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St. Petersburg Times (Florida)
January 19, 1987, Monday, City Edition
Monster trucks a big hit with fans
BYLINE: DARRELL FRY
SECTION: SPORTS; Motorsports; Pg. 10C
LENGTH: 426 words
DATELINE: TAMPA
TAMPA - Monster mania roared through Tampa Stadium Saturday night as more than 50,000 fans showed up for the four-wheeled rodeo event of the 1980s: monster truck competition. It was the second-largest crowd to attend the Super Bowl of Motorsports, a car-crushing, bog-driving, sled-pulling show of horsepower.
It was pure mud and guts.
"We really love coming to Florida to run," said driver Kenneth Geuin of Oklahoma City, Okla. "The weather is great and you couldn't ask for better fans."
The warm and clear weather was a welcome change for competitors and fans. Colder-than-normal temperatures greeted the inaugural event in 1985, and a downpour soaked the 40,000 fans at last year's show. Race promoters had hoped to draw more than 60,000 fans Saturday night.
"Tickets for the Genesis concert went on sale Saturday and people who wanted to get tickets for our event had to wait in line for hours," said Mike Boykin of Turnstyle, promoter of the truck event. "So we didn't sell as many tickets Saturday during the day as we thought. Overall though, we are very pleased. It was a good crowd and they seemed to enjoy it."
Due to a late start, the event didn't end until after midnight, but many spectators sat glued to their seats until they saw the finale: the legendary Bigfoot competing in the "Battle of the Monster Trucks." It was worth the wait.
On its first car-crushing endeavor, Bob Chandler's 13,000-pound high-rise Ford pickup got all four of its $ 2,700 tires off the ground, smashing 16 automobiles on the way to victory.
Thunder Beast is probably the only monster vehicle that got more attention than Bigfoot. That's because the gargantuan machine went out of control during a parade of monster trucks at the start of the event and then slammed into a wall and just missed two fleet-footed cameramen. No one was hurt.
To whet the horsepower appetites of the crowd for the monster-truck showdown, the show opened with truck and funny-car pulls and a mud-bog race. The latter was the more popular as drivers waged their jeeps and trucks against a 200-foot river of muck.
The mud bog, which was about 5 feet deep in the middle, usually won. Numerous vehicles had to be towed out, and all ended up with a mud-brown paint job.
LOAD-DATE: November 18, 1992
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Times Publishing Company
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