Lucky Trades, Cowboys and Somebody's Mom
As Marty Lawson was preparing to compete in the sleeper berth finals, a small boy approached him and offered a trade for one of Lawson’s pins.
Trading pins was one of the main pastimes at NTDC, as it has been for more years than anyone can remember, and the youngster had his eyes on a beauty that the 1998 grand champion had received from the California Highway Patrol. In exchange, he was offering a shoulder patch.
“I kind of considered that one of my lucky pins,” said Lawson. “And he was holding the patch upside down, so I couldn’t see what it was. But I traded anyway.”
Less than an hour later, Lawson was indeed the national champion in that category and — though he didn’t know it — he was also grand champion for the second consecutive year.
According to one longtime observer, the competition used to be called the “Truck Roadeo,” but it was changed to erase the image of truckers being, well, the cowboys of the highways.
Although the most visually interesting part of the competition involves precision driving, safety is the word heard most often in connection with NTDC, and safety seems to be a prime criterion in choosing a winner.
A driver can’t even compete — not even at the state level — unless he or she has completed a year of accident-free driving. And that means no accidents, regardless of who was at fault. The only kind of accident that keeps the driver eligible for the NTDC is when the truck was parked and the driver was not in the vehicle at the time.
“Otherwise, it gets too involved with questions like: What did the driver do that might have contributed to the accident? What could the driver have done to prevent it?” explained Timothy Marchand, a contestant from Yellow Freight System in Illinois.
Yet, there are strange features to the competition.
“In real life, you try to miss a hazard by as wide a margin as possible,” said rookie contestant Wayne S. Creager of Viking Freight in Utah. “But here, you try to come as close as you can without hitting it.”
Unlike the earlier years of the championships, the driving tournament in Tampa took place totally indoors, on the concrete second floor of the convention center. It seems impossible that these huge trucks — and the event’s spectators — can be contained in a space that might suffice for a basketball game.
The trucks were all new, donated by manufacturers, and the smell of diesel was so slight as to be hardly noticeable. But the noise of the horns, sounded when a driver felt he or she had completed a problem and was ready for measurement, quickly became a part of the environment.
This year’s competition reflected the growing ethnic diversity of the industry, with several African-American, Hispanic and Asian drivers behind the wheel.
Women, who have become a substantial portion of the truck driving community, were represented by three female state champions.
| Witnessed on an elevator at the Hyatt Regency, which was filled to the brim with contestants and their families: Young woman with a small child chatting with a driver and his wife. She explains that she had brought her daughter for the first time to see the championships. “Who does your husband drive for?” asks the man. She gives him a quizzical look as she and her daughter stepped off the elevator. “It’s me,” she said. “I drive for Con-Way.” |
