I once forgot to put the parking brake on an '87 Dodge Omni. Moments later I was chasing it down a slope. That's about as close to daredevil car danger as I've come. So excuse me while I pick my jaw up off the ground witnessing Rhys Millen go about his work week.
"So Rhys, was this a productive day?" queried the clueless sportscaster.
"Yes, I think so," he told me in his distinguished New Zealand accent infused with a touch of California cool. "The nose of the truck went two layers in and the boxes on the third level really just absorbed well."
More on that later.
For now, absorb this: While the rest of us are taping glossy photo cards of smiling children to our refrigerators this holiday season, Rhys is preparing to make stunt men everywhere feel small. The 35-year-old has been a man on a mission for 11-plus months. It's all part of "New Year, No Limits" (ESPN, Monday, Dec. 31, 11:15 p.m. ET).
The task is to fly an off-road racing truck from a 30-foot long, 16-foot high ramp. It's not just any ramp. It's kind of like the Inspector Gadget of ramps. Not that a propeller will emerge from the top upon command, but there is this special kicker they designed that lab coat-wearing dudes would be proud of.
Once the machine is airborne, Rhys' truck is supposed to do a backflip, then land wheels down on a ramp. Yes, a backflip. As in, a Kerri Strug or a Mary Lou Retton backflip. That is, if you could attach the frame of a 2,600-pound Chevy Colorado to the back of their leotards.
"No one's done it," the part-time stunt man, full-time race driver explained.
Uh-huh Rhys no one has done it because it's craz but he interrupts my inner thoughts: "You can sit around your whole life and watch people do things and go, 'Wow that's cool, I wish I came up with that idea.' The reality is, if you want to be a leader, you gotta put your best foot forward and take the risk."
He has taken the risk plenty of times. You know Rhys Millen. You just don't realize you know him.
OK, boys and girls, let's see a show of hands. How many saw the movie version of "The Dukes of Hazard"? Come on now, I know you buy celebrity gossip magazines at the checkout counter. Admitting your Jessica Simpson/Daisy Duke interest is fine here. Anyway, that was Rhys driving the "General Lee" on all those moonshine runnin' stunts in the "Dukes" movie. You didn't really think Johnny Knoxville was pulling that off, did you?
"That [stunt driving in 'Dukes'] took me as a purist, a motorsport driver, being on the edge of control, going for speed, being precise. I got turned on to the stunt world," Rhys revealed.
The stunt world is the furthest thing from his pedigree. Rhys' dad spent 30 years in motorsports. "Old Man" Millen raced. He didn't backflip.
"My dad doesn't talk to me about my stunts. Just won't even acknowledge them," Rhys honestly, and somewhat cautiously, told me.
You get the sense that Rhys backflipping a truck rather than grabbing a checkered flag is like Larry Bird's son growing up to spray buckets of Harlem Globetrotter confetti rather than making NBA jump shots.
"When I moved to the U.S. in 1990," he said, "I expected kind of the silver spoon support from my father, and it never came in the way of monetary support. It came in the way of advice, opportunities, connections, but doors that I had to open and be willing to walk through them."
The door he was opening on this day was to the cab of a forklift power crane. Rhys is one of those guys who could probably drive anything. This practice test session would put all his skills to good use.
He climbed right in. His team latched the hook of the crane to the top of his custom-built truck. Rhys hit a few levers and raised it more than 40 feet in the air. There it was, his steel-reinforced baby dangling over a sea of empty cardboard boxes. His crew had stacked so many of them it would make a UPS warehouse feel inadequate. All this, just to make sure the boxes could support the weight of the falling truck.
The first few times Rhys went to release it, the truck didn't move. We could have used Wile E. Coyote to go underneath and tap it just to stimulate a drop. Finally they figured it out, and thud. There, buried in cardboard, was Rhys' truck. Today's lesson learned: If Rhys had been in the truck, he would have survived. Productive day, for sure.
Before this week, the closest Rhys and his team were to proving this dangerous 360-degree flip would work was by having a grown-up play date. They practiced using a remote-control truck. Makes me wonder what my second-grader is cooking up with his Matchbox cars.
Rhys and Co. were hopefully a little more precise than schoolkids with playroom ramps. The remote-control truck and ramp were built at an exact 10-degree scale of the real things. Who would have thought that you can go to Radio Shack and engineer a way to put your life on the line in front of millions of viewers?
Crew member Eric Cantore pointed out, "It's a little bit easier to replace a remote-control car than it is to replace Rhys Millen or a truck."
Good point -- "crushed stunt man" is a hard item to get through the customer service return counter. Which gets us back to Rhys' productive work week: You don't just sit in a Pro Lite truck, launch yourself into the sky and hope for the best. Rhys takes calculated risks.
"He's assured me that it's safe," his girlfriend, Pressley Carter, said. "The girlfriend in me is of course very nervous."
She's not the only one. When your practice includes the local El Toro fire and rescue teams standing by, you may want to pause and think about your chosen profession.
There is no pause in Millen. He is movie star-good-looking yet stunt-man brave. A few days after the truck drop, the first practice jump saw Rhys go off the ramp higher and further than we all anticipated. He also came down straight on the rear frame. Like a knife dropped blade first into a vat of butter.
A quick lesson was learned by all. A cat apparently is still the only thing you can toss in the air and know it will land on all fours.
They tweaked the ramp, they tweaked the truck and they tweaked the portable lights as the day grew longer. More cardboard boxes were brought in. Even more anticipation was building.
And then he revved that 500-horsepower thunder. Here he goes. Up the steep ramp. Into the air. The front tires went through. The back tires hit that specially designed kicker at a lower angle.
He's flipping he's flipping he's flipping.
He's not flipping.
Straight down on the roof. Yep, upside-down Kiwi 8-feet deep into a cardboard box avalanche. But don't worry. That was part of the plan. Figure out how much, how little, how fast and what a blast. Two practice jumps in and Rhys was well on his way.
"With the changes that we can do with the kicker," Rhys said, "with the speed that we can adjust, we're gonna get this thing."
He better get this thing, because come the stroke of midnight Pacific time on New Year's Eve, there isn't going to be a pit of cardboard boxes catching him.
And I sure can't go chase him down the hill like I did with that ol' Dodge Omni.