For the next four weeks, CompetitionPlus.com will conduct its third annual War Stories Showdown. The veterans of yarn spinning are paired for what promises to be a series destined to produce the finest behind-the-scenes stories.

Here are the rules –

The field was seeded by reader vote. The participants are paired on the standard NHRA professional eliminations ladder. Each story represents an elimination run for the participant. The readers will judge each war story on the merits of (A) believability and (B) entertainment value. Please do not vote based on popularity. You are the judge and jury, so vote accordingly. Multiple votes from the same computer IP address will not be counted.

Voting lasts for three days per elimination match. Once a driver advances to the next round, they must submit a new war story.

This is an event based on fun and entertainment value, and the rules are simple. The stories cannot describe any felonious acts (unprosecuted, that is) and you can't use a story about your opponent, against them. There is a one event win rule.

This is drag racing with no red-lights, disqualifications and plenty of oil downs minus the clean-ups. Please enjoy as each of our competitors tell their own stories.

EVENT HOMEPAGE

Let the competition begin -

No. 1 Billy Glidden vs. No. 16 Ted Jones

RACE COMPLETED: WINNER: BILLY GLIDDEN (83.22) DEF. TED JONES (16.78)

WINNER - NO. 1 QUALIFIER – BILLY “MAD DAWG JR.” GLIDDEN
WAR STORIES CLAIM TO FAME – Grew Up A Glidden And Survived

THE STORY OF: GLIDDEN TOUGH MEETS BOBBY KNIGHT

Growing up in the Glidden household was not for the weak. You had to be tough, and I mean “Glidden” tough and you better make winning your absolute priority.

For those of you who think I am too serious all of the time I would like to share a “war story” of life in the Glidden household as a kid. I s*** you not, what I am about to tell you is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

You may wonder why when people mess with me at the track or the starting line and when pressure bears down on me, it doesn’t seem to bother me. And, it really truly doesn’t.

Things go wrong in the cockpit and it becomes just another thing.

People pee on my trailer, it’s just another thing.

People write graffiti, just another thing.

I learned at an early age how to block things out.

When you reflect on just how competitive my dad Bob Glidden was just remember that I had a mom, in Etta, who was just as competitive. She held as high standards as dad did and put as much emphasis on winning.

So when other kids might have heard, “Wait until your dad gets home.”

We never did. The punishment was handed out on the spot.

You didn’t even have time to duck, much less take evasive action.

Just like drag racing, reaction times meant everything.

There were times when Rusty and I argued, and when wherever we went, you’d see the end result of our punishment. We were told to knock it off and if we didn’t, you’d see us with the gray duct tape wrapped around our mouth, and I’m talking all the way around the head.

Yep, if Mom had to go shopping, she’d take us with her even if we had duct tape wrapped around our head. They’d prove to us who was boss and a little self-humiliation went a long way. If we were going to a race, there we would be with our faces pressed against the window for the other motorists to see. I can only imagine what they thought.

I know there were times when Rusty would slam a phone down or was angry and slammed the refrigerator door that he would have to walk over and apologize to the offended item with someone present.

I’m not kidding, “I’m sorry Mr. Telephone.”

If you didn’t make bed check or messed up, there was a chance you’d have to clean someone else’s trailer to learn a lesson. That’s so people knew you were being punished.

Whatever we did, we did to win.

When I was growing up and as I entered the seventh grade I had a lot of talent as a basketball player except I had one fault. I had a weakness in dribbling the ball with my left hand when compared to the right and dad knew it.

He’s always pushed me in Little League and I can remember the time I scored over 70 points in a game. I did that because dad told me that if anyone got past me on the court that he’d whip my butt and I was deathly afraid of my father.

Because of that, I quickly became as efficient in dribbling with the left as I was with the right. One day at the shop, he took a roll of duct tape and taped my right arm to my body and set up some barrier in the driveway and sent me out there to dribble the ball with the instruction, “If I hear that ball stop dribbling, I’m going to whip you’re a**.”

