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Like most people, I occasionally take stock of what I’m doing and see what I can do to improve upon it. I also accept any criticism that people want to send my way and pay attention to all of it that doesn’t involve threats of bodily harm and recommendations for how to best get my head out of my ass.
That said, looking back at 2014, I’m not at all happy with the way I handled things in regards to writing about the Team Demo Association (TDA).
First an aside. I have no idea why I write about the TDA. I originally got involved in doing so while working to tell one of the more unique stories I’ve encountered: a year in the life of a TDA team. When my research on that was complete, I just continued writing about the league, sharing the stories I saw, the wild stuff that really went on behind-the-scenes and pretty much everything else that I loved about the sport. I’ve never been paid a single cent to do so by anyone—though if you’d like to click a couple of ads to the right, it would be appreciated!—I’ve just sort of done it because I’ve enjoyed it and I feel like it’s good for the sport as a whole.*
* It’s certainly not bad for the sport to have a professional journalist writing about it.
There is a lot to love about the demos and I do love a lot of it. Unfortunately, there are often a handful of things not to like about the demos too. And it’s hard to consistently preach love and write about the spectacular stories unfolding on the track when the politics of the sport creeps into that. It was terrible to see Mean Green Machine’s Matt “Opie” Pierce not be able to celebrate his team’s championship Fifth Night because he was in the hospital after taking an inadvertent driver’s door hit while racing. Terrible because Mean Green Machine had actually won the championship after Fourth Night.
This off-season though, I have vowed to (try and) accept the TDA for what it is: a horribly flawed entity that provides an amazing and unequaled sense of entertainment to its audience. What Real Steel’s Wally Hartung did last year was, well, unreal. Hartung raced like a man possessed. He was doing so many wonderful things on the track that, at a certain point, I began to watch his car rather than the race as a whole for fear of missing something unique he did. Other people in the stands did as well. Sure, the big crashes are exciting, but as I’ve become more familiar with the sport, seeing someone like Tom “Brickman” Lewis power slide into a head on with his opponent’s lead lap runner is even more invigorating.
No matter what, there is a lot to see, appreciate and love about the TDA, no matter how much political maneuvering enters the picture. And I am going to (try and) accept that. Yes, it’s more than likely that the “wrong” team will win a race this year because of faulty lap counting, but that’s part of the sport. Yes, it seems like it could be easily corrected and simply hasn’t been, but that’s is also part of the sport and the part I just need to (try and) accept.
In 2015, I want to (try and) focus on the elements of the sport that are worthwhile and genuinely deserving of examination. This is not to say that negative observations will be swept up under the rug or carefully ignored, it’s to say that there are only so many times that one can mention the score keeping issues before it begins to become monotonous. And no one wants to read ten articles by me complaining about the score keeping. Frankly, by this point, I’m sure you already have.
So going forward, I want to highlight the things that are worth our while and that should be celebrated. Thus, as a change of pace, rather than go through the teams and predict who is going to finish where—an exercise that might prove difficult given that everyone I speak to is convinced that there are only 5 actual teams, a fact not exactly refuted by the league’s releasing roster information for only 5 of the 8 teams—I’m going to preview the 2015 season by counting down my five favorite drivers that I’ve seen and written about since I became involved with the TDA.
Read: The 2015 TDA Preview: Part Two – The Honorable Mentions here