John Force heard the screaming.

He was just starting out in drag racing and was with uncle Gene Beaver at California's Sacramento Raceway -- "in my little Chaparral trailer with four bald tires, race car wouldn't start, broker than a church mouse," he said.

"And over here is TV Tommy Ivo with his big rig and his friend, Don Prudhomme," Force said. "And I heard Prudhomme scream. And Tommy Ivo came out of that trailer -- and Tommy Ivo threw a piston at Prudhomme -- across the parking lot! And I was standing there, saying, 'Oh my God! They're going to fight!' And Beaver said, 'Don't care about the fight -- get that piston!' It was brand-new piston he threw at Prudhomme!"

Force squealed with delight at the antics of his drag-racing heroes as he recounted that tale Friday, with Ivo alongside him at zMAX Dragway.

John Force heard the screaming.

He was just starting out in drag racing and was with uncle Gene Beaver at California's Sacramento Raceway -- "in my little Chaparral trailer with four bald tires, race car wouldn't start, broker than a church mouse," he said.

"And over here is TV Tommy Ivo with his big rig and his friend, Don Prudhomme," Force said. "And I heard Prudhomme scream. And Tommy Ivo came out of that trailer -- and Tommy Ivo threw a piston at Prudhomme -- across the parking lot! And I was standing there, saying, 'Oh my God! They're going to fight!' And Beaver said, 'Don't care about the fight -- get that piston!' It was brand-new piston he threw at Prudhomme!"

Force squealed with delight at the antics of his drag-racing heroes as he recounted that tale Friday, with Ivo alongside him at zMAX Dragway.

"You don't know the stuff that went down," Force said. But Ivo -- NHRA's honored Legend at this weekend's O'Reilly National -- helped him inform the gathering about some of what did go down in those early days of the sport.

Said Force of Ivo, "He used to get under Snake's skin. I never could. Snake would shoo me away: 'Go away, Kid.' Still to this day he tells me to go away. I love Prudhomme. He's my hero, too. But he can be a pain sometimes. But Tommy could get to him, and it hit the fan."

Ivo, feigning innocence, chimed in with some insight about Prudhomme. "I don't know why Prudhomme had such a bitter attitude . . . other than when we were out on tour and we were down here at Charlotte, I took his shampoo, dumped it out, and put 10-weight oil into his shampoo bottle instead. And he got very upset with that. Maybe that's why he had such a bad attitude after that. You think so?"

Prudhomme, long before his "Snake and Mongoose" glory days annoying Tom McEwen and vice versa, worked on Ivo's crew. (Imagine -- the fierce Snake working for a former Disney Mouseketeer and child movie star.)

"He was my tire wiper," Ivo said, admitting that's an inglorious label for a crew member. Force showed his approval with a fist pump, one he kind of had hoped nobody would pick up on and later stammered to explain.

"That was long before he grew fangs and became The Snake," Ivo said. "So he was Don The Worm at the time. But he did grow fangs. He did a wonderful job."

Force said he learned from Ivo to be a showman extraordinaire.

"I sat in front of the TV with Mickey Mouse ears and watched this guy," the 15-time Funny Car champion said. He said from Ivo he learned how to deal with the fans: "Look 'em in the eye, love 'em, tell 'em stories, even if you have to make half of 'em up, because I couldn’t win a race. He called watching Ivo ignite the crowds coast to coast "the best learning lessons ever."

Said Force, "We were in the entertainment business. It was about entertaining the fans. I watched the crowds in the early days. It was showmanship." That was what he saw in Ivo, what he longed to do himself and after years of story-spinning to the fans and to the media. And now he is doing it with his John Force Travelin' Road Show.

Force had loved Ivo's glass-sided hauler with the Corvette on top and the two dragsters inside. What struck him as ingenious was the notion that "when it was raining, the show went on." The fact the display saved time and manpower because no one had to unload and set up anything inspired him. And as he was planning his own Road Show, Force tried to order an 18-wheeler with glass sides but discovered he couldn't re-create what Tommy Ivo had back in NHRA's early days.

