Welcome to the first in a series of essays and interviews inspired by the author’s OSMT (Old School Monster Trucks) monster truck history project.

“It’s 9:56M on a Saturday night, do you know where your kids are?”

Sounds like something a parent would get asked by one of those “authority” figures back in the 80’s who liked to dish out unsolicited “moral guidance” during a Sunday morning TV block that was keeping your grandpappy from watching the early game.  Well, to answer, if you were cool (be you parent or child), then maybe they were with you at the Ford/Budweiser USHRA Truck & Tractor Pull Championships featuring The Battle of the Monster Trucks when that question may have been asked in oh, say, January of 1986.

To be certain, there’s a lot to like about these photos, most of which are from the Philadelphia Spectrum (photographer unknown, sadly), but my favorite is the time on the scoreboard…more on that later, though.  First, let’s indulge in the setting as a whole, a packed hockey arena with the classic pulling track right down the center of the arena, flanked on both sides by an enticing variety of pulling machines and people standing freakin’ everywhere.

Well-worn blue jeans, cowboy boots and lightweight satin jackets (embroidered and emblazoned with sponsor logos, patches and a variety of automotive messaging) were the ubiquitous uniform of the night, topped off with a foam-front/net-back ballcap (colloquially known now as a “trucker hat”) if that was your thing.  These cheap-but-breathable pieces of headwear were as likely to have the iconic crest of the USHRA (United States Hot Rod Association) sanctioning body featured on them as they were a Ford oval or a Budweiser wordmark, any of which were plentiful and plenty acceptable that night. You could also throw in a mish-mash of tobacco and petroleum company-branded lids to, erm, top things off.

This being years before anyone in this scene probably knew or cared what a “smoking ban” was, the acrid smell of cigarette smoke wafts through the air in thick clouds, comingling with an atmosphere already redolent of spent hydrocarbons and abundant curse words.  You hear the tell-tale sound of..is that…a beer can cracking open nearby during an incredibly rare moment of semi-quiet?  You’re not quite certain if that guy in the brown flannel two rows down snuck a sixer in or not, but you wish you had. 

Maybe this recently-opened can of “beverage” belongs to the driver of that 2WD puller that thoroughly vomited out the contents of its engine onto the ground via a fresh hole in the oil pan that didn’t exist half an hour ago.  Liquid sympathy, 12 ounces at a time.  Either way, you’re jealous because that particular type of refreshment sounds damn good right now, but you aren’t spending the $2.25 they want on the concourse for a plastic 12oz cup of overly-foamy draft beer.  But hey, at least the gigantic Bud 6-pack riding the sled isn’t making you even more thirsty. Sadly, you forgot to sneak a few cans in via the hidden pockets you sewed inside your favorite jean jacket (the one with the Iron Maiden backpatch that your mom *hates* and your kids think you’re too old for) like you did for the last pull at The Vet.

The pulling has been fantastic tonight, but the Thumb Truck Equipment No. 8 pulling sled doesn’t seem to reset itself back to the starting line near the tunnel entrance as fast as it ought to so things are moving a little slow it feels like.  And you don’t mind one bit, this is your happy place. This is nirvana.  The back door of the arena must be open, an honest attempt to pump some fresh air in and thin out the thickening stratus cloud of fumes and molecular detritus hovering in the otherwise unmoving arena air.  You get a slight chill from a gust of cool air swooping in from the bowels of the arena but the freshness of it smells good, and you’re just about to reconsider that $2.25 beer when a new kind of thunder electrifies the masses huddled inside this modern coliseum, and you happen to note the time on the scoreboard above the endzone of the arena.

9:52PM

It’s a few minutes away from 10:00pm and things are about to get really, really good because the “whump-whump-whump” lope you’re hearing is coming from a supercharged big-block Ford that’s riding about 6.5ft off the ground, rather than nearly hugging the floor like those in the pullers you’ve already seen tonight.  Cleaned and polished to a mirror finish that Tony Montana or Stevie Nicks would have appreciated on some sort of primal level, The Virginia Giant’s internal combustion engine is no show-truck parlor trick.  Like the image that would spit out if your future grandchildren prompted AI to “dip Battersea Power Station in chrome and give it two carbs and a blower”, there’s much more at play here than a transplanted pony car engine that started life as a Dearborn clap-back at the Chrysler Hemi.  “Boss 429 Ford” has been artfully hand-painted on the front fender just below the marker light; a bold brag, a promise that this machine makes serious power that the driver hopefully isn’t afraid to use.

9:53PM

As the funny-car style flip-top body rises up in the air to reveal the guts of the leviathan, you’re struck by the incredible attention to detail the builder of this truck has thoughtfully spent their time on during its construction.  Like the business card scene in “American Psycho” that is still a decade and a half away from being filmed, you find that you’re talking to yourself inside your mind, noticing one fine point of craftsmanship after another.  “Look at the subtle use of a police lightbar on the double-hoop rollbar in the bed.  The tasteful thickness of the treadplate floor and firewall.  Oh my god, it even has pinstriping on the frame…”

9:56PM

Now fully-coupled to the sled, the Virginia Giant and its driver with the funny first name roll into the throttle, the front wheels of the monster coaxed into the air almost immediately as the captain’s right foot signals to the engine room “all ahead full!”.   This truck’s driver, Diehl Wilson, is not unfamiliar with the Thumb Sled no. 8 nor is its operator unprepared for the pull that’s already 40ft or so underway.  This must be a good sled, judging from the way one husky, bearded puller talked about it to the PA announcer earlier in the evening; it was a conversation you only paid half-attention to but you recall hearing his slow country drawl explain to whomever was listening that “it’s a real good sled, it pulls real well and I don’t mind hookin’ to it.”

You’re trying to wrap your mind around what kind of mechanical alchemy must be bubbling away when it comes to conjoining a 10ft-tall truck designed primarily to crush cars to a weight transfer machine designed primarily to be pulled by vehicles other than monster trucks.  There’s a two-person tango happening here to make this performance work, clearly, between the monster truck driver and the sled operator.  Unlike the Argentinian dance that the rest of the Western world thinks of, this tango has to be performed by its partners from a distance of 40 or so feet apart, on a dance floor made of compacted dirt and clay. 

It figures in your mind that there must be a million things that could break or go wrong between these two contraptions, but that thought leaves quicker than a restless 6yr-old who wanders into their parent’s room after 10pm and accidentally witnesses an appallingly different kind of tango/coupling.  The Giant is under full load now, both from the sled’s increasing impedance and the driver’s demanding right foot.  The violently-straining mill of the ornately-painted Bullnose is now turned up to 11, singing the song of its people and drowning out anything else in the arena along the way. 

You feel the full onset of goosebumps and notice simultaneously every hair on your arm and neck are standing on end as a single tear rolls down your cheek. From the fumes, of course.

For a moment you swear that the Giant’s frame and body are literally bowing under the strain of the sled’s stubborn resistance.  Tired mothers in the crowd immediately relate to the on-track struggle, having experienced something similar before while dragging an irate toddler through a crowded Woolworth’s just after the little turd decided to go completely limp in the aisle.  Call it a non-violent protest, probably something to do with not getting that G.I. Joe Transportable Battle Platform playset they wanted. The struggle continues.

9:57PM

Somehow less than a minute has elapsed since this transaction between fan and competitor kicked off, and the climactic finish has arrived in the form of the fullest kind of full pull you can get at one of these deals.  The Virginia Giant has now reared up on its haunches in some sort of part-victory-part-surrender stance, the front pair of massive full-cleat Firestones it wears parked neatly in the air with enough clearance underneath them that a spandex-ensconced jazzercise dancer wouldn’t ruin her giant hair walking underneath.  Angled at 23-degrees for optimal traction, the tread bars of the rearmost ‘Stones have burrowed themselves into the track surface, becoming a sort of fulcrum between the sled and the truck, a job nobody in Des Moines ever expected these to perform. Are those wheels aluminum?!

