"I'll quit when I win......"
"It's really hard to quit when you win....."
"One more time....."
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Should I Stay Or Should I Go? Weepy Force Ponders Retirement
By
Susan Wade September 05, 2019
John Force is just like one of Dr. Seuss’ Whos down in Whoville.
They liked Christmas a lot.
John Force likes drag racing a lot.
The Grinch, who lived just north of Whoville did not like Christmas. He could not stand all the noise-noise-noise-noise. According to Dr. Seuss, no one quite knows the reason the Grinch hated the whole Christmas season: “It could be his head wasn’t screwed on just right. It could be perhaps that his shoes were too tight.” Or, he wrote, “The most likely reason of all may have been that his heart was two sizes too small.”
John Force has been accused of not having his head screwed on just right. Who knows about his shoes? But unlike the Grinch, no one ever would accuse Force of having a heart that was two sizes too small.
But Force has his Grinches, of sorts. He has family members who question why he continues to race through his considerable and understandable aches and pains. They wonder aloud why he doesn’t stop and enjoy his life. They actually aren’t Grinches. But it’s clear Force thinks that with their suggestions, they “got a wonderful, awful idea.”
Force has other Grinches. He has Father Time, he said. He has aches and pains. He has a racecar right now that can carry him to a 17th championship, but he has had ones that have turned on him, breaking apart and slamming him into a Dallas wall and into Kenny Bernstein, resulting in multiple career-ending and possibly crippling injuries. He has had engines detonate and cost him not only thousands and thousands of dollars but also another piece of his health each time. He lost Eric Medlen in 2007 to irreparable racing injuries. And then he has those other Grinches: regret, self-doubt, and fear. Those are real, and his raw emotions came spilling out Labor Day in his often-tearful and evidently therapeutic post-race interview.
I started and I didn’t know my kids. I don’t know my wife anymore. I just go down this road and do this stuff because it is the greatest sport in the world.
He just had earned his first U.S. Nationals Funny Car victory in 17 years, one that would pull him into a tie with Ed “The Ace” McCulloch with five on the NHRA’s grandest stage. But from the tone of his remarks, one would think he was spinning lyrics for a country-music song about lost love.
The unmatched 151-time winner lamented, “I should’ve retired 20 years ago for that quality of life. I should’ve walked away, and now I don’t even know how to walk away. I don’t know how to get off this train – but I got to. It’s coming. I don’t know when. If you’re waiting for me to tell you I’m quitting, I ain’t going to do that.