High Rollers

Such is the Phantom's menace that park officials made me ride it with a 15-year-old from Mars, Pa., named Ed Murphy. The kid, a veteran of 20 Phantom rides, could only stare grimly from our front seat as I babbled nervously. When I blurted that I had just eaten a chicken-salad sandwich, young Ed said, as we ascended the chain lift, "I wish you hadn't told me that."

The Phantom is frequently cited as the second-best steel coaster in existence, after Cedar Point's Magnum XL-200. Cedar Point has the highest concentration of coasters anywhere in the world. What's more, the park is on the beach where Knute Rockne invented the forward pass with Notre Dame teammate Gus Dorais while the two worked as lifeguards in the summer of 1913. The historic spot, marked with a plaque, is now part of the Soak City water park.

I rode Magnum with Cedar Point public relations director Robin Innes, who wore a shirt and tie and carried on, with consummate professionalism, a business conversation as we climbed the 205-foot first hill. "This was the first coaster to break the 200-foot barrier," Innes said casually as we crested. "This first drop is 195 feet and aaiiieeeyeaaah! Hoohoohoo! Wahahaheee! celebrating its 10th anniversary this summer and oh man! Oh man! Woooooo! Yeaaahh! top speed of 72 miles an hour, which is approximately yes! Whoahoho! Woohooee! Hey hey! the tubular steel track eee-heee-hoo-ha-haaaa! be happy to if you have any questions." I had no idea what he was talking about, but I nodded frequently in response.

Toomer designed Magnum but never rode it. Still, he is aware that it remains the favorite of a great many coasterphiles, whose reasons are largely intangible and perhaps best articulated by Innes when he said, "Wahahoohaheeeeee!"

"Ten years after opening," says Escalante, the ACEr, "Magnum still hasn't been improved on." At the coaster's anniversary party in June, Toomer signed 1,000 autographs.

"I never expected that I'd become some kind of nut-club cult leader," the designer says. But he has become just that, with 80 wildly popular coasters stretching from Indonesia to Spain to the interior of Buffalo Bill's Casino in Primm, Nev. "These rides," he says, pondering a legacy, "will be around for a very long time." To say the least. Leap-the-Dips opened in 1902 and runs to this day at Lakemont Park in Altoona, Pa.

Not far from Leap-the-Dips is the Wildcat, at Hershey Park. It gives riders the most instances of air, or negative G's: 11 times passengers are lifted from their seats. "There's an arms race for everything now," says industry analyst Ruben. The list of superlatives is seemingly endless, much like the venerable Beast at Para-mount's Kings Island, near Cincinnati. The Beast is by far the longest wooden roller coaster in the world, both in track feet and in ride time. It travels a tortuous 7,400 feet and covers an area more than twice that of Kennywood's Thunderbolt. The Beast lasts an unheard-of three minutes and 40 seconds. And "no man," as Dr. Johnson said about Paradise Lost, "ever wished it longer."

STRIKE THAT: One man has ever wished every ride longer. A coaster jockey of exceedingly rare gifts, Richard Gregory Rodriguez now takes his place beside Ted Williams and Jascha Heifetz as a 20th-century titan whose skills simply overwhelm our powers of analysis. Twelve times Rodriguez has set the world record for marathon coastering, but last summer was his Beamon leap, his Secretariat-at-Belmont moment: He rode the Big Dipper in Blackpool for 1,013½ hours over 47 days, from June 18 until August 3, nearly doubling his own record of 549 hours, set in Blackpool in 1994. "The three big questions I get," Rodriguez told me solemnly, while sitting for an interview in a sidewalk café near his home in Miami, "are Why? Do you get paid? and How do you go to the bathroom?" We will try to answer each of these questions in due time, but for now you need understand only that Rodriguez's life is a cat's cradle of coaster history. In him all of the industry's threads intersect.

He was born to greatness, blessed genetically and geographically. For starters, young Rich grew to the minimal acceptable standard of 48 inches, then kept going, eventually leveling off at 5'8" and 160 pounds—"The perfect size for riding," he says. "Like a Formula One driver's."

Even more propitious, Rodriguez was born in Brooklyn, the cradle of American amusement, home of the original Luna Park and Coney Island, where the first commercially successful roller coaster was built, in 1884. The Gravity Switchback Railway was the brainchild of LaMarcus Thompson, who had made a fortune inventing seamless hosiery. More than a century later, in unintentional homage to the stocking magnate, an astonishing number of women would toss their underwear from roller coasters, in the same spirit in which unmentionables are flung into trees from chairlifts on ski slopes. It is a dirty little secret—a Victoria's Secret—of the family entertainment industry. But we digress.