He forgot about me because I stayed out there every bit of ten hours dribbling that ball. As it turned out that year, I almost got cut from the team because the coaches felt I had an identity problem determining whether I was a left or righthanded player.

Fast forward to 1989. We were given the opportunity to visit Indiana University and meet basketball coach Bobby Knight. The early part of this war story was to establish the foundation for what happened on this trip.

The whole family went, including Mom and Dad. The whole family. Rusty brought his son Brandon, who I think was about 2 years old at the time. They took all sorts of pictures of our visit with the race car.

We’ve always been big IU fans and anyone who has lived in the United States for the last thirty years has heard of how temperamental Bobby Knight can be.

We were escorted to Bobby Knight’s office and there we noticed this huge log with a chain on it and the thing is covered with mud and dirt. While we are there, little Brandon starts messing with this thing. Rusty and Gina are trying to be discreet in getting him away from it.

About that same time, Bob Knight walks in.

His first words are, “Leave f***** son of a b**** with me for a week and he won’t do that again.”

Those were his first words, I kid you not.

Then Knight gives us his speech and he’s a confident fella. At the end of it, he asks if we have any questions. Dad pops up and asks if he recruited any good big men.

Knight tells a whole list of players.

Then I piped up and asked him, “Are they going to play like a bunch of 6’4” white guys that can’t jump?”

He looked straight at me and asked, “What the f^&% are you talking about?”

I told him that everybody he had played like they were six foot four.

He goes off in a tirade talking about what all they had won. I looked at him and said, “So?”

“They still play like little bitty white guys.” I added.

He got quiet and you could see him getting as red as the sweater he was wearing.

Then he looked at dad and said, “Mr. Glidden if you ever want to come to a game and be where the action is, you call my secretary and tell her who you are and I’ll put you on the bench or right behind me.”

Then he looked over at me and said, “And you can leave that mouthy mother%$#@^# at home!”

“I’ll straighten your s^%$ out in a hurry,” he added.

I sat there for a moment and calmly looked at him and said something that left him puzzled.

“I grew up with him as my dad,” I said, pointing at my father.

“You don’t bother me at all.”

And that was the day I left Bobby Knight speechless.

NO. 16 QUALIFIER – TED “I’M A PRODUCER” JONES
WAR STORIES CLAIM TO FAME – A Former Larry Carrier Advisor

THE STORY OF: TONY CHRISTIAN AND THE WOMEN'S GROUPS

Rivalries are much a part of drag racing as the burnout.

And when you put together Pat Musi and Tony Christian, not only will they fight amongst themselves but others will get dragged in along the way.

I was part of the Inside Drag Racing team on ESPN2 and we were covering the old National Muscle Car Association. That is the old NMCA with Ron Coleman and Russ Smeltnieks.

The class that was both hotly contested and popular was Pro Street.

The three top stars were Musi, Annette Summer and Christian.

As it turned out, Musi and Christian were neck and neck in the points that year. One of the races, late in the season, was at Virginia Motorsports Park in Richmond, Va.

We were doing coverage of the event with Inside Drag Racing.

The race had gotten down to the semi-finals and I saw where Tony Christian was scheduled to race Annette Summer. Pat was on the other side of the ladder and I can’t remember who he was supposed to run, but he was a lock on one of the final round spots.

I walk over to Tony, and he’s got the door open on his car.  I stuck the microphone in the car and asked, “Tony, you and Musi are going head to head for the championship but before you can get to him, you have to race defending world champion Annette Summer. What do you think about that?”

He sat there for a moment and responded with his raspy, WWF-style voice, “I can tell you, I ain’t worried about it. First of all, I don’t know why she’s out here taking up men’s parking spaces. She should be at home washing dishes and making babies. You got it right. She’s a former champion. She’s washed up. Don’t worry. I’ll face Musi in the final.”

As it turned out, we made the decision to leave his comments in the show.

What we thought was pretty neat and funny, wasn’t viewed in the same light by the women’s groups.

