Real Stuff on the Highway

             Flipping through the television channels, a commercial for an upcoming Monster Jam show at the Nassau Coliseum caught my attention. It had been well over a decade since the last time I was at a monster truck show and I had put it off in recent years, so I definitely didn't want to miss it this time around. There were going to be five shows across a Friday through Sunday. Of the days, Sunday was scheduled to have two shows (2:00pm and 7:30pm), but Sunday afternoon I was going to go to an antique toy & train show, and Sunday night is usually when the best television shows are on, so that day was out. Usually there's bigger things going on during a Saturday, so that basically left Friday as the only realistic day I could go. The tricky part was on Friday afternoon I had an appointment at Yankee Stadium regarding the re-location of my season tickets, plus the forecast called for snowfall at night, making a drive back and forth to Long Island less appealing and possibly dangerous.

             Since I wasn't sure yet whether I should really go to the show on Friday or push it back to Saturday, I figured I should take care of the Yankee tickets first and then when I got home, depending on how the weather conditions were looking, I could buy the monster truck show tickets online before driving out to Long Island. My appointment time for Yankee Stadium was 2:30pm and I took the subway down and made it well in time. The Yankees offer season ticket holders the opportunity to change their seat locations or make adjustments to their current plan(s) depending on what is available. Food is provided in the form all-you-can-eat hotdogs, pretzels and chips, plus soft drinks to wash them down with. I ended up with half of a hotdog and a diet pepsi. The 2009 World Series trophy was on display and fans can walk right up to it, I saw it last year as well. Soon after it was my turn to check out the seating area and holding a cold can of soda out on a cold winter day proved unwise ten minutes later. It was strange seeing the stadium completely empty and the grass looked like it hadn't been cared for since the 2012 season ended in October. I I wound up moving my seat to a new location and updated my season plan. As a result, once I returned to the welcome area, I had to wait nearly an hour to see a ticket representative to make all the necessary adjustments with my season plan. To help the time pass I treated myself to a bag of cracker jacks and a second can of diet pepsi. By the time I was done with everything at Yankee Stadium it was 4:30 pm, with the monster truck show three hours away at 7:30pm if I was going this night. The sky was looking clear of any snow, so I had a feeling that night should've been the night.

              When I got back home after a quick stop off to get some Chinese soup, there was still no signs of any snow, that made the decision final in my mind to buy the ticket. Roughly five minutes after I get the ticket online, I look out the window and see a few innocent snowflakes flutter from the clouds. By the time I leave for the show at 6:00 pm, its more than just a few snowflakes and its beginning to stick to the ground. A drive to Long Island didn't seem ideal at this moment, but with the ticket already purchased, I had no choice but to embark on the journey. I anticipated there would be some traffic with the weather conditions, plus the fact is was in the late-phase of the weekend rush-hour home. Leaving at 6:00 pm would give me plenty of time, or so I thought. It turns out from the toll booth nearly all the way to the Nassau Coliseum, I was crawling. Motorists tend to overreact when its snowing or raining and it was torture to be driving 25 mph when snow not had even accumulated yet on the ground. Better yet, the ingenious sanitation department never fails to dump their unnecessary dirty grey salt onto the roadways which actually doesn't melt the snow and ice, but instead makes front windows dirty and limits driver visibility. In addition, by driving slow, motorists allow the ice conditions to built up easier versus if they drove normally (with just a few miles slower than usual) the constant car tire action would melt any snow/ice on the ground instantaneously. Instead, sanitation workers apply the myth that they're actual needed for all snow conditions, when in reality its just a ploy so they can squeeze more overtime hours from taxpayers. In some places in situations the salt is needed, but not in all. Naturally my window got nice and dirty and little pebbles of salt managed to wedge their way between my windshield wiper blades, making the blade quite useless since each wipe would essentially salt up my window even further.

             As what always happen when there are slow highway conditions due to snow, the accidents started to pile up. Every ten minutes there would be two or three cars off to the side of the road with what looked like to be caused by fender-benders. Then on the other side of the highway there would be flat-bed trucks carrying cars which were damaged much worse. Common behavior after long periods of driving super-slow is once there is an opportunity to go faster, motorists use this burst of freedom to hit the gas harder than they should and they end up smashing into the car in front of them (which they couldn't see because their front window has been tarnished with filthy salt). At one exit a black SUV was turned sideways with the driver's side door smashed in. A police car was arriving to that scene by the time I passed by, still crawling at 25-30 mph. All the way through there would be police lights flashing in front of me, in my mirror (not for me), on the other side of the highway, the cops were certainly going to be busy. What was really frustrating was that although I left very early, the drive should normally take about forty minutes, I was on pace to be late for the show. Seemingly going to be late for the show and not knowing how bad the snow would be for the ride back home, and with battered vehicles littered all over the road, I was thinking that this wasn't turning out to be one of my brighter ideas in recent memory. If anything, there was more damage I was seeing on the road for free than what I would be paying to see a monster truck do inside an arena.
       
