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Scott Paulsen can now be read every Thursday in the Washington Observer-Reporter and each Saturday in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Listen to Scott each weekday as he talks sports on
Last One Moving Wins Scott Paulsen Sometime during the second heat of the hotly contested Washington County Fair School Bus Demolition Derby, the windshield fell onto my lap. There was nothing left to do but toss it through the open framework and crash on to victory. The good news for parents of schoolchildren who have a driver like me is that their bus can withstand at least forty-seven collisions in a twenty-minute period and still deliver its payload, relatively unscathed. The even better news is that, thanks to the derby, chiropractors all around the tri-state will be able to pay their bills for some time to come. If you’ve never experienced what it feels like to purposely crash a large vehicle at top speed, allow me to describe. Wooooooooooooo! Yeah, buddy! That’s it, in a nutshell. Nutshell, by the way, is the perfect home for those of us who enjoy this sort of “sport”. At county fairs near you, all during this great month of August, demo derbies will be contested. People much like me, bored and dangerous, will mechanically alter family sedans and, in the most extreme cases, school buses, to make them more indestructible and infinitely punishable. These welded and glassless chariots will be lined up, Red Rover style, in a pit of doom (a mud field bordered by concrete Jersey barriers). An officially sanctioned referee (the nearest available volunteer firefighter) will blow a whistle. The fun will begin. Wearing a helmet, the demolition derby driver steers his vehicle in reverse, right arm clutching the back of the passenger seat, left foot on the accelerator. The car’s gas tank has been removed and replaced with a safer molded plastic container, strapped to the rear floor. Using the back of the car as a battering ram, our Blue Cross plan member employs his cunning and total lack of self-control to bash everything that moves. Last one moving wins. Have you ever been sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on Route 28 and had the evil random thought of tossing all logic aside and smashing the Toyota directly in front of you? I’ve had the unique opportunity to live out that fantasy several times. Once, in a Caprice wagon (king of the derby machines), I finished first. It happened in Knoxville, Tennessee. The car cost about two thousand dollars to build and I took home a trophy. I didn’t say it was financially rewarding. But it sure was fun. In the meantime, be happy in the thought that the same type of bus your child occupies each morning and afternoon has been thoroughly field tested (in an actual field) by semi-professional sort-of-experts like me and passed with flying, bent colors. Feel safer now?
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