Racer is more like a force of nature

Among the compelling things about John Force is his name, which is a perfect description of his personality.

The publicity handouts say he is a 57-year-old drag racer who lives in Yorba Linda, has won 121 events in National Hot Rod Assn. competition and has a 71-point lead going into the annual final event of the year today and Sunday in Pomona, where he figures to win his 14th championship in the funny car division.

But the publicity handouts don’t come close to capturing the force of Force. He is part hurricane, part tornado, and if he gets in a boat, expect a tsunami.

His run to a 14th title is unprecedented in any NHRA division. Shirley “Cha Cha” Muldowney won three and they made a movie. For Force, they needed at least a television series and, lo and behold, they did one.

Force and his self-labeled dysfunctional family have filmed 18 episodes of a reality show called “Driving Force.” It was on the A&E; cable network Monday nights and may return after the first of the year. Even now, people with headphones, cameras and boom microphones follow him everywhere, as they do his four daughters and his wife, Laurie. Suffice it to say, this show is not “Ozzie and Harriet” revisited.

One daughter runs John Force Racing Inc., and is married to one of Force’s drivers and main challengers for the title, Robert Hight. The three other daughters race dragsters, and Laurie, who tossed Force out of the house seven years ago and says now they should have gotten a divorce but just never got around to it, plays a major role in the show and frets over the possibility of her daughters getting hurt in racing accidents.

You can’t make this stuff up, nor is there an easy answer to the question of why, if your personal life is such a circus, you would allow it to be on TV.

“Just stupid, I guess,” Force says.

Force, of course, is stupid like a fox.

You don’t interview John Force. You show up, open a notebook and start scribbling. He is always on, always promoting, speculating, theorizing, rationalizing, worrying, storytelling and entertaining. He is loud and likable, dominating and never dull. He is a walking ad for caffeine. There are no needle marks showing, but he must mainline it.

Reporters show up for an interview, and a night at the Improv breaks out.

He speaks fast and there are often no transitions. Usually, none are needed.

“I found out a couple of weeks ago I wasn’t Catholic,” he says. “Somebody from the TV show asked and I said I was, that my kids were born and raised Catholic, and my wife says, ‘No you’re not.’ So I asked her why she sent me to Santa Barbara that time when priests were putting water on my forehead.”

He says his wife loves him, “but she just doesn’t like me.”

He says he got a haircut the other day and looks like “Bob’s Big Boy,” and says he would have gone to the shaved-head look but he had “too many lumps to cover up.”

He says the only thing good about getting old is that “when you put your socks on in the morning and push the big toe through, you don’t even know,” and that he hasn’t had a beer in two months and will have to relearn that soon. “Don’t they call that rehab?” he says.

The former polio victim, who recovered to become the Bell Gardens high school quarterback and led the team to zero victories in three seasons, may be a better storyteller than drag racer, and many think he is the best drag racer ever.

“I got kicked off the couch again,” says Force, who has a separate condominium near the large home where he lives with his wife and two of his daughters until they can’t stand him anymore and toss him out. Their tolerance limit is usually two days.

“This happened just a couple of days ago,” Force continues. “A young driver, Jack Beckman, won for his first time in Las Vegas. He gets married and they have a party.

“Laurie and I go and she has a card for the newlyweds and I write on the card ‘Congratulations on your win in Las Vegas.’

“Laurie goes nuts, says that all I care about is racing, that the card was for their wedding. So I’m back out in the boathouse [his condo] again.”

He says that, on his little lake in Yorba Linda, East Lake, holiday boat shows are a big deal.

“There’s this lady who is always after me to decorate my boat and get in the show,” he says, “and I want to scream, ‘Hey, lady, I’m having a nervous breakdown here. I got three guys up my butt in the points race and I’m dying here.’ So I decorate my boat for Halloween and get out there in line and we are puttering around and my engine battery dies, the lights go out and I mess up the whole parade. Now, I got a little sign on the boat that says: ‘Christmas Grinch Lives Here.’ ”

Force says that the TV show has given him a chance for a rare fatherhood mulligan. He watched the early shows and didn’t like what he saw.

“What I’ve learned ... is, I really am a jerk,” he told the Associated Press. “My wife was right.”

He expands on that this week by saying, “I was gone a lot, but I thought I was a decent father, that I was there for Christmas and birthdays. I was paying the bills; I bought cars for my daughters. The thing is, I never taught them how to drive them.”

In the race for the title, Ron Capps is 71 points behind Force, and son-in-law Hight is 73. The most points a driver can get on any NHRA weekend is 138, and that is only possible with a 20-point bonus for setting a national speed record. The Pomona Fairplex circuit has never yielded those 20 points to a funny car.

Force won 12 of the 13 national funny car titles from 1990 through 2002, then lost to Tony Pedregon in ‘03, won again in ’04 and lost to Gary Scelzi in ’05.

“For a while, I thought it was a bad thing for the sport to have the same guy winning all the time,” Force says, laughing. “But then Scelzi won last year and I got over it.”

Force is contractually committed to sponsors to run his funny car in NHRA through 2011, through age 62, and at this point, he seems fit and ready to do that. The only thing he might lose along the way is his voice.

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.