"We go back to the starting line and I look down at the accelerator pedal and see this push rod stuck through a hole. Bill had taken a push rod and sharpened it up sharp as a nail, and he did that so I wouldn't mash the pedal over center. He was trying to keep me from breaking his accelerator," Ball said.

Surprisingly or not, Ball said that he has never been a dragster man, although he has owned and raced two in brackets, a front-engine one and a rear-engine one. The '91 Probe replaced the rear-engine car, and before that, he had a Monza that won him a lot of money.

In his lifetime, Speedy Ball has raced the two Oldsmobiles, in Stock and gasser modes, a '35 Chevy coupe in a gas class, Bill Mullins' Prefect, Mullins' gas and fuel dragsters, a '41 Willys coupe in C/ and D/Gas (from 1967 to 1974), a G/ and F/Modified Production and bracket Camaro in 1975, the Monza bracket car, his two dragsters and the Probe.

Ball has had his share of wins, but none more important than in the '50 Olds in D/Gas way back on December 18, 1960, at a track near Argo, Ala. "Don Nicholson ran there, and so did Hubert Platt, C.J. South, Billy Jacobs. Now, on this day, there were some real heavy hitters --- Vac Hammonds, Robert Nance (later known as "Mr. Four-Speed" and "Mr. Plymouth), Oel Foster ... they were people you had to beat to win. I won on that day. They gave me the biggest trophy I ever won, over six feet high. Some people tried to buy it back from me, but I never sold it. It got burned up in a house fire in 1964.

"The next day, my wife Helen gave birth to my son Mitchell. She was in the hospital when I got home that night, Sunday, December 18. I went straight to the hospital, and she had Mitchell the next morning, Dec. 19, 1960. I had several more wins, but that one was real important to me because normally I didn't run with those people, and my son was born the next day. That's a day I'll not soon forget."

Nowadays, grandson Charles "Charlie Brown" Defnall, 12 years old, goes with Ball to the bracket races. They travel in style, in a Kenworth diesel with a converted trailer on the back, a trailer that Speedy built himself and includes beds, a shower, a kitchen and plenty of room for his Chevy-powered Probe. Also along for the ride is best friend Gene "Fly Ball" Linn, of Anniston, who has a new slip-joint dragster. He has been friends with Mr. Ball since 1967, when a man named Jerry Coleman had Speedy build a '53 Corvette for racing.

"We were at Yellow River Drag Strip (in Georgia) when they had that bad accident and those 12 or so people were killed (in an early Funny Car crash in the late 1960s). That was the maiden voyage of the Corvette. After that, Jerry decided not to race again. Fly stayed with me from then on," he said.

Ball's tracks of choice have been Lassiter Mountain, Helena, Phoenix City, Argo (we have to admit, we've never heard of that one until good friend Jerry Hallman of Birmingham told us about it), all in Alabama, and Covington and Dallas in Georgia, plus a few others in Mississippi and Florida.

Brackets are now Speedy Ball's game. "Nobody else in the family races but me," Ball said . "My kids don't care nothin' about racing, so I have 'Charlie Brown' and 'Fly Ball.'" ("Fly Ball," by the way, got his name because he used to "fly" into work and "fly" out when it got to be quitting time, and "Ball" because ... well, you can figure that one out).

"It's not the same fun as it used to be in the old days, but it's the only fun I've got," Ball said. "I don't enjoy nothin' else except drag racing. No other kind of sports. I'm gonna race 'til I run out of go-power. I'll either get physically or financially disabled to race before I quit."