Antron Brown has officially never served in the U.S. Army.
However, a two-day Mini Basic Combat Training at Fort Jackson, S.C., in December 2004 molded the NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle racer into a three-time Top Fuel champion and laid the foundation for his 2022 move to independent team ownership.
When he arrived, along with Army-sponsored bike teammate Angelle Sampey, for the five-day course, no one knew they were drag racers there just for a taste of the rigors of military life. And the drill sergeant showed them no preferential treatment.
“I will never forget what I went through there, and it was all a mindset,” said Brown, driver of the Matco Tools/Toyota/Sirius XM dragster for Don Schumacher Racing.
Just when the former college track standout thought he was getting the hang of what’s expected and the physical demands, he said, “Then they start beating you down and tell you, ‘You ain’t going to make