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The Washington Post
April 30, 1984, Monday, Final Edition
IT'S MUD, BUD;
Revving Up the Thunder For a Slide Into Memory
BYLINE: By John Ed Bradley
SECTION: Style; C1
LENGTH: 966 words
ONE THOUSAND Belgian horses of power kicking in a stall never churned up this much dirt, and all the flashbulbs flashing and the ladies screaming--good golly!--and the road leading through mud and packed dirt and lazy planks of plyboard, one full turn around the pasture in RFK Stadium Saturday night, and there, parked on the south end, five dead Fords and one white Dodge waiting to die again.
Here comes that red-headed, red-bearded bad boy Everett Jasmer in his monster Chevy USA-1 looking for a tin chaw to slip between cheek and gum, a pinch of Detroit to chew on. And Old Everett--who's really, at 32, pretty young and already the star of the Hot Rod Truck and Tractor Pull Championships--is feeling that old cowbell heart of his clanking against his lungs, and his mind saying, "Gimme tin meat! Give it to me! C'mon now."
Mama!
Hey, sons of filthy rich mothers do it all the time, come up to Everett and give him the dumb cow's eye, staring at that same faded blue railroad hat he wore the other night, and ask, "Whach-yoo want for it, Ay-vrett?" And Everett Jasmer of Spring Lake Park, Minn., proud to the bone, starts talking dollar bills.
"I've been offered as much as $300,000 for the truck," he says, "but I turned my back and walked away. This truck to me is invaluable. It's got three years of my life tied to it and an initial investment of over $100,000. I'm not ready to give it up. No way."
The law says no vehicle can push down the highway if it's wider than eight feet, and this car-crunching, mud-running road beast is as outsized as a double-wide trailer after a hurricane hits and blows out the make-do walls. The USA-1 is 11 feet wide, 10 feet tall; and every time Everett puts on a tin-eating show in a new city, he and three other men spend an hour and a half wrestling with the tires that weigh 750 pounds and cost $2,700 apiece. "And that tire change is before and after each show," he explains. "But all that work is the price you pay for the glory, I guess. I like to hear the crowd go wild. It's for them and it makes them happy. That's why I do it."
And while Everett's doing it, a bustle of old boys in four-wheel-drive Broncos and Ramblers and Jeeps get ready for their own brute competition, which is broken down into two categories: the truck pull and the mud bog racing. In the truck pull, drivers hook a weight transfer machine to the back bumpers of their rigs and pull that 50,000-pound barge as far as they can down a stretch of packed earth. The truck that pulls the sled the greatest distance is the winner.
In mud racing, drivers compete against the clock and the bog at their wheels. He who covers the most ground in the best time is crowned champion and takes home $300.
That old boy Tim Arfons, owner and operator of the "Green Monster," a funny car with a helicopter engine that blows enough fire to charbroil West Texas, can pull a weighted sled of 80,000 pounds a distance of 200 feet, easy, and with only his two back wheels on the ground. The steering wheel of the car is no bigger than a giant jawbreaker, and it sits up against your stomach, pressed against your belly and rumbling with 1,500 horses of poised power.
"You feel this thunder up under your hind end," Arfons says, "and your front end lifts four or five feet off the ground when you give it the juice. It becomes a sensual thing, really, because how you steer it depends entirely on how you feel it. You got brake pedals for each foot and an accelerator and a hand throttle, and all you hear is the engine screaming, is all."
And a dream song of long ago, the sound of his own famous father Art Arfons breaking a land speed record in the salt flats of Utah, out near Bonneville, with a run of 576 mph. This was in 1964, and now Tim hears his old man trying to explain how it feels to fly and never leave the ground, and how it felt that ugly day a few years later when his mule blew a tire and the entire ship scattered over four miles of netherland, and everything burned. They could never find the parts to put the speed ship back together again, and his father, burned and bruised and battered, spoke only of going 600 mph and living to see it through.
Daddy!
Mike "Tennessee Thunder" Hollingsworth is saying, "Me and Tim are strictly exhibitionists. We don't compete for prize money in the mud runs and the sled pulls like these other old boys, we're strictly for show. They pay us about as much as a crummy offensive lineman in the United States Football League, and what we do is travel 100,000 miles a year to run down a strip of dirt in less than 20 seconds. You'd think you could, but you can't ever get used to it. I sup-pose, though, that if it didn't scare you it wouldn't be any fun and you'd want to go back home and just work in the shop. I look forward always to being scared by this business."
Like so many old boys who came up loving the mule-thunder their rigs gave them, Hollingsworth and Arfons used to make every county fair they could to show off their fast funny cars. "We'd pay $25 to enter," Hollingsworth remembers, "and it'd cost $75 for gas. And all you're doing is fighting over blue ribbons and a $100 purse. It made no sense. Life was too complex. Then they started paying more, and the price of gas and such went up and up, and your expenses never matched what you could earn. That's when life became impossible, I say."
But now life is the saint of internal combustion rock-rolling across six dead cars, and that looks like old Everett Jasmer--yes, it does--sitting pretty before the world with a heart that clanks and a beard that burns red. Nitrous oxide spits fire out of chrome pipes, and the thing is hungry, starved. Oh, you bad boy, you beast! Look out, tin meat! Look out, America! Here come's Everett!
Mama!
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Pictures 1 through 3, Everett Jasmer's USA-1 driving over a row of cars Saturday night at RFK Stadium; Jasmer in front of his truck; Tim Arfons in his "Green Monster" funny car. Photos by Fred Sweet--The Washington Post
Copyright 1984 The Washington Post
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