BILL DONER: DRAG RACING’S PROMOTER
That's what Bill Doner wanted to know.
"You're a cool guy. I like you," Prudhomme told the memorable race promoter from Orange County, Irwindale, Fremont, Portland, Seattle, and other fabled drag strips.
"I said, 'OK,'” Doner remembered, still puzzled.
Then Prudhomme said, "Now, here's the deal: I'm going to unveil a new Shelby car, over at Pomona. We're going to have a dinner and stuff, and I want you to come over there."
RELATED COMMENTARY - DRAG RACING NEEDS A PROMOTER
What in the world possessed Don Prudhomme to pick up the telephone on Super Bowl Sunday this February and call Bill Doner?
"You're a cool guy. I like you," Prudhomme told the memorable race promoter from Orange County, Irwindale, Fremont, Portland, Seattle, and other fabled drag strips.
"I said, 'OK,'” Doner remembered, still puzzled.
Then Prudhomme said, "Now, here's the deal: I'm going to unveil a new Shelby car, over at Pomona. We're going to have a dinner and stuff, and I want you to come over there."
The occasion was the debut of the Prudhomme Edition Shelby GT500 Super Snake automobile during a private reception at the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum. Prudhomme's Ford Cammer-powered dragster made its debut as "Shelby's Super Snake" at the 1968 Winternationals. The Snake won the race and drove the rest of the season under the Shelby banner. The two were getting back together to share the story of their new road-and-track car project with racing insiders and to share some fond memories.
About a week before the call to Doner, Prudhomme and Carroll Shelby had taped an interview at Shelby's house, reminiscing about how they got together more than 40 years ago. When Prudhomme mentioned Doner, Shelby exclaimed, "Where is Bill?! We need to see him!"
So Doner showed up early the day of the reception to watch the opening qualifying session for the Winternationals. It was rained out, so he sat in Prudhomme's trailer and, he said, "and had a lot of fun and yucks." Then when they got to the function at the Museum, Donor said, he visited with Shelby -- "We laughed and we giggled."
Doner sat and watched Mike Dunn at least try to moderate a panel of notorious rebels and characters -- Prudhomme, Shelby, John Force, Ed "Ace" McCulloch, and Jerry Ruth. Force said he got his start "back when Bill Doner was running Orange County."That's all it took. "Then they started telling stories about me," Doner said, "and I got a really big kick out of it. I got up and waved my white flag: Stop it! Stop it! I don't know sometimes if the NHRA likes hearing or not hearing all that stuff. But I had a really good time.
"The next night," he said, "Prudhomme called me and said, 'Lynn and I were just thinking about what a good time we had last night. Would you come around more often?' I said, 'Yeah, I'll do that.' Of course, I haven't. But I've been watching the drag races. I was thinking that maybe I would dart out to Pomona (for the Finals in November)."
My promotional ability has not all been drained out of my body. I don't sit home every Sunday and watch car races, necessarily. But I have been watching the drag races lately. I watched Denver and Seattle, and out of the corner of my eye I'll be keeping track of what goes on at Sonoma.
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Doner, who's retired and lives in the California desert oasis, can come out of hiding. The statute of limitations is in effect, and he's
Or as Tommy Naccarato dramatically said on the website nostalgiafunnycarnews.com, in exhorting Doner to come out of the shadows and breathe excitement into the sport:
"They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. . . . They'll just walk out to the bleachers, sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect Saturday evening. They'll find they have reserved seats somewhere just off of the starting line where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the race, and it will be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them from their faces. People will come, Bill. The one constant through all the years for us, Bill, has been drag racing Funny Cars. . . . Our dragstrips have been erased like a blackboard, redeveloped and erased again. But our brand of drag racing has marked the time. This racetrack, this sport, these cars, it's a part of our past, Bill. It reminds us of all that once was good and could be again. . . . Bill Doner, it's time to wake up. It's time to go to work."
"Bill is my hero," Naccarato, the former crew member for teams such as the Condit Brothers' L.A. Hooker Funny Car, said this past weekend while taking a break from his golf-industry graphics job. "That guy, Bill Doner -- he's what we need. He was awesome. He and (the late) Steve Evans (his promotional partner in grime) really would go out of their way to make it happen. He would be screaming into a microphone, getting people excited. It was like the carnival had come to town. The grandstands were full. People were lined up five- and six-deep the fences."
Would Doner come back to the arena that remembers him as the big dreamer responsible for making the "64 Funny Cars" shows a reality? Would he come back after being -- in the late Shav Glick's description in the L.A. Times -- "(a) brash, fast-talking, arm-waving maverick promoter from Orange County who filled the stands for drag racing at Irvine and Irwindale with such outrageous stunts as Fox Hunt night, where female-ogling was as much a part of the scene as dragsters and Funny Cars," a rogue with "a helter-skelter, shoot-from-the-hip-and-ask-questions-later approach"?
