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There are a some interesting storylines unfolding this year in the TDA. They include:
The Injured Boys are Back
The two most surprising things I saw this year when the TDA released its rosters of five of its teams were that Matt “Opie” Pierce and Carl Brouwer were on Mean Green Machine and Orange Crush respectively.
On one hand, this is awesome news! Pierce and Brouwer are not only good drivers, but it means that they are healthy again! On the other hand, the last time anyone saw Pierce or Brouwer on the track, they were being sawed out of cars and rushed to the hospital for emergency care. Brouwer’s medical bills totaled more than the GNP of Italy and Pierce’s weren’t far behind. Just the fact that both men were out of the hospital and able to walk on their own two feet seemed pretty impressive.
Joining Pierce and Brouwer in returning from major injury is Brian “The Tickler” Anderson. Anderson is a little bit ahead of Pierce and Brouwer in the respect that he came back to race for Seek-N-Destroy Fifth Night of 2014. Now part of Full Throttle, Anderson looks to be racing a little more than in spot duty.
Injury is a part of any sport. Compared to the NFL and even the NBA, the TDA is a pretty “safe” sport. When you hear that cars are going to be crashing into one another at 45 miles per hour, it’s easy to imagine that everyone is going to break a leg or be severely injured during the course of a season, but such is not the case. The TDA has a pretty good track record of driver safety. The one downside is that when drivers do get hurt, they often get really hurt. Like not being able to work for six months kind of hurt. Such was the case with Pierce and Brouwer (and to a lesser extent with Anderson).
At first I couldn’t believe the men were on the rosters of TDA teams again. Then I thought about it and wondered why I was surprised. Football players suffer horrible injuries and return all the time! What was different with demo drivers? I didn’t have a good answer for that. So, welcome back, boys! Be safe! We’ll be cheering you on!
Mean Green is Reproducing
Mean Green Machine won the 2014 Championship and the drivers celebrated by going out and knocking up women everywhere. Luckily for all parties involved, those women happened to be dating/married to the drivers in question. (Congratulations again, Ryan and Jenny and Andrew and Lisa!) Both babies are due during the season. And that’s where things will get interesting. Come August and September, how are an incredibly tired Andrew Sherman and Ryan Decker going to hold up? It will be interesting to see.
It won’t be as interesting as my grassroots campaign to get Ryan Decker to name his child “Becker” and to then encourage her to go on a long journey to learn how to plan a certain board game that she can then destroy so that I can call her Becker the Checker Wrecker Trekker Decker, but it will be interesting nonetheless.
(As an aside, thank God for RhymeZone.com That last paragraph would not have been possible without them).
(As another aside, it is shocking how few everyday words rhyme with ‘Decker’. It seems like there’d be a lot more.)
Will a Woman Race for the TDA this Year?
… Speaking of Deckers, let me focus on another one: Megan Decker.
Megan Decker has been racing at Sycamore for years. She’s often at the top of the female-specific standings and holds her own against men as well. She’s raced in the Banging for Boobs event every year it has been held at Route 66 and comports herself extremely well on the track.
The TDA is also currently experiencing a bit of a driver crunch. When it released the rosters of the teams racing this year—something that I, as a journalist, genuinely appreciated—it only did so for 5 of the 8 teams in the league. The move suggested that the other three teams might have a bit of, uh, roster fluidity, shall we say.
For all I know, Ryan Bleuer, Johnny Ryan, Steve Gursky Jr. and Ed “Booger” Walker are going to show up First Night racing as the Crazy 8s, but, more probably, teams 2, 7 and 8 will be a patchwork of former drivers, guest drivers and drivers that wouldn’t necessarily be able to crack the rosters of the other five teams. My question is: why not get Megan Decker involved on one of those teams?
Decker is mentally tough enough to handle the burden of being the first female to race in the league and skilled enough a driver that she wouldn’t be a liability on the track. From a business stand point, bringing in a female driver would get tween and teen girls interested in watching the demos, a demographic that isn’t exactly in the TDA’s wheelhouse right now, and would also bring a lot of positive press to the sport. If a Megan Decker jersey were made, my guess is that it would instantly become a best seller.
Decker might need a little help with her building (with D the Builder in house this could be negligible), but the benefits to this move would far out weigh the negatives.
Will The Sting, The Locomotives or The Crazy 8s win a race?
As I mentioned above, I have no idea who is on Teams 2, 7 or 8. Beyond the fact that the teams have names, I know almost nothing about them. Neither do a lot of other people. One source told me that he wasn’t sure of anything in regards to Team 2 other than they “exist”. I do know that Greg Mesich is still Team 2’s owner… but have no idea whether he’s going to be racing this year. Another source told me that he knows one driver on The Locomotives (Team 7), but that one driver didn’t know anyone else who was on the team. Team 8, The Crazy 8s, is even more in a state of flux than that. I talked to three people who are all affiliated with the league and not one of them could tell me who the team’s owner was, who was racing for it or what their colors were. “It’ll be an enlightening First Night,” one source said, laughing.
With all these unknowns circulating, I began to wonder: is it possible that the TDA could have three 0-5 teams this year?
First things first. It’s technically possible. It would require all three never to face each other during the season; if two of the teams pulled each other in the first round, one team would be guaranteed a win. All three teams could conceivably pull Teams 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6 in the first round and lose each time. So it could happen, though the odds of that are very low. Part of me hopes it will happen because it’d be funny and another part of me hopes that two of the teams face off against one another First Night just to remove it from the realm of possibility.
Speaking of interesting scheduling quirks, one thing I’d actually be more wary than the three 0-5 teams is a scenario when 2, 7 and 8 end up on the same side of the bracket. Until I’m shown differently, I’m going to assume that the 2, 7 and 8 teams are going to be bad. And no one team should be ‘rewarded’ with a trip to the finals by beating two of the bad teams in the first and second round.
Of course, on the flip side of the coin, if 2, 7 and 8 are spread out across the bracket and don’t face one another, that means that there will only be one real race in the first round, the race between the two teams that are forced to face off against each other as opposed to 2, 7 or 8.
The TDA has had replacement teams previously, but never to this degree. It will be fascinating to see how this all plays out.
See you all at the Route 66 Raceway on Saturday, May 23rd!