Without Old Rival, It’s a Bit of a Drag : McEwen Having Best Year on Strip but Misses Prudhomme

“When the cat’s away the mice will play,” the English proverb goes.

And when the Snake’s away the Mongoose will play.

Tom McEwen, drag racing’s venerable old Mongoose, is having the best year of his long career as he approaches 50, but he would enjoy it more if the Snake, old rival Don Prudhomme, were racing this year. Prudhomme chose to sit out when he couldn’t find a sponsor.

The Snake and the Mongoose go back to the very roots of drag racing, the 1950s, when the place for hot rodders to go on Saturday nights was P.J. Hart’s strip on the old Santa Ana Airport runway.

McEwen ran his first race there when he was 15, driving his mother’s ’53 Oldsmobile. That was a year before the National Hot Rod Assn. held its first national event.

This weekend, McEwen will be at it again. The veteran from Fountain Valley is one of the favorites in the funny car division of the NHRA’s 22nd annual World Finals at the L.A. County Fairgrounds in Pomona.

The Snake will be there, too, but only as a spectator. He will be back racing next year, however, with backing from the U.S. Tobacco Co. The announcement and the unveiling of his Skoal funny car will be made tonight.

“I couldn’t count the times the Snake and I lined up side by side,” McEwen reminisced. “We used to travel together and do match races all over the country. I miss him, and I’m glad he’s coming back, even though he’s beat me 90% of the time.

“I didn’t win nearly as many times as he did, but for some reason I managed to win when the big bucks were up.”

McEwen has been the Mongoose since 1964, when engine builder Ed Donovan said he acted like a Mongoose because he spent so much time chasing the Snake. He scored his biggest win in the 1984 Big Bud Shootout on Labor Day weekend at Indianapolis, collecting $50,000, half for winning the event and a matching $25,000 from Coors for winning the beer-sponsored race.

In 1972 and 1973, McEwen won the two richest drag racing purses in history at the time, $23,000 for the first Supernationals at Ontario Motor Speedway and $38,000 in the Professional Drivers Assn. final at Tulsa.

McEwen’s most memorable victory, though, was in the 1978 U.S. Nationals at Indianapolis, where he defeated Prudhomme in the final round. McEwen’s 15-year-old son, Jamie, had died of leukemia 10 days earlier.

“It was like a fairy tale,” McEwen said. “Even today I find it hard to believe. The Snake and Jamie were very close. All Jamie’s life, Snake and I had been very close friends, almost like brothers, and Jamie was always around with us.

“Before Jamie died, one of the last things he said was to go to Indy and beat Prudhomme. The Snake was unbeatable in those days. He’d won four World championships in a row and set low e.t. (elapsed time) in every round at Indy. We changed gears for the final run to get some extra power off the line and it paid off when we both got off good but the Snake smoked his tires. We were gone.

“I was so choked up I couldn’t get out of my car. I just sat there crying. The Snake knew all about what Jamie had told me, and he knew how I felt. He got out of his car, walked down to where I was, poked his head under the canopy and stood there crying with me. I never saw him so emotional.”

The death of his son changed McEwen’s life. For the last eight years, he has devoted as much time working for leukemia and cancer funds and visiting hospitals as he has racing his Corvette funny car.

Last week he was in San Francisco attending a Leukemia Society of America convention as a member of the organization’s sports board. Other members are New York Met catcher Gary Carter and Olympic wrestling gold medalist Jeff Blatnick.

“Gary lost his mother to cancer when he was 13, and Jeff had surgery and radiation treatment for Hodgkin’s disease before he came back and won his gold medal,” McEwen said. “He was stricken again after the Olympics, but he’s a battler. We’re a very involved group.

“Carter has been a tremendous asset in the movement. Last year, he raised more than $50,000 himself, selling autographed baseball cards, baseballs, all sort of things with his name on it, and making public appearances.”

