Usually John Force answers questions . . . or at least starts out trying to answer them.

But this time he blurted out a question of his own:

"Did you know you have little nose hairs that keep dirt and stuff out?"

Usually John Force answers questions . . . or at least starts out trying to answer them.

But this time he blurted out a question of his own:

"Did you know you have little nose hairs that keep dirt and stuff out?"

"Yes," came the reply. "You have regular nose hairs, and then you have little, tiny ones in the back of your nose. They're called cilia."

"I should have paid attention in school," Force said, wagging his head in self-criticism. "I'm reading my daughter Brittany's seventh-grade health book. This is stuff I should have learned when I was a kid."

Brittany is 20 years old now, in college, driving a Super Comp dragster, starring along with the rest of the family in the A&E TV Network's reality show "Driving Force," and is just one of the reasons the NHRA Funny Car superstar is out of his orbit much of the time these days.

Actually, he has been in a state of mild hysteria for years. Much of it started out as entertainment for the media, who love the shtick and begged for more. But when Force ruined his own chances at the U.S. Nationals this Labor Day weekend with a first-round red light and surrendered the lead he had taken all year to capture less than a week before, the media at Indianapolis were stunned. They had witnessed what they thought was a meltdown.

Force walked into the second-floor press room and asked to address the press corps. He was without his public-relations representative, like a distressed patient chucking his medication. He already had said on the public-address system, "Bottom line: driver error. The crew gave me a good car. The sponsors gave me the money. And I screwed it up. They ought to take me back to the trailer and beat the s--- out of me."

Force told writers, "I want you to hear it from me and not from my PR people, because they'll make me look good. My PR people try to protect me because they love me. I don't deserve love. I hate myself. I'm the best there is, and I forgot how to race. Lose at Indy and you deserve to have your ass kicked."

He loves to say that wife Laurie, a San Diego State alumna who used to write his contracts and mix his fuel in their pre-children days, "loves me -- she just don't like me." Said Force, "As we started having children, she didn't want to go on the road. The machine got bigger and bigger. The fight got tough."

He said he told her, "After I win a championship, I'll calm down." Then his promise became "After I win 10 . . . " He said, "She just got tired of that rage all the time, of coming off a plane if you win you keep the kids up all night and they can't go to school, and if you lose, you're mad and on the phone in the middle of the night, yelling at Coil and yelling at everybody. Yelling's how we talk. She said, 'Why don't you go stay in the boathouse till you calm down?' I've been there ever since. I come home every now and then and stay. We get along good. We take vacations together. But it's like she said on TV, 'I can't take the guy more than two hours.' "

So why in the world did he want to invite television production crews into his home and his personal life?

 

 

 

"I didn't want to do it. I'm on overload. I have five corporations. I was offered a number of reality shows, bit I turned 'em down. I don't have any time. And there are so many things I need to do, to address, and to win this championship. But in the process, my kids wanted it. It says in the show that my wife and I haven't lived together for seven years. It's nobody's business. TV show wants to show it. They live right around the corner. Know what I mean?

"The girls wanted it [the show]. I said I've been offered two or three reality shows. I ain't got time and I know what it takes. It's seven days a week. You're up in the morning with somebody talking to you while you're trying to eat your breakfast. And when you go to sleep at night, when you're trying to pray, somebody's right there with you. It's personal. It's aggravating."

He said he consented to this offer because "they said it was about Ashley and her sisters Brittany and Courtney and their mom and the lifestyle they lived away from me and trying to race. But I'm drug into a lot of stuff."

Documented by the ever-present cameras, the women in his life caught him in an April Fool's Day joke at Houston. And Force was not amused.

"They tried an April Fool's joke on me and it went sour," he said. "And it was right in the middle of my overload. The world got a [glimpse] that John Force ain't the wonderful guy a lot of people think. You fight this job seven days a week to win. And when somebody comes and sticks a pin in you, man, you snap. I've apologized, but I was caught at the wrong time. As much as I laugh and I joke, I don't play jokes on people. It's not funny -- even if it's April's Fool. That's a dumb idea, anyway -- it ain't like it's Washington's Birthday."

He said because of the TV show, "I've had to change the way I do business. I've had to change everything."

Maybe the main reason he consented to let Brent Travers and his Schmaguuli Productions film his every move is, he said, "I thought it would bring my family closer together."

And has it?

