Can you believe it? We are less than a month away from the start of the new Monster Jam season when the Speed TV cameras follow an all-star line-up back to the Metrodome in Minneapolis for what has become the traditional start to the new season, the December Minny Jam.
Scheduled to be in that field, along with the likes of Dennis Anderson in Grave Digger and Tom Meents in Maximum Destruction will be Adam Anderson in his Taz truck. Recently I had the chance to chat with the young superstar, looking back on the 2009 season and ahead to the new campaign.
Adam Anderson started last season being recognized for the first time in his budding career as a World Champion, having taken home the World Freestyle Championship in Las Vegas at Monster Jam NGK Spark Plugs World Finals 9 in March of 2008. I started our conversation by asking Adam if starting the ’09 season as a world title holder made things significantly different than in previous seasons. “It definitely did,” was Anderson’s answer. “A lot of the shows I went to I had to run last, even behind my Dad and Tom. I did it before in the Digger truck, running behind Tom. But this year I beat Dad one time. I mean he was on a roll this year. He doubled down multiple times, he won many, many times, and it was probably one of his best years by far. There was definitely pressure being the World Champion, coming in and trying to carry that. It was a tough deal. I tried my best every time though.”
We’ve talked over the past several years at length about all of the new talent coming into the sport, and with Adam’s championship run in 2008 followed up by Damon Bradshaw driving Air Force Afterburner to the World Freestyle Championship in 2009, you can certainly make the case that the young guns have already arrived, something that Adam Anderson, one of the leaders of the young guns, takes great pride in. “Oh yeah. Everybody has stepped up their game,” Anderson claimed. “Not that long ago there were just a few trucks on top. A lot of people said there were A trucks and B trucks. It’s not like that anymore. Everybody’s on kill, everybody’s awesome drivers now. You have to watch everybody. It’s made it harder. Even though it may seem like there’s two separate groups everybody is their own man out there and it’s tough. It’s not that I go out there and I want to beat just the older guys that have been around for awhile, I want to beat them all. We’ve all stepped it up. I just want to come out and outdo whatever they’ve done. It’s a tough feat but we’re doing it.”
For all of the Monster Jam superstars some of the biggest changes and new challenges in 2009 came not from other drivers, but from the track designers who created exciting racing courses and many new style huge freestyle obstacles, many designed to push not just a driver’s talent and daring but his or her creativity as well. Those challenging new obstacles are well received by the Taz driver. “I love the new obstacles. When they put something new out there the regular guy will go up there and he sees the way he’s going to hit it,” Adam explained. “Well I’m not going to hit it like that. I’m going to hit it any which way that I can. I’ll go out there and hit it like it should be hit the first time but when I come around the second time it’s not going to be the same for sure. I like that. At the same time it makes it tough.”
It seems to me that in a sport so driven by amazing Wow moments that you can take most of the sport’s top superstars, look at a certain year, and one major accomplishment or Wow moment will pop into mind first. Take Adam Anderson. Think of 2008, and you remember the amazing performance in Las Vegas that saw him become the youngest World Champion in Monster Jam history. So how about 2009. I would argue that the moment that will jump into many minds regarding Anderson’s 2009 season was his wild crash off of the racing course and into a tree at World Finals 10. I asked Adam to recount how he saw that unforgettable crash from his seat aboard Taz. “Going into the 2009 season, being the freestyle champ, I knew that I was going to run the truck hard. So I was concerned that I could wreck the truck bad enough that I’d have to worry about the roll cage, so I lowered my seat down to be as far away from the roll cage as possible,” Anderson detailed. “That hindered me in racing. I wish I would have never done it because I had never had any problems in the past, I was just kinda nervous about it. There were some things that I wanted to try, so I made that change, and that’s what messed it up for me. I had the best qualifying time I had there since my first year of driving out there. So as soon as I took off in racing I knew I was in trouble but you can’t stop, you’re not going to stop. I hit the barrier (on the inside) and then the next thing you know I saw the other barrier though my side window. I just peeked over and then started to turn into it and hit the throttle but it was too late. There’s the tree. Actually I didn’t know at that moment that I hit the tree. When I opened my eyes back up my cab was full of leaves and I was like, ‘where am I at?’ I was pointing in a different direction than I started so it was a pretty wild ordeal. Truthfully, when I look back at it, it doesn’t seem that bad. I’ve had much wilder wrecks. It seems to me that’s how it is. When you have the simplest wrecks, and people don’t realize this, but when that truck just falls over, those almost hurt worse than when you’re tumbling and rolling. It’s because you have some momentum there, it’s not one sudden hit. That was a pretty sudden hit. It did rattle me pretty good. It wasn’t fun, that’s for sure.”
Adam was not injured but was shaken up and medical personnel checked him over. His night was done in that racing crash, meaning he would not be able to try to defend his world freestyle crown. That’s something that to this day still gnaws at him. “Unbelievable. It’s unbelievable,” is how Anderson looks back at the circumstances that cost him the chance to go for a second straight freestyle title. “Now Damon had an awesome run, he really did. Now I don’t want to be cocky, but I believe if I could have went out there and stayed on all fours I could have taken that from him, no problem. No problem. Remember all year we were a team. All year we battled it out and there were very few times that he would beat me. It was a battle between us within our team, more so than with anybody else. But hands down he got it this year. He did. He did a good job. But (in 2010) I’m out for him.”
During the summer the sport was hit hard by the death of Air Force Afterburner Crew Chief Jesse Barden, and his passing was especially hard on Adam who, as noted above, traveled as a teammate to the Air Force Afterburner team in the first quarter of 2009. Adam says that he still feels his friend’s presence every day and that he and the Taz team will be remembering Jesse Barden at each event as we head into the new season. “There’s no way that you can’t, he’s going to be there with us always. Every single day, especially being at the shows and stuff, there’s not one day that you don’t think about him. It’s a horrible thing,” Adam told me. As well as he knew the mechanical ace simply known in the industry as “Twig”, the younger Anderson said it really hit him just how much the sport meant to Barden when he was a pall bearer at his funeral and, like more than 100 other people from the Monster Jam world who attended, Adam spent lots of time at the church looking at a huge catalog of pictures and scrap books from Barden’s days beginning as a huge Monster Jam fan through his journey into the sport that took him all over the world, and in 2009 to World Championship heights. “He loved monster trucks, and I don’t think I realized just how much he actually loved the trucks (until seeing all those pictures of his involvement with the sport over the years),” Anderson continued. “He loved Grave Digger. He loved my Dad. To see all that stuff, it was awesome. It was a really awesome thing. He was living his dream. He was really living his dream. And I was glad to be there with him for that.”
His heart still heavy but knowing how much his departed friend loved Monster Jam, Adam Anderson and many others in the sport will continue to have Twig as their inspiration heading into another campaign. For Adam, beginning in Minneapolis, he plans to make sure that this next season is his greatest yet.
