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I AM AN EVENT GUY

Somebody's Gotta Do It.

By Ron DillonPublished 3 years ago 5 min read
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I am an event guy. That’s what I am, period. I have hosted 256 events to date, since I was a teenager in 1979: big ones with over 13,000 people, down to little ones with exactly two. It’s what I do because I am an event guy, and after 41 years of doing it, it has been imprinted too deeply into my DNA to stop now. I will take any event on, from a biker wedding, to a race between a man and a mule, it makes no difference to me because I am an event guy.

I have hosted events involving: motorcycles, bicycles, music, horses, mules, runners, swimmers, skiers, snowbikers, dogs and (once) a skunk. I have gone 72 hours without sleep, and 48 hours without eating.

I have seen people faint in the heat, vomit at the bar, and shiver their way to hypothermia or frostbite. That is in part because I have had to face every kind of weather imaginable: brutally hot, numbingly cold, Noah’s Ark level rain, screaming winds, tornadoes, dust storms, lightning, hail, flash floods, and blizzards.

When it comes to events, there one absolute fact, Events bring out the best in people and events bring out the absolute worst in them as well. I have seen teenagers with green hair and pierced faces return lost wallets, dripping with cash and credit cards. I have seen people work tirelessly to reunite a missing mother and child, help change a flat tire, break up a fight that they never started, and refuse any sort of compensation for doing so.

I have also seen people, expensively dressed and immaculately groomed, climb over fences and slog through waist deep snow to avoid buying a $10 ticket to a show. They are looters and they are shameless.

I have witnessed unapologetic cheating and lying, all in the name of winning.

I have seen every kind of theft possible: cars, motorcycles, trucks, snowbikes, generators, tools, purses, wallets, clothing, cases of beer, coolers of beer, and back seat beer. I have seen entire sets of lawn furniture vanish, along with clothing, pets, gasoline, propane, spare tires, bicycles, bicycle racks, unicycles, firewood, RC toys, skis, televisions, CD’s, DVD’s, wine, weed, speed, shade canopies, tents, and guns.

I have had to face every kind of drunk known to man: mean drunks, Good Time Charlie drunks, drug-using drunks, wife beating drunks, gun-toting drunks, cop-beating drunks, band beating drunks, band member beating audience member drunks, know it all drunks, quiet drunks, loud drunks, child beating drunks, dog beating drunks, and drunks too drunk to drive, who yet insist on doing so, and sometimes die in the process. I have seen drugs being passed around like candy, and combined into lethal combinations.

I have encountered nudity, profanity, adultery, bestiality, fornication, homosexuality, wife-swapping and cat juggling.

I have had guns shoved in my face, several times, demanding money or for us to suspend the event and leave. My mother, who has aided me with events from time to time, has been shoved and cursed and been mistreated in a myriad of ways.

I have also seen unbridled joy expressed when a 10 year-old girl wins her class at a bicycle race. I have seen unexpected and unscripted marriage proposals, and people proud of their kids and grandkids athletic accomplishments beyond measure.

I started and embraced women’s sports in the worlds of bicycle racing, motorcycle racing and snowmobile racing, and when they not only triumph over their fellow female athletes, but also males; that is a beautiful thing to see. Good for them.

I have seen athletes and onlookers killed and paralyzed, and brain-damaged, and had their bodies altered in an instant from chiseled and perfect one moment, to bent, broken and battered the next.

I have dealt with elite, Olympic and world-class athletes who performed so poorly that their own grandmothers could have defeated them, and I have seen the weeping and vanishing of self esteem that accompanies such lackluster performances. I have also seen chubby, out of shape people, somehow will themselves to perform at levels far above what their bodies are capable of, and yet somehow they find the will to make it so, and their weeping of joy cancels out the sorrowful weeping of those who performed poorly. In my world, there ARE winners and losers, but a new event brings new promise and potential redemption.

Years ago, I put on a Charlie Daniels concert for the Air Force and 5,000 airmen showed up and cheered the old man on. I was exhausted trying to get all of the items on his rider checked off: (booze, LOTS of booze, specially-colored towels, specials soaps, special toilet paper…celebrities can be a pain in the ass). The next weekend I hosted the Nevada State Championship Duathlon, featuring running and cycling, and TWO athletes showed up…TWO! But we ran them because once an event reaches a critical mass of two, a race is born.

Humans have been competing and showing off for thousands of years. They need a place to unleash and show the world their gifts, or lack thereof. Not everyone wins, but everyone would like to.

NOTHING surprises me anymore. People are awful. People are amazing. Ordinary people are capable of extraordinary greatness, and extraordinary people are capable of incredible mediocrity. A 70 year old grandmother could outrun a 25 year old man and a flying saucer could land behind the bleachers, and it simply would not surprise me anymore. Jesus or Martin Luther King could show up at a bicycle race and ask to enter. I would simply hand them their numbers and point them in the right direction.

Someone has to wade in and set the stage, shoulder the risks, calm the nervous and fire up the uninspired. That’s me, the event guy, always striving to host the perfect event, in an imperfect world.

goals
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