Tony Pedregon has played basketball with Antron Brown, and the FOX Sports analyst has seen Brown’s competitive nature off the dragstrip. “He’s a wolf,” Pedregon declared. “A wolf.”
Hearing that, Brown giggled. But he knows it’s true. No matter what the contest, he knows he’s merciless in the moment.
“You could see me smiling, kissing babies, shaking hands, and when I put my helmet on, I’m like Gladiator because I’m trying to bring death to the competition. And that never changes, brother,” Brown said. “I don’t care who you are. I don’t care what kind of car we’re racing. We could race Big Wheels to the 60-foot clock cone, and you could be a little girl that’s seven years old – and I ain’t giving her no false hope – I’m taking her to the cleaners, brother.”
His Top Fuel competitors have been warned.
“I don’t care who it is,” Brown said. “It’s just one of those deals where I’m a true competitor by nature, and I tell people this all the time: The day that I feel like I don’t want to win, I will not be driving a race car no more. I don’t like to lose, and I go to the gym. I do all the necessary things – try to eat the right foods, keep myself in shape, and I try to come out in the best shape and mindset that I could be to win. And when I lose a race, I don’t go from a race and go, ‘Man, I wish I did this better.’ I have given it my all so I can honestly move to the next race and whatever I messed up on, I am going to work harder on what I messed up on and make that weakness my strength. So I’ll go in the next race to give it my all. And that’s how I carry the chip. I’m always hungry.”
And he can tell you exactly what shaped that mentality: “I’ve always been like that, and there’s a reason for it: “I’m the youngest sibling. I have one older sibling, my older brother, Carlos Albert, and he used to beat me down,” Brown said. “And I wanted to go play with him and his friends. He never wanted me to come. And his deal was if I cry, I had to go home. So he used to have his friends tackle me and push me down, do everything else. So when I used to play against kids my age, they never hurt me. I got beat up by kids that were six years older than me. So I’m like, ‘That’s all you got?’ I’m like, ‘You pushed like a child.’ I was getting pushed around by older teenagers.
“My brother to this day tells me, ‘Ant, I’m so sorry for what I did to you when you were young. He goes, ‘But you inflicted all that pain out on everyone. And I’m so sorry,’ because when I turned 16, my brother never beat me in another basketball game or any sport we played. Never let him.”
Brown said Pedregon “knows how I play. He said, ‘Oh, he’s a maniac out there.’ They can’t slow me down. I’m all over the place.”
So Brown said he figured his brother did him a huge favor.
“Oh, yes he did. Yes he did,” he said. “And I still play like that to this day, even at my age of being in my mid-40s.”
