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The Antsy in his Pantsy Award: Damage, Inc.’s Dave “Repo” Swan Here’s a trivia question for you: what percentage of Damage, Inc’s races featured Dave “Repo” Swan getting out of his car during the middle of the race? Half of them. Damage, Inc raced six races this year and in three of them, Swan got...
The Most Battered Driver Award: RECKONING’S “SPEEDY” STEVE VOLLBRECHT Matt Wilson’s mother might have an issue with this recipient of this award, but Reckoning’s “Speedy” Steve Vollbrecht (unfortunately) truly earned it. As most people remember, Wilson was sawed out of his car and carted off to the hospital in the middle of the Damage Inc....
The Tpyo Award: Stranglehold’s Bill McMahon, er, Bill McMahen, uh, I mean Bill McMahan, no, um, Bill Mcmahen. Whatever. There’s an old joke that I still find amusing. What word is always spelled wrong? ‘Wrong’. Well, in the TDA, there’s a similar situation that isn’t exactly a joke. What driver’s name is always spelled wrong?...
Least Drivers: (tie) RECKONING and FULL THROTTLE On the other side of the driver turnover spectrum from Damage, Inc. were Reckoning and Full Throttle. Full Throttle swapped out Andy Fleischman for Levi Turnbaugh after First Night and then used its Turnbaugh, Ron Johnston, Jay VanAllen and Pete Milette Jr. lineup for the rest of the...
The Most Drivers: DAMAGE, INC On the teamdemos.com web-site, Damage, Inc. is listed as having 8 different drivers race for them this year, a number that ties them with Seek-N-Destroy for most drivers (there are 9 names listed for Damage, Inc., but Matt Wilson is listed twice). However, that doesn’t paint the full and complete...
The TDA off-season is upon us. Sure, it could technically be argued that this happened two months ago, but the beauty of the TDA is that there is effectively an outro to the season. The last race was in late September, but there were still final team get togethers, retirement celebrations and the unenviable task...
I have spent the last seven years as a fan of the Team Demolition Association (TDA) and the last two writing about it. In 2010, I followed Reckoning throughout their season for a year-in-the-life book, The Year of Reckoning, that I am current pitching to publishers. In 2011, interested in staying involved with the league,...
I like statistics. I love reading how Vegas computes its NFL lines, enjoy pouring over the weekend box office totals each Monday morning and, while I hate watching baseball, am fascinated by the myriad stats that are now available to fans. In the latter case, it’s not simply OPS and WHIP, but FIP, WAR and...
Minor Point #1: Transparency Made Its Way to the TDA It brings me great pleasure to be able to write that the TDA handled the scheduling of Fifth Night’s races with as much transparency, class and grace as could have been imagined. In hindsight, there wasn’t one element of the process that I would have...
Race of the Night: Orange Crush vs. Reckoning The last month of the 2011 season was filled with a lot of uncertainty and skepticism. Not only were there numerous discussions about what the tiebreaker was and whether it had changed since 2010—it hadn’t—and the method that the night’s race schedule would be determined, but there...
Minor Point #1: Roster Changes I love the team demolition derby. I am enamored of so many different facets of it, I probably could write an interesting column simply by listing the myriad things I enjoy about the TDA. To wit: I love Kyle Shearer’s fearlessness, Johnny Ryan’s ferocity, Ryan Bleuer’s speed, Steve Gursky Jr.’s...
