The Snake and the Mongoose

This is the only entry in the Ophidiary where the serpent and its predator were the same business.

Don Prudhomme raced with an economy of motion that got him the nickname Snake early — he was fast off the line and gave nothing away. Tom McEwen was a decent racer and an exceptional thinker, and he understood something that the rest of the sport did not: that nobody buys a ticket to watch a fast car. They buy a ticket to watch a fight.

So McEwen named himself the Mongoose. Not because of anything he did on the strip. Because the mongoose kills the snake, and because a sport with two names in it is a story, and a story can be sold.

He then took that story to Mattel — a toy company with a die-cast car line called Hot Wheels — and proposed something that had essentially not been done before at that scale: a corporate sponsor from outside the automotive industry funding a racing team, in exchange for the team being the product. In 1970 the Snake and the Mongoose ran matched funny cars in Hot Wheels livery, and Mattel sold the pair in a twin-pack with a length of orange track, and children who had never been to a drag strip knew exactly who was who and which one they were supposed to want to win.

What McEwen had invented, in essence, was modern sports sponsorship. Every football shirt with a betting company on it descends, distantly and without acknowledgement, from a man deciding to call himself after a small carnivore in order to give a friend an enemy.

The rivalry was mostly manufactured and the friendship was entirely real. The story’s final act is well known and the Ophidiary tells it without embellishment: in 1978 McEwen’s son Jamie died of leukaemia at fourteen; McEwen raced days later at Indianapolis and won the final, with Prudhomme in the other lane.

Snake and mongoose. A relationship in which two animals are permanently defined by each other, and neither one is complete alone.