But he has been wanting an elephant for his act, "so we'd have a petting zoo to make it more P.T. Barnum." However, an elephant expert told him an elephant would be spooked by the loud noise of the race cars. Force said he couldn't understand why someone simply couldn't provide ear plugs for the elephant -- or why he just couldn't find a deaf elephant.

And then he has had to deal with questions from children. "Kids ask, 'Where's the elephant with the show, Mr. Force? You promised an elephant.'

"Well . . . ," Force said, to the group Friday, not to the children, "Well . . . S--- happens."

Plenty of it happened when Tommy Ivo was racing, when Tommy said he figured this drag-racing thing would catch on.

"I had a movie career going. I was in the movies when I was seven. I had made about 100 movies and 300 TV shows. And I saw this [NHRA drag racing] was going to be something," he said. "It was so much more exciting than the movies. So I gave up the movie career to go drag racing."

He left behind "The Mickey Mouse Club Show," " My Little Margie," 'The Donna Reed Show," and "The Danny Thomas Show." And he still was a star. He rolled out a four-engine Buick that still is the talk of the bench-racing set. "The Showboat," he appropriately called it.

(Curiously, though, he never was keen on that name. He told on his website how that name came about: "The car's name . . . came from a Hot Rod Magazine photo shoot on the set of the short-lived 'My Little Margie' television series. Ivo played Haywood Botts, the title character's love interest. Ivo and his co-star, Cynthia Pepper, happened to be wearing their costumes for the show, which featured a ragtime-band theme. Ivo was in a striped jacket, bow tie, and straw hat. The photo shoot also was where producers of the show finally realized what Ivo drove, and they tacked an addendum to his contract, which prohibited him from driving the much-publicized car.')

Ivo had a twin-engine Buick, too, during the days when the NHRA put the kibosh on nitromethane and went to gasoline for fuel. He had jet cars. He had all kinds of cars, including a jet car, on display. And he knew how to relate to the growing fan base. And it was exploding then.

"It was fun to grow up in that age," Ivo said Friday. "Now it's pretty much down to a fine science."

Force funds four Funny Car teams and a technology trailer -- and all the hardware and vehicles for his road show that ironically points largely to the simpler days of drag racing.

It is what it is, as today's saying goes, but Force can't help but cling to the early years of drag racing, that culture that made him so smitten with "Prudhomme, Garlits, Shirley, and TV Tommy Ivo" and why as a grown man, a truck driver like his father, he would save his money to buy magazines to read about those drag racers doing all the things he longed to do.

"They're the ones who keep me climbing up that hill, just to be a part of it," Force said.

"Prudhomme, he worked in a little paint shop in the [San Fernando] Valley. He wanted to work for The Man, Ivo. That's what it’s all about. It's where we came from."

He said the NHRA's 60th Anniversary and its program honoring its Legends has been a special treat for him. "I get to watch these guys. It's all happenin' all over again," he said. Force never gets tired of telling the stories, and he never gets tired of listening to them, either.

And he couldn't stop reveling in the pre-qualifying conversation Friday without telling a story about Tommy Ivo that came from an unlikely source, his own father. Force prefaced his yarn by saying, "I've never known my father to lie. He was nothing like me." (He said he got the gift of gab from his mother and her side of the family, including his beloved "Uncle Beav.")

But one day Force's father, the champion said to Ivo, "delivered palettes and somehow ended up at your house." And he said his dad was astonished to find Ivo's grandmother in the living, sitting in her rocking chair -- sharing the space with the front end of Ivo's dragster. He was thrilled to hear from Ivo that the story was not a figment of his overly active imagination.

"That was when we figured we had to put a shop around back," Ivo said with a chuckle. "It got a little tense."

Drag racing has evolved from the days of Ivo and his background with M-I-C-K-E-Y and today's focus of M-O-N-E-Y. But no one ever can take the nostalgia out of John Force's heart. As today's iteration of TV Tommy Ivo, Force runs on that kind of fun-fuel, a nostalgia-nitro of sorts, to propel NHRA drag racing into the next era.

Ivo and Force . . . talk of the sport's four-engine cars and four-lane dragstrips, glass-sided trailers, elephants, dragsters in the living room . . . and, of course, the Prudhomme-poking . . . all that deserves a fist-pump.