Sunday’s World Finals will be McEwen’s 25th national event this year--14 in the NHRA and 11 in the Southeast-based International Hot Rod Assn.--and at each one he has spent at least two days working against leukemia and related diseases.

“My schedule usually calls for one day talking to reporters, getting on TV, doing anything I can to get the message across about what’s happening in leukemia and cancer research. My role is to generate excitement in the fact that a break-through is coming someday. Soon, we hope, and everybody wants to be there when it happens. You can’t believe the advances made in the short time since Jamie died.

“When Jamie came down with it, leukemia was a death warrant. There was no hope. Today, the doctors are saving lots of them--if they can get at it early enough--and helping others to keep going as long as possible. When the break-though comes, and the cure is found for those type diseases, just hanging on for one more week could mean a new life for someone fighting to stay alive.”

On Thursdays, McEwen goes to area hospitals to visit patients, usually children, and their parents.

“Some kids hate the world, hate the doctors, hate everybody they know. You can’t blame them, but they’re the ones I like to talk to,” he said.

“At first they wonder what I’m doing there. They challenge me, but when I tell them what my son went through, the terrible bone marrow treatment, the chemotherapy, all the things they’re going through, that changes their outlook. Some of them couldn’t care less that I’m a drag racer, but that doesn’t bother me. I keep telling them to think positive or they’re going to die.

“Some get pumped up over race cars, and we spend time talking about my racing. That takes their minds off their sickness, for a few minutes at least.”

McEwen himself had a personal scare last March.

“One morning I noticed a lump under my arm,” he said. “Well, I’d been around enough to know I should be checked immediately, but I also thought, ‘Oh, no, it’s going to happen to me, too.’ All the talking I’d done about keeping a positive attitude left me when it was me who was involved.

“I was like everybody else who thinks they’re dying of cancer. The only difference was that I knew how important it was to act quickly. Most people in that situation either don’t want to know, or else they want to ignore it and hope it will go away.

“I went right in for tests. The doctors told me that if they found something, they’d operate immediately. I knew in my mind that I was going to wake up and find my arm gone. I was as scared as anyone I’d met who faced the same possibility. When it was over and they told me everything was OK, that the lump was benign, I felt like I was reborn.

“Maybe that’s why I’ve had such a great year this season. The week before I went in the hospital, I failed to qualify for the Winternationals at Pomona. The next event was the Gatornationals in Florida and I made the finals. I lost to Ed McCulloch, but I was on my way.”

With one event remaining, McEwen is seventh in NHRA standings with 7,396 points, only two behind McCulloch and 372 behind fifth-place Johnny West. He also finished third in the IHRA funny car standings behind Mark Oswald and Paul Smith.

“An added incentive to do well is the money Coors donates to leukemia research through the American Cancer Society each time I win a round in an NHRA or IHRA national event,” McEwen said.

Each time McEwen qualifies for the first round of a 16-car elimination, $150 is donated. When he makes it to the second round, another $200 is added, with an increase to $250 for the semifinals and $400 for a win. The brewery also added $500 when he qualified for the Big Bud Shootout, where he lost in the second round to two-time World champion Kenny Bernstein of Newport Beach.

Sunday, between rounds of the World Finals, McEwen will present a check for $4,700 or more--depending on how far he advances that day--to Bill Littlejohn, American Cancer Society director of development for western Los Angeles county.

McEwen stood 15th after Thursday’s first day of qualifying, driving his Corvette funny car through the quarter mile in 6.063 seconds at a top speed of 172.28 m.p.h. The 16 fastest cars after three more qualifying sessions today and Saturday will make up Sunday’s starting field.

The funny car leader is Johnny West, of Chandler, Ariz., who ran a track-record 5.584 seconds at 262.62 m.p.h. That broke the elapsed-time mark of 5.588 set last year by Rick Johnson.

McEwen’s all-time records are 5.64 seconds and 260 m.p.h., both set this year in Bristol, Tenn., during an IHRA national event.