The switchboard at ESPN lit up with irate viewers, and women’s groups and ended up becoming one of the highest rated shows ever in the history of Inside Drag Racing.

ESPN got a call from N.O.W. [National Organization of Women], among other groups raising sand. Of course, I got a call from ESPN asking me what I was doing.

Of course Tony was always colorful. He was always the loudmouth ‘rassler type.

But even this time, he outdid himself.
 
From that point, I always used close discretion when airing his interviews.

WHO HAD THE BETTER STORY?

Voting Completed

No. 8 Tommy Ivo vs. No. 9 Bill Doner

RACE COMPLETED: WINNER: BILL DONER (59.38) DEF. TOMMY IVO (40.62)

NO. 8 QUALIFIER – “TV” TOMMY IVO
WAR STORIES CLAIM TO FAME – Missed the Best Run of his Life Because His Eyes Were Closed

THE STORY OF: THAT #@$%^^&  IVO DID IT

First of all you folks need the setup for this story:

You see there’s “World Time” and “Ivo Time”.  For almost a half century, when I was drag racing, especially when I was on tour, we didn’t have full shops in 18-wheelers. We would use people’s shops all over the country.  I even had a Farrie dealership I work out of in the DC area.  Nice!!!  So at night when they closed down at 5 PM, we’d move in like the elfs and work all night fixing the hot rod.  In the morning, they’d come in at 8 AM and say “good morning” and we’d say “good night”.

It worked out better for me as I worked an up all night and sleep late into the day routine.

This also worked great with the hectic racing schedule I maintained.  We would run every Saturday and Sunday for sure, with a lot of Wednesdays and Fridays thrown in for good measure.  Eight races in one week was my record.  Sunday afternoon at Atco New Jersey, near Philadelphia and Sunday night at Englishtown New Jersey, plus every day that week. Each of them at a different track, with a sizeable drive in between. It was a crazy time in the match race days.  

So when a race was over late on Saturday night and everyone else was traveling down the road with “Ben” (taking Benzedrine to stay awake while they were driving to their next race, at the Sunday track) I would be wide awake, because I had only gotten up at one or two, in the afternoon.

Second part of the set up is this - I was a practical joker junkie! There was seriously something wrong with me. I think I made one too many sit-com TV shows, while I was acting in my younger days and it became part of my DNA.  Because I saw “funny” in everything I did, or at least tried to make it that way.

For instance, when Don Prudhomme, who got his start in drag racing with me,  went on my first nationwide tour in 1960, as my crew guy, he paid his dues dearly, for me teaching him the ropes. I was always torturing him in some fashion or another. Like switching his shampoo with 10-weight oil (it was the same color and thickness as the shampoo). When he washed his hair in the shower, the more water he added to his hair after squirting the shampoo (oil) on his head, the more it turned to axle grease.

No wonder why he doesn’t like me too much.  

Well, if you know Prudhomme, you'd know he doesn’t take torturing very well. But at that time, he was still “The Worm”, before he grew his fangs and became “The Awesome Snake”!!!  But, you get the idea of what I mean about being a practical joke junkie, constantly, with this story.  

So now on with my story!!!

We were at Union Grove, Wisconsin, for a two-day race and it rained out on Saturday. So, that night there was nothing to do. Come 11 PM everyone went to bed.  GREAT!  There I was, wide awake, and we were staying in the only good motel in the area, IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE!!! The good old “Holiday Inn”, where everyone stayed when they came to run at Union Grove for a two day event.

Well, in those days, everyone had Chaparral trailers and “Big Dooley” Chevy trucks. It was the uniform of the day, so to speak.  You could open the hood with a latch on the outside, just under the middle of the hood, above the grill.

Hmm, my mind shifted into practical joke gear and we took all the hoods off of the red trucks and put them on the black trucks, the yellow on the green and so on.  It was very colorful in the parking lot that morning, when everyone went out there to take their rigs to the track!!!