"Yes, it has," Force said. "This ain't about racin.' You want to watch racin', turn on ESPN2. You'll watch a family. It ain't the Osbornes. It ain't the Osmonds from Salt Lake. We have our issues. I swear a lot, but I still love God. A message started being said. It kind of evolved that way. I saw myself on TV, I thought, ' What a jerk.' I saw the first show and I talked all these years to my kids -- I didn't know I had that look on my face. I didn't know I was up on the tire. I never knew I swore so much. I need to clean up my act."

But then again, as he told Laurie with another Force-ism, "It ain't like we're Ward and June Beaver."

Before filming began a year or so ago, Laurie Force said, "I think he's starting to wind down a little, but winding down for him is still beyond for anybody else.

"The bad thing," she said, "is he can't let go of certain aspects [of the racing operation]. He has to be hands-on with every part of it. That just makes him so explosive. That was hard for the kids as they were growing up. But the kids always knew he loved them."

They did. They just never understood him, exactly. They looked dumbfounded when he showed them a shiny red popcorn wagon that he bought, thinking that they would use it and rally the family around it like the family he bought it from, these strangers he envied. All of them have rolled their eyes at a host of his suggestions, including Ashley when he told her she should get comfortable by wearing her helmet everywhere she went, day and night. Responded Ashley, "Like nobody would think that was weird."

Life seems to be a constant struggle for Force, to win on the track and simply to communicate with the wife and daughters he loves so dearly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

He always has had trouble relaxing.

And now, this fan of the big screen, has a newfound hero in actor Samuel L. Jackson, who quipped, "I'll sleep when I'm dead."

When the girls were young, he thought it would be a wonderful bonding experience to take them fishing. The girls came home in tears, saying all their daddy did was talk on his cell phone. Somehow, though, they caught five small fish, which Force evidently envisioned them eating that evening for dinner. "He didn't know how to clean them, and I certainly didn't," Laurie said. "So we threw them out and went out to eat."

And that aspect of John Force's life never really changed.

"Everything I do has got to be a reason to grow. I find myself if I do," he said. "They have pictures of me in Hawaii, standing in the surf in my bathing suit with my cell phone. I need to work. That's what I love to do. It ain't just to beat the competition. I've got so many things I want to do in my life and not enough time."

He suddenly came alive, talking about his latest project. "I just bought a '55 Ford school bus -- unified school district, yellow, black letters, little short thing -- that I'm going to restore because . . . I'm going to build it for an airport shuttle," he announced proudly.

"I went down to buy a shuttle bus, because sometimes you go to the airport, there's 10 of us and you have to take three vans for all the luggage. So I thought, 'I'll buy a bus.' They wanted $80,000 for one of them limousine big buses. And I thought, 'I'm not going to spend that kind of money.' So I got something I like: a school bus. I'm going to convert it."

Sometimes Force's body screams "Enough!!" at him. He said just before the Indianapolis race, "I like interviewing. I had some trouble with the TV show. I started hurting my voice. I talked all day, and I got out with the fans. And I scream and yell. And you forget how to talk. That stretches your vocal cords. I threw my voice out, couldn't hardy talk. Every time I started to talk, my windpipe would close. They took me to the doctor and he put me on some pills to relax the muscles."

He said two things scare him.

"Going back to that trailer house I came from, because it makes me work seven days a week. The other thing is getting to where I can't drive," Force said.

"A lot of things scare me. Cancer scares me. My kids getting hurt in a car wreck scares me. But for me personally, besides all those things, that I won't get to drive one day, because I know that's what I really feed off of. And not having the money to do it," he said.





Older brother Walker Force always has worried about baby brother John. In the early days Walker told him continually that his Funny Car was unsafe: "You are going to die in this junk." Said the former L.A. County Sheriff's detective, "His car was held together with baling wire and duct tape."

And with all the antics, family free-for-alls, and even fan-induced chaos, Walker said he is sure of one thing. Asked if he's worried that John will have a heart attack (after all, John did order defibrillators for the shop and team), Walker said firmly, "Ohhhh, no! John does not get heart attacks. He gives them!"

That John Force, always giving . . .

To drag racing, he has given his life. He has qualified for an unprecedented 388 consecutive NHRA tour events, dating back to the start of the 1988 season. He has appeared in almost half of all the final rounds contested in the NHRA Funny Car division since 1989 (175 of 353) with 121 victories. And he has won at least one tour event for 20 straight seasons.

To his own children and to all young adults, he gave some advice.

"Don't do it for the money, because, buddy, you live it," he said. "Do it for the dream, in all phases of life. Take life's journey where it takes you. Usually you don't end up where you think you're going.

"What I say is finish your education. I wish I had that. I would be so much better," Force said. "I've learned it in the streets. Get that education."

At least you'll know about nose hairs.

 

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