After all, his drag-racing exploits launched him into the Las Vegas scene -- with a hiatus in Cabo San Lucas to lie low. From drag racing he moved to vice-president of marketing at Caesars Palace. There he promoted the famous 1987 middleweight title fight between Sugar Ray Leonard and Marvin Hagler. After that high-profile chaos -- "People were running through the fountain!" -- could he ever return to drag racing the way it is now?
Maybe.
"Do I think I could come in and out-promote almost any of these people out here? Of course I do," he said. "On the whole, I think I still have enough good ideas and enough wherewithal and the ability to grind and push, that yeah, sure, I could do that. Who's out there in the trenches, promoting the individual events for them?"
He said he's inching back to drag racing.
"I'm a big football guy. During football season I go to football games in Los Angeles. But last year I went up to Bakersfield for the March Meet," he said. "Thinking about it, sort of lit a little fire in me, and (I'm) thinking maybe there's a lot of fun there. And the year before, I was one of the speakers at Tom McEwen's 70th birthday deal. So there have been some things happening, some little steps along the way.
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People who remember Doner's offbeat brand of magic say he could pack in the crowds now. However, Doner, who takes a great interest these days in the fan counts as he watches the races on TV, would say not to count on him for Fridays.
"I've always had a hard time on Fridays anywhere I ever did anything," he said. “At Orange County, I made every single Funny Car make pass Friday night and I'd let all the people in for free, and I had a match race between Shirley Muldowney and (Don) Garlits -- two out of three -- and I still couldn't get any people. Friday has never been my long suit. I maybe could sink 'em Saturday night, but Friday, I don't know. I see these tracks that do real good on Friday night and I say, 'I wonder how they did that.' "
Doner said his memory tells him that promoting a race in the summertime is extra-challenging work: "It took about every trick we could come up with. We did it, but it's hard." He said he thinks about the crowds today but "I'm not going to second-guess somebody when I'm sitting in my living room."
The secret to effective promoting, he said, is instinct.
"A lot of it is you just feel it -- you just do it, you know?" he said. "I used to call it water dripping on a rock. I don't know if it even penetrated the people. But you just keep dripping enough of it and maybe it gets in there somehow."
Today's media choices astound him, he said. "Nowadays there are so many radio stations and it's hard to try to blanket television. Now people have televisions with 150 stations! How do you pick your spots for all that?"
And this is from the master of the mesmerizing commercials.
"When the ads came on the radio, people didn't turn the radio down -- they turned it up! They loved the ads. They'd go to the major rock stations and listen for our ads. If we weren't on the air on that station, the kids wouldn't listen to it," Doner said. "The 64 Funny Car ads were so powerful that people bring that up to this day."
Jim Rockstad, the longtime Northwest promoter who was Doner's protégé, said, "We had the largest crowd ever in SIR (Seattle International Raceway, now Pacific Raceways), at 26,000-plus, for the '79 edition of 64 Funny Cars."
He said Doner "is a very smart individual," his antics notwithstanding. "I have the highest respect for him . . . and his capabilities. He turned the Northwest into a haven of Funny Cars when he hatched 64 Funny Cars. It came from him and changed the sport all over the nation, as other operators went to the night Funny Car programs."
Doner easily noticed one thing that's wildly different from the days when he was appealing to the masses -- the ages of the fans.
"One of the things it looks like, to me, is happening is they're losing some of the younger people," he said. "I don't see thousands of teenage kids dying to go to the drag races. We could get 'em so whipped up that if you weren't there, people would throw rocks at you. It was the biggest deal ever!"
Drag racing in the Midwest had Union Grove's "Broadway Bob" Metzler at Union Grove, Wis. He used to thrill the crowd by riding on the front of jet-powered dragsters and on the hoods of jet limos. Still, Rockstad said, "Doner was the ultimate drag racing promoter of his time." The 64 Funny Cars show, he said, was "the event that was Northwest-born and put Seattle on the map. It will forever be part of the early years of the sport." Doner, he credited, coined such phrases as "fiberglass forest," "ground-pounding," and "under the lights.
Doner knows that's his legacy.
"All the things I can say I did in my life, people don't say, 'Hey, didn't you work for Carroll Shelby?' No. They don't say, 'Were you the commissioner of Unlimited Hydroplanes?' No. 'Did you catch the biggest fish in the world?' No. 'Did you work at Caesars Palace?' No. Know what they say?" he asked. " 'Hey, that's the guy who did 64 Funny Cars!' Everybody knows what that means. I'd just as soon that wasn't on my tombstone . . . but everybody knew what that meant right away."
At that dinner at Pomona, Prudhomme cooed about the new Shelby offering, "The thing I really think is cool about this car is that you can drive it both on the track and on the street. It reminds me of how drag racing used to be back in the day when we would drive our cars to the drag strip, race them, and drive them home at the end of the day. That's maybe the neatest thing about this car."
Same for Bill Doner, the envelope-pushing, curfew-pushing promoter. What's cool about him, the neatest thing about him, is he reminds everybody of how drag racing used to be back in the day. The sport never will see another Bill Doner, but maybe someday it can be Morning in Drag Racing again.
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