A little more than three months have passed since that magical night in Las Vegas when Adam Anderson became the youngest World Champion in Monster Jam history, so when I had a chance to spend a few minutes with the Taz driver before he went out and won the racing competition in Brussels, Belgium, recently, I asked him how he felt about winning the title, now that he has had a few months to enjoy the reality that he is the World Freestyle Champion.

Much as he was that night while accepting his championship hardware with his family and crew celebrating with him, “Double-A” still seems a little stunned that he has already grabbed his first championship, but clearly with some time for the magnitude of his accomplishment to sink in, he realizes just what an incredible night that really was for him. “It was definitely really, really special. It doesn’t happen to everybody,” Anderson told me. “This has been my life, I’ve grown up in it, and it’s all I know. Then to be at the top of it already, as young as I am in the sport, I couldn’t even believe it. When I’ve won other times, even when I won my first stadium major freestyle I was happy, it was cool. But then to go in and win the World Championship in Las Vegas was just an unreal feeling.”

So what was it like during his amazing run? Was he aware during the run that he was having a great performance, a championship caliber run? “Yeah, you kind of are,” Adam admitted. “If you know if you’re off you just can’t keep your mess together. You have to be thinking straight when it’s going on. And it’s sad to say that after the run I cannot tell you what I did. I have no clue. But you have to have your head on straight and you know when you are on a good run.”

After completing his awesome freestyle and edging past Dawn Creten by one point for the lead, Adam said he was thrilled, but knew he was not the champ yet, because his father, Dennis Anderson in Grave Digger and seven-time World Champion Tom Meents in Maximum Destruction were still to come, and every fan of Monster Jam, as well as every competitor, knows how tough they are tough to beat. “They are. They’ve brought us to where we are today,” the young Anderson continued. “What I’m trying to do now is bring it to another level. And it’s tough to do because they follow right up with anything that you do and they’re gunning for everybody out there. They do not want to let anyone else win.” But on this night neither of the big two could keep the next generation of Monster Jam from grabbing the spotlight.

For Adam his first chances to compete as the reigning freestyle king have come in Europe last month, and he says it was really exciting for him the first few times when he heard top level Monster Jam announcers Darren Pallen and Greg Whitacre introduce him as a champion: “It really is. To hear ‘Adam Anderson, the World Champion’ in the same sentence is just unreal to me,” Anderson admitted. “It’s almost like it didn’t really happen because I haven’t been around long enough to even feel like I should have a World Championship. But I do, and I think I earned it in Vegas, I feel like I had a very good run. Not taking anything away from anybody else, but it was just unreal out there.”

Freestyle being a judged competition means that often those watching differ on who they thought won, and at the World Finals, with 24 of the sport’s greatest performers in action, there has been discussion after many a finals about how this driver or that driver should have won. This year there has not been very much of that type of talk, and I’ve not heard anybody say they did not think Anderson deserved to win “That feels really, really good to me,” Adam confided. “You know it almost feels better when you’re at a big stadium show, and you always want to win, but when you don’t win and the fans tell you ‘you should have won it’, over top of Grave Digger, Max-D, whoever it was that did win, that makes you feel really good, sometimes even better than when you actually straight up won it. But this year (at the World Finals) everybody told me that I earned it, and that really felt good to me.

“ I still remember at the NGK Spark Plugs World Finals live, when I had the privilege of getting the first interview with the new freestyle champ, that Adam looked at me and said “what do I do now?’, and I told him he needs to just come back and win more titles, something Anderson clearly plans on doing, having more World Championships in his future. “Hopefully it is, but I don’t know what I’m gonna do,” the Taz driver commented when asked about more titles in the future. “To go out there and do that, I mean you’re on the edge. That’s all the sport is any more, on the edge the entire time, and to be out there on the edge the entire run and not mess anything up, not break the equipment, and pull it through, that’s tough to do. It just chances that you have to take, that’s all there is to it. It’s like when Tom went out and he took the chance first thing and it didn’t work out for him. So there’s so much give and take that I don’t know how I’m going to do in the future. I have no clue.”

As Adam noted earlier, he and many other new stars coming into the sport will take it into the future and to the next level, so I asked him if he could see himself in a rivalry for the top spot with a Damon Bradshaw, or maybe an Alex Blackwell, or even his younger brother Ryan, a rivalry that might be on a par some day with what has been motorsports’ greatest rivalry, the battles over the years between his father and Meents. “Hopefully it will be like that one day,” Anderson said while paying tribute to his Dad and Tom. “That rivalry is awesome. It’s awesome to watch when those two guys are going at it, whether it’s racing, freestyle, whichever, and everybody loves to see it. Now a lot of people want to see me race my Dad, and I love to race my Dad. I’ve only raced my Dad straight up one time, and I beat him but I ran off the cars ‘cause I was trying way too hard to outdo him so he actually got the win, but it wasn’t by much though. He was right there. I was out of control, and I remember growing up telling him that he was out of control. Now I’m out there doing the same thing he was.” So Adam Anderson is proudly taking up the mantle as a major player in the future of Monster Jam, while relishing his opportunity to compete right now with the superstars who have blazed the trail to make the sport so popular today. And he heads into that future already known as a World Champion.