Prudhomme exploded and said, 'That d*** Ivo,' and everyone said, 'How do you know it was Ivo'?  To which he replied, 'Because it has IVO written all over it!!!'  I of course denied it all together - deny, deny, deny!  Not that anyone believed me, but the best they could come up with, was to block the door to my room with the Coke machine.  Like I couldn’t overcome that, them weak dogs. Is that the best they could come up with?

Man, that was a lot of work.  It took half the night to do it!!!  Although we just put the hood bolts in temporarily and eased the hoods back on the trucks, because they all had to be changed back the next day anyway. But it was worth the price of admission, when I saw everyone carrying around their hoods in the pits on Sunday morning, instead of working on their cars.  With muttering going on, it just made it better yet!

Perfect!

But I think the most interesting side bar on it was that drag racers always take advantage of a situation. They try to make the best of it.  The guy that had a scratch on his red hood didn’t want it back and said, 'That’s not MY hood.' Mine had perfect paint on it, which added more confusion to the predicament and made it even greater fun for me. I was just laughing inside watching them trying to sort that one out!!!

Life is good!

WINNER - NO. 9 QUALIFIER – BILL DONER
WAR STORIES CLAIM TO FAME – Once Escaped An Event Via Helicopter With Raymond Beadle

THE STORY OF: THE BEGINNING

I call this story the beginning because it was essentially that, the start of my promoting career.

This story dates back to 1969 when I went entered into a partnership with an automobile dealer and a real estate guy. They had talked me into joining them in a business venture after I was finishing up some sponsorship programs with Carroll Shelby.

So I left Shelby and went up to Kent, Wash., to take over a new track called Pacific Raceways, outside of Seattle. The track was primarily a road course and on occasion ran some minor league drag racing events. They also ran some Trans-Am events on the road course and a few sports car events.

I was familiar with the place since we had raced and won there with Shelby.

A couple of significant things happened after I got to Pacific Raceways. Both of the guys who had brought me there went bankrupt. The economy had gone into the tank to the point it was similar to today’s situation.

Boeing, one of the leading companies located in the area, had just gotten their teeth kicked in when one of their major contracts were cancelled. There were 50,000 people out of work from that area. Gasoline was rationed.

I can tell you, it wasn’t a good time for the area and not too promising for any promoter.

Earlier in the year, the two guys who got me to come to Pacific went down to the bank to borrow $50,000 to make improvements to the facility for an Indy-car style race that year, which due to rain, was a bomb and lost money.

It’s the end of 1969, it’s dreary and rainy in Seattle and my life is coming apart.

And, oh yeah, the guy at the bank contacted me and let me know he was going to call the note on the loan. The guy at the bank had almost developed a hitch in his neck because he was so scared the loan would go into default.

Of course, I looked at him and asked, “What are you going to call it? A bad note? My other guys are gone.”

Then the banker told me that I was responsible in their absence. I was in a bad way. I had to rent a house when I moved up there and I didn’t even own a car.

He agreed to give me a little running room and the promoter in me scrambled to come up with an idea to cover the loan.

For me, the only hope was to run a great big drag race and I started to put it together. I was going to do it early in the year and take a chance on the weather. I knew, being in the Northwest, early in the year, if the weather was right, we’d get a s***load of people in there.

We worked on it and scheduled a race for the last weekend in March. In reality, it looked like a terrible roll of the dice.

The event would be called the Northwest National Open and it would feature 16 fuel dragsters and 16 fuel Funny Cars. The only problem with the idea is that we’d never had more than eight of either at the track.

I ran a lot of ads and even got Hot Rod to help me out. As it got closer, I tried every gimmick I could with the radio and television stations.

About two weeks before the event, I still didn’t have a major hook and that’s when I called my old buddy Don “the Snake” Prudhomme. We had worked together on the Shelby Super Snake program. I was the one who put the deal together and gave him the money.

I had heard a rumor that he wanted to run his dragster after running the Funny Car in Pomona, and I made him a deal - it was $2,000 to win Top Fuel and I guaranteed him $1,000 against what he could win. He thought about it and agreed to do it.