             There was one final culprit who was stalled in the middle lane of the highway for whatever reason. After getting by that annoyance, I was able to increase my speed from 25 mph to a whopping 50 mph. On their website, Nassau Coliseum lists their parking at seven dollars, but when I actually got there it was ten. Snow had already blanketed the ground and covered the yellow lines, so I'm not sure if I parked in a valid spot or not, but it looked sensible enough and I was already five minutes late. I was just hoping they wouldn't use wrongly parked cars as smash victims for the monster trucks. The last time I was at the Nassau Coliseum was 1997 when I saw a hockey game between the New York Islanders and the visiting New Jersey Devils. I remember the Devils won that game to a score close to 4-2. Other times I was at the arena for some wrestling shows back when the WWE was the WWF. The Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum opened in 1972 and was the home for the Nets of the basketball ABA League, with "Dr. J", Julius Erving as the star player. Eventually the Nets would join the NBA and the team would move to New Jersey before winding up in Brooklyn, where they play now at the new Barclay's Center. The only team the coliseum can hang its hat on is the New York Islanders of the NHL, and that is headed for extinction with the Islanders planning to join the Brooklyn Nets at the Barclay's Center after the 2013-14 hockey season. There's doubts about the coliseum's future and losing the Islanders might've been its deathblow. In the age of the new modern arenas with all the luxury suites, bars, clubs, shops, bells-n-whistles to attract the bandwagon type of fan and price out the real fans, its a welcoming experience to go to a place like the Nassau Coliseum as a throwback to what a sporting arena used to feel like. In addition to the monster truck show, I wanted to make sure I got to the coliseum at least one more time before a wrecking ball gets taken to it.

              The parking lot was rather packed for a snowy night, but perhaps like myself, people bought their tickets and had no choice but to tough it out. Even though I was a few minutes late, I didn't miss any action. I guess under these conditions they knew people would be filing in late. With a fifteen-dollar ticket special for kids, there were alot of families present. In fact, during the breaks the hallways had me thinking I was back in grade school with all the little kids running around. Speaking of the hallways, the coliseum is heavily decorated by the blue and orange colors of the Islanders franchise, the last thread of relevance that keeps its doors open. After winning an astonishing four championships in a row from 1979 to 1983, the Islanders franchise has fallen on hard times which is part of the reason there has been no push to renovate or re-energize the building. I was able to find my seat rather quickly and the first thing I noticed was how cold it was. I'm not sure it was because of the trucks and the exhaust fumes they would be emitting, although there were two large-sized fans aimed to blow the smoke straight up in the air. Another reason could be that since it was an ice hockey venue, perhaps there was cold ice under floor causing it. Either way, throughout the entire show I was able to see my breath and I needed to keep my jacket on. Every so often I would leave my seat and venture out to the hallway just to warm up a little. The seats were a little more than half full, which is about the expected crowd size for these types of shows. The Islanders championship banners as well as the retired numbers for former players hung high from the rafters, and below them on the ground were car shells waiting to be crushed.
                 
             The most infamous truck on the circuit is Grave Digger, who I saw at my last monster truck show in Madison Square Garden back in the late 90's. On this night there was also Grinder, Scarlet Bandit, El Toro Loco, Monster Mutt, Bounty Hunter, Aftershock, and properly named for snowy night, Storm Damage. The event had a ringleader on a microphone to keep the crowd involved and narrate the action. He would also find his way into the crowd to give away t-shirts and other prizes. There was a cool helicopter boomerang he kept tossing into the audience that I wanted, but it never came close enough for me to grab it. Monster Jam has been doing these shows at the Nassau Coliseum for the past twenty seven years, and someone in the audience claimed to have never missed a year. The first competition was concerning the cars on the outside rim of the track. The deal was the trucks had thirty-seconds to run over the cars on both sides and each truck would get a number between one and ten based on how spectacular they looked doing it. After the other trucks had their turns, Grave Digger finally made his appearance. Created in 1982 and driven on this night by Gary Porter from a team from North Carolina, Grave Digger to no surprise was the crowd's favorite, and won the first round of the competition. Upon receiving a plaque for this meaningless win on a snowy night in a old run-down arena, Gary Porter took the plaque into the audience to give it away to a kid. A folk lift truck would come out after each round, sometimes even after a race, to straighten out the cars while a crew on the ground would clean up any debris that could cause a truck to pop its tire and do who knows what sort of damage. It was during these breaks where I would go out into the hallways to warm my bones. The $3.50 small cup of hot chocolate was worth every penny.

            The next competition was head-to-head races which two trucks would race around and whichever trucks was the first to crush the outside pile of cars three times, was the winner. They kept pinning two trucks at a time against each other until it was down to Monster Mutt and Grave Digger. There would be a second meaningless plaque for Gary Porter, because Grave Digger won again!! Just like the first plaque, Gary brought it into the crowd to give it away to a lucky fan. To switch it up a little from the trucks, they next brought out some ramps for dirt bikes and regular bicycles. For about ten minutes, dirt bikes jumped the big ramp while a team of cyclists did all sorts of flips and jumps on the smaller ramps. Once that was done there was a fifteen minute intermission. I used that time to warm up again and even visited the souvenir stand to buy a Grave Digger t-shirt. When the show was back it would be trucks only from then on out. The third competition was the donut wheel-spinning contest in which each truck would be graded on a scale of one through ten. I hope things weren't fixed, because Grave Digger had one for a third time. This time though, Gary Porter signed the plaque before giving it away to an audience member. That left it to the fourth and final content of the night; each truck would have sixty seconds to smash up any and all cars and vans they wanted to and would be graded on the scale of one to ten. As this night was warring on, the arena was getting colder and people started filing out, I'm guessing with the uncertainty of the weather and road conditions. The energy was lacking from the crowd that was there for the previous three truck contests. I figured the way the night was going for Grave Digger, he would've won this too, but surprisingly Bounty Hunter really stepped up his game and put on a very impressive car-crushing performance for the upset. I was a little disappointed in Grave Digger not winning the last one that myself, and what was left of the crowd, started to leave before the driver was awarded with his plaque. When I got back to my car the snowfall had stopped, but ice cycles were hanging off my front bumper and my windows were completely covered. I needed a few minutes to clean up the car before I was able to take the demolition derby highway back home.

               That's where I would be up against the real stuff....