Wordlessly, together in tandem, the driver and sled operator have done their jobs.  Previously filled seats are abandoned so that jubilant cheers of approval might be roared by those the universe deigned fortunate enough to be here in this moment.  Standing on their feet in unison as untold numbers of empty beer cans, cups and forgotten paper bags of popcorn are trampled underfoot, they pay their vocal, unintelligible respects to the driver of the machine as he takes in the accolades of the crowd.  You’re noticing all of this when you realize that you’ve been shredding your own larynx the whole time as well, unable to escape from your own primal enthusiasm. Someone whistles very loudly directly in your right ear, a fact you won’t forget before tomorrow morning.

9:59PM

The clock on the scoreboard at the end of the arena is still half a minute away from hitting 10:00pm when you reach another realization:  you’ve been in this building since 6:45PM and this show is STILL GOING.  In fact, the track announcer has just made it known that there’s plenty more still to come…the pull-off finals, yet another monster truck has to pull the sled, and that’s not to mention FOUR monsters including the one you’ve just witnessed will be crushing a row of junk cars to end the show.  BIGFOOT is here for the love all that is holy and burns petroleum, and you’re totally positive you saw on the way in a freakin’ Jeep perched on top of monster tires.  Those clunkers that have been chilling trackside between two groups of pullers?  They’re going down baby, and there’s no way you’re missing that.  You then decide you will have one of those two-buck beers after all, and maybe a hot dog to boot; and why shouldn’t you? 

The night is young.

So what’s with the clock, anyways?

A fitting metaphor perhaps, but for me the clock in the first photo of The Virginia Giant at 9:56PM truly represents a time and era long since passed.  As I approach my 40^th lap around the sun this year, I look back at the monster truck and pulling shows of my childhood through rose-tinted glasses and everything I see is exciting and shiny, perfectly imperfect.  Through the soft-focus lens of a fading memory and low-quality photography, I find myself longing for the days of events that lasted five or six or more hours deep into the night.  By and large those days are gone and are not likely to ever return.

As a long-married parent of two young daughters (6 and 10 as of this writing), I can appreciate the efforts it must have taken parents in the late 80’s to coax their children into remaining reasonably focused and well-behaved during lengthy truck & tractor pulling and monster truck events (TTPMTE, for…short?) that lasted most of a normal 8hr work day.  It must have been a monumental task to maintain the focus and patience of a 6yr old child for that long of a show, given 6yr old kids aren’t notable for having much of either.  Or was it?

We’ve made it a bit of a tradition the last several years to attend one of the Monster Jam events that visit nearby Denver, Colorado when friends/past associates of mine are a part of the event crew.  Sometimes that means we’re ushered into the confines of the Ball Arena (named for the Ball Corporation, makers of aluminum beer cans among many other things) or set free to roam the media boxes of Mile High Stadium (which even as a die-hard Chiefs I fan will always respectfully refer to this stadium, regardless of whatever its current corporate overlords call it) while we watch the MJ trucks and drivers do their thing.  Now, for the ticket-buying public sitting in the stands, this is at best a 3-4 hour investment of their time I’d reckon, unless they make a full day of the pit party festivities which are particularly long at the stadium show.  This is a stark contrast to the 5+ hour comittment I remember my parents making when they would take me to shows as a kid (I was NOT leaving early, thank you.) 

That all said, I’m thankful for the opportunity I have to make monster truck shows a proper all-day affair for our daughters (although my wife is maybe not as thankful for that!) I would say our kids have longer than average attention spans than most other kids their age that we’ve met, but even they’re struggling by the time freestyle is halfway over.

Turns out some boffins with large foreheads and lots of data to analyze have apparently deduced that peoples’ attention spans have grown shorter over the years. Peoples’ minds are now engaged in a sort of instant-gratification ouroboros with demands for fulfillment met right this instant by some device or other person.  The cycle then goes on to repeat itself continually with an increasing amount of demand for shorter wait times and a decreasing amount of patience and attention span.  This, at least until the user in question decides its time to take a break from this vicious cycle and retreats to a bed-and-breakfast out in apple orchard country to “unplug for a bit”.  Upon arrival they’ll immediately demand an early check-in, briefly walk a nearby orchard to take some pictures to process and post to Instagram on the spot, then retreat to the comfort of their room where they’ll order dinner via DoorDash (use code “UNPLUG10” to save 10% on your order!).  What’s the WiFi password here again?

While I’m certainly not anti-cellphone per se, I do think above all else this device alone (and its requisite internet connection/capabilities) has certainly caused all of our perceived attention spans to wither compared to what they were, say, 35 years ago.  If you’re like me and you are fortunate enough to have some kind of photos from shows you attended as a child, then chances are you only have one or two rolls at best from any of those shows unless your mom or pops was Steve Reyes.  Shooting and developing film wasn’t free back then, you couldn’t see the image you had just taken on the screen to ensure you were happy with the photo, and you couldn’t fill your camera roll with endless selfies that you could later batch-delete to free space on your camera-equipped device (after you’d preserved the best of them in IG, obvs).  A person with only, say, 36 exposures available to take on the one roll of film they brought to the show is probably going to be fairly judicious with how they expend them; that is to say, they’re likely going to exercise patience and restraint with their photo-taking.  This is probably the main reason why there aren’t as many photos from that era as we’d all like there to be.  What is for certain however, is that fans today would not approve of being limited to about 30 photos per show (and no videos!) for any reason.

Side note: How amazing would it have been to have had a smartphone to capture images and video with in 1986?

Back in 2024 at Monster Jam, the clock in the stadium never reached anywhere near 9:56PM while the show was still going.  In fact, I think the post-show VIP autograph session had damn near wrapped up by that point.  I know this because we were back in our hotel eating Freddy’s Steakburgers by 11:00PM after a 10-mile drive through Denver traffic, a loop through the Freddy’s drive-thru and a quick stop for pictures with an Oscar-Meyer Weinermobile that was parked at a hotel adjacent to ours.  Side note (again): my 6yr old excitedly pointed out that the tube-steak-shaped machine was a “glizzy truck!”, causing my wife and I to stifle some serious laughter while silently cursing the internet for teaching her the term “glizzy”. 

There was a time when stadium TTP/MT events featured a whole roster of vehicle types competing: multiple pulling classes (tractors, 2WD trucks, 4WD trucks, exhibition classes, etc), one or more mud bogging classes, tough trucks, motorcycle and/or ATV racing, demolition derbies and even “thrill show” style stunts performed live.  To be sure, that’s only a partial list of what you might see at a stadium show; I mean, what child could forget seeing the multi-story car-eating robot-alien-dinosaur “Robosaurus” devour cars right before their eyes?  And that’s not to mention all the other characters that form the transforming-robot murderer’s row that most of us witnessed one or more times as a kid, but I digress. 

Today’s Monster Jam events (and to some extent, many other top-shelf MT events) have whittled the show format down to almost nothing but monster trucks on the track, advertisements on the big screen and a brief intermission between show halves.  All meat, very few potatoes. I can attest to the fact that most of today’s youth are really only good for a couple hours of live monster truck entertainment before they start to get restless, and that’s during a good, smooth-running show.  Denver’s most recent event was plagued pre-show by nearly 24 hours of constant precipitation that resulted in a plodding, slow-going show flow that was hampered by the absolute worst mud I’ve ever seen.  Trucks and drivers, track officials and dirt crew operators were hamstrung by the incredibly thick, sticky muck that clung to every available surface, all the while rain kept showering down. Nevertheless, being the consummate pros that they are, the MJ staff got the show rolling promptly at 7:00PM and had the track cold by a little after 9:00PM. The 38,000 or so rain-soaked fans who came dressed for the occasion seemed pretty damn happy from my vantage point. 

Maybe mixing mud and monsters was never a great idea, but it’s particularly unfortunate when it happens to the modern performance machines that they’ve become.  Where there was once a thrill in watching a Stage 1 monster snort massive shots of nitrous oxide en route to clearing a deep mud bog pit, or watching Stage 2 trucks splash through a half-assed mud pit at the finish line of an obstacle course, mud honestly has become an enemy to truck, driver, promoters and fans in this day and age.  This belief only reinforces what I just said about the MJ operation being consummate pros and somehow plowing their way through that Denver show against increasingly greasy conditions as the night went on.

A small percentage of monster truck super-fans would love to see a stadium show like those from yesteryear, complete with a full suite of truck and tractor pulling classes, mud bogs, and ample monster truck action provided by vehicles equipped exclusively with steel truck bodies and leaf spring suspension systems.  Think of this concept as the hillbilly cousin to the posh elderly gentleman with the curled white moustache who wears a scarf, glass goggles and leather driving gloves as he hustles his 1953 Jaguar C-Type around the local road course during the “Historic Auto Racing Weekend.”  Far more of us industry or industry-adjacent types would love to see something like this too, I guarantee it. 

But who’s buying it?  Or more importantly, who’s paying for it in the first place?  In a world where the monster truck industry at its very best still leans more towards the “entertainment” part of the phrase “motorsports entertainment” and profit margins are far slimmer than the average fan would suspect, its hard to imagine anyone (promoter, sponsor, team owner, etc) taking a risk on bringing a concept like that (back) to life.  Historic motorsports events have a justifiable following due to the pedigree of the vehicles involved; lots of long-time fans truly appreciate still being able to watch a Ford GT40 and a Ferrari P3 clash at Laguna Seca or Brands Hatch in 2024.  However, the monster truck industry’s fan base is primarily populated by ever-rotating waves of young children (and their eager-to-please parents) whose interest in the sport is a temporary passion at best. 

These fans buy a ticket to a monster truck show expecting the latest in what the sport has to offer and no amount of marketing or advertising will keep a great number of them from being disappointed when they show up to a 6-hour-long “Superbowl of Motorsports” that defies any and all expectations they had.

In a world where TV ads for monster truck shows feature headliner trucks doing backflips and breaking wheels off, I don’t think enough people are going to pay money to watch a restored/replica version of Hercules plod around the track and pound some unibodies into piles of plastic, especially after they saw a commercial of ‘ole Hercules doing just that.  I think all of us who consider ourselves OSMT fans are going to have to continue to come to grips with the fact that the Golden Age of Monster Trucks only lasted a few scant years (less than a decade, really) and it’s never coming back in any widespread way. 

All credit to those promoters who’ve tried their hand at nostalgia-infused tribute shows and/or have booked old school trucks to perform exhibitions as part of their wider, more contemporary events. Myself, I would like to see more of this kind of thing where it makes business sense and where the fans are given some context to better appreciate what they are seeing.  Further still, I think the International Monster Truck Museum & Hall of Fame is also a worthy and important cause despite its apparent flaws and I hope one day it will exist in a form that reaches many more fans than it currently does today.  Whatever all of these projects and attempts add up to is hard to quantify, but I still think they are massively important even if only to a small group of fans and industry members.

So will we ever get to see a truck like Virginia Giant dragging a sled down the track again in a packed arena a few minutes before most peoples’ normal bedtime?  Probably not.  But YouTube’s full of OSMT content, a 6-pack of Coors isn’t all that expensive and hot dogs are cheap and easy to cook.  So I suggest skipping the cigarette smoke, let the kids stay up well past 9:56PM and indulge in some monster truck nostalgia.

 It’s what Diehl Wilson would want you to do…probably.

For more from the Philly Spectrum, check out this gallery of classic fan-shot photos from the good people over at Bangshift.com!