I’ve spent months upon months prepping something only to have it fail at the last possible second and it is one of the worst, most deflating feelings imaginable.
Knowing how much time, money and energy Leodoro had sunk into both helping Orange Crush and working on his amateur race car, Orange Crush driver Johnny Ryan brought Leodoro a working number 68 car. Leodoro hopped in, sped out onto the track and immediately hit another car, exciting the crowd, making everyone in the pits stand up, eyes wide, and ask with a huge smile, “Who the fuck is that?” We had no idea what we were witnessing, all we knew was that an Orange Crush car drove out into the amateur race and trunked someone right away.
It was the demo equivalent of an uninvited Colin Farrell wandering onto stage during the Oscars and grabbing the microphone from Billy Crystal or of Aaron Rodgers running onto the field during a Bears vs. Lions game, stealing the ball from Matt Forte and punting it into the stands. As a fan, it’s doubtful I’ll ever see something like that again, but the one time it happened, it was awesome. Check that.
It. Was. Awesome.
So, I’m not saying Leodoro should have driven out onto the track in the middle of the race… but I understand.
Fourth Night of racing had truly everything I could want from a night of demos: excitement, intrigue, hard-hitting races, unusual circumstances and entertainment value. And better still, all scoring issues, finish line issues and officiating complaints were absent. Now to call Megan Decker to find out about getting adopted…