Seek. Destroy. Enjoy.

Sometimes there's a fine line between sport and sideshow.

Exhibit One: the Eastern finals of the 2000 National Championship Demolition Derby Series

by Andrew Weiner

BACK THAT THANG UP: in demolition derby, hitting with the rear of the car is about as technical as it gets.

WEST LEBANON, NY -- Cindy Regimbald has a thing for her Elmo doll. "Elmo is my mascot," she happily informs me as she readjusts her hair scrunchie. "We go everywhere together."

Today, "everywhere" means onto a dirt-track speedway in eastern New York and directly into a series of other cars traveling at speeds ranging from five to 50 miles per hour. Cindy's adorable red plush toy is wired to a steel grate that has replaced the windshield on her LTD Crown Victoria. Cindy herself, an affable and soft-spoken 23-year old, is a demolition-derby driver with nine trophies on her wall back home in East Middlebury, Vermont.

Cuddly little Elmo has a front-row seat for the Eastern finals of the 2000 National Championship Demolition Derby Series. He doesn't know what's about to happen, and that's probably a good thing: during the next two hours he will sustain more high-impact collisions than the Volvo test lab sees in a year.

Ten minutes after I talk to her, Cindy and 56 of her fellow drivers are in a last-minute huddle with Todd Dubé, president of the Demolition Events National Tour, or DENT. "Cars that catch fire," he says, "will be allowed to continue at the officials' discretion. Rollovers are okay. Now go out there and make good hits. No love taps, and no sandbagging."

What Todd calls sandbagging, anyone else would call self-preservation. Braking before impact, waiting more than 20 seconds between hits, and generally staying out of harm's way -- these are all against the rules of today's derby, and will result in disqualification. In a sport that has about as many rules as kill-the-carrier, the ban on sandbagging is sacrosanct. The only other thing you can't do is drive directly into a driver's-side door.

To the assembled drivers, this speech is a mere formality. The three-year old DENT circuit is the closest thing demolition derby has to a major league, and most of today's entrants -- here to qualify for the national championship -- are veteran competitors. Some of them have traveled from as far as Texas for their shot at being crowned the least defensive driver in America.

FOR A first-time spectator, not even a complete viewing of the Mad Max trilogy would be adequate preparation for the sensory assault of a demolition derby. Within a minute of the opening gun, the track becomes carmageddon.

Collisions come fast and thick, about one per second. The smell of charred Buick hangs thickly over the stands. To protect their engines, most drivers crash backward into each other, which gives the track the look of a mall parking lot populated by psychotic elderly drivers. The roar of muffler-less engines is punctuated by thud after thud; it sounds like a dozen refrigerators landing on a busy airport runway. Unidentified car parts arc high into the air. Fans hoot lustily. One car does a complete rollover, only to drive on as though nothing had happened.

Halfway through the heat, a Chevy lines up a stalled Chrysler from across the track. As the Chrysler's driver flails with the ignition, the Chevy uses a hundred-foot head start to unleash a devastating hit. The whole passenger side of the Chrysler caves in; it looks like a dinghy struck by a cannonball. The crowd erupts in cheers, only to sober up when it appears that an ambulance might be needed. But just then a feeble wave from the Chrysler's driver lets us know he's okay, and the derby continues, growing uglier by the minute.

I want to want to stop watching, but I can't. It's kind of like a massive . . . er . . . car wreck.

What one might loosely call the genius of demolition derby lies in its simplicity. Stock-car racing is hugely popular in America, and many race fans will freely admit that they come for the chance of seeing a spectacular pile-up. Like a sports-highlight reel, demo (as it's known to its followers) takes the active ingredient of stock-car racing and isolates it to make a more concentrated form of entertainment.

The spiritual forefather of the sport is generally taken to be "Head-On" Joe Connely, who earned his name staging collisions between locomotives for state fairs at the last turn of the century. Beyond that, demo resembles other sports in the patchiness of its official history: for some time conventional wisdom had it that Larry Mendelsohn, a stock-car driver, organized the first real demolition derby at Long Island's Islip Speedway in 1958. Until its closure, the track proudly billed itself as the birthplace of the sport. Todd Dubé, however, has researched the records of state fairs and racetracks and established that a derby was held eight years earlier, in Franklin, Wisconsin. As he tells it, the event was sponsored by "Crazy Jim" Groh, a local used-car dealer with a surplus of product. A third story, probably apocryphal, holds that demo originated on a street corner with a fender-bender that turned ugly.

Whatever the origin, demo in the 1960s and early '70s made a gradual transition from local curiosity to national sporting event. This unlikely debutante was finally presented to society in 1974, with a series of national broadcasts on ABC's Wide World of Sports.

Demand held steady for the next two decades, with an average of more than 2000 derbies annually, most of them in the Great Lakes region and the Midwest. Over time, demo inspired a series of spinoff events: colliding school buses have long been a popular attraction, and other derbies have featured motorcycles, New York City taxicabs, and combines. (Combines!) One event in the '70s featured a game where two teams of cars tried to push a VW Beetle across a set of goal lines. But as the novelty of mainstream demo wore thin, it gradually lost its hold on the nation's attention. The sport also lacked cohesion. Multiple local events billed themselves as "national championships." (Not surprisingly, the US is the only country where demo exists as an organized event.)

In response to these problems, Todd Dubé decided to organize DENT. The new tour began by increasing purses and relaxing restrictions on modifications, allowing roll bars, high-performance gas, and beefy forklift tires. These changes appealed to drivers and fans alike, and seem to have succeeded in raising the profile of the sport. ABC Sports has contacted DENT about televising the national finals, and the Discovery Channel filmed this year's Southern regionals for a documentary that will air in August.

In coming years Dubé hopes to double the number of regional events and create a sanctioning body with the aim of obtaining better insurance coverage for drivers.

But participants have a more practical perspective on the future of the sport. When asked how he pictures demolition derbies in 10 years, Mike Denio gave this response: "It's going to be a lot harder to find mid- or full-size American cars to wreck."

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Andrew Weiner last wrote for the Phoenix about the death of pinball. He can be reached at weimar99@yahoo.com.