Creator Dennis Anderson told Monster Jam he made the first “piece of junk” that went by Grave Digger in 1979. A shaggy-haired gearhead starting out of Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, his eventual rise to fame is another classic American Dream story of a man on a mission to build a lifted truck that’s bigger, better and badasser than anybody else’s.
There’s as much trash talk in mud racing as any other sport, so Anderson got plenty of crap from boggin’ buddies about his yard-found equipment. As current Grave Digger teammate Randy Brown tells the story in this video, that’s actually how the legendary truck got its name:
When Dennis started mud racing... everybody would laugh at him because he’d show up with a bunch of junk, you know cobbled together, whatever he could scrape.
Anderson’s reply?
I’ll take this old junk and dig you a grave with it!
Even when he didn’t win races, Anderson had a reputation for balls-out driving that brought in spectators and supporters. If you’ve ever seen him race recently, you’ll know that hasn’t changed a bit.
Brown says “everybody at the mud pit started calling him ‘Grave Digger’ and the name stuck.”
(Jalopnik.com)
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