We changed the ads to reflect that Prudhomme was coming.

The day of the race was coming, and I didn’t even have enough money to start change. I went around with the one Mastercard that I had, hoping to scrounge up enough money get this done. I went to other banks because I didn’t want the guy who had loaned me the money to know how desperate things were. I got the money from the card and scraped together every nickel and dime I could find. I had exactly $1,000.

Fast forward to the race weekend. It was really overcast on Saturday, but we managed to get qualifying in. That night, after it was dark, I went down to this little pub there in Kent that was named Meeker’s Landing.

That weekend, I had a racer staying with me named Dwight Salisbury.

Salisbury and I went down to Meeker’s with me and we were having a few drinks and by that time it was pouring rain. It’s 7 PM, and you can’t see 20 feet.

Jerry Ruth, the hotshot local guy, comes cruising in with his Cadillac, leaves his girlfriend in the car, has one drink and walks over to us. He proclaims, “This thing is dead. There’s not a chance in the world you’ll run this thing.”

Of course, I thanked him for his optimism.

I went home and over the bathroom there’s this skylight and I just see the water pouring from the sky. The only thing I could do is keep drinking and tell Dwight how desperate times were and if it rains out, how I’m unloading everything in the car and disappearing. Everyone will be after me, including my old friend Prudhomme.

Somehow I get drunk enough to fall asleep and in the morning I woke up and the sky was clear. There wasn’t a cloud in sight.

I have no idea what happened.

I grabbed my two step-children, hopped in the car and headed down to the drag strip.

There was a back way into the drag strip and three miles from the track, early in the morning, there are cars all the way backed up down this road. I can’t even get into the track. We went around another way through the dirt and we couldn’t get in because there were so many cars.

Then a police officer came up to me demanding that I open the place because the cars waiting for the track to open have backed up traffic all the way to the interstate.  

I didn’t even have ticket sellers in place or anything, but he demanded that I open up the track.

Finally, I found a way into the track, grabbed a couple of caretakers for the facility, and I grabbed my old sidekick, Father Duffy and Steve Evans.

We went up to the gate and started bringing them in, and we were just throwing the money into paper sacks. I didn’t even have time to count. I didn’t count change and was taking whatever I could get. Help finally arrived and we were bringing the fans in as fast as we could, all four lanes were wide open trying to get the cars in the gates.

We start letting them in at 7 am, the race was scheduled to start at Noon and by 3 PM we still had a line at the gate.

I never saw the race, and I could hear Evans in the background. I was too busy at the gate.

Prudhomme ended up winning and walked up to me at the end with a s***-eating grin and said, “Doner, you killed them.”

With the race over, we went back to my house and starting counting money. We had more money than we knew what to do with it. I never put the money in the bank. I kept it at the house.

I had a guy stay there with a gun while I went down to the bank with some money. I handed the bank guy $25,000 in cash. He looked at me like he’d just watched a miracle happen and it did.

I told him that I had another plan and within two weeks, I believed I could deliver the rest of it.

I decided to put on a motorcycle road race and bring in Evel Knievel to do a jump over 19 Mercury Cougars. Yes, it rained on the day of the race.

None of the motorcycle guys wanted to race, and Knievel, who had two guys at the gate clicking the spectators as they came in because part of his pay was $1 per spectator. When they got to 11,000 spectators, he quit clicking.

Those motorcycle guys were scared to death. Knievel called them a bunch of chick s****. Never mind the fact he’d crashed on his practice lap.

In the end, I gave the bank guy his other $25,000.

When I tell you I was so close to this whole thing imploding before it all got started, that’s not an exaggeration. We eventually changed the name of the track to Seattle International Raceway and I called on my old friend Mike Brown to install about grandstands to seat 4,000 spectators. Before that, we didn’t have anything. We had an old broken down tower.

Yeah, I have some wild stories to tell, but this one still makes me emotional, because this is where it all started. It was my beginning.

WHO HAD THE BETTER STORY?

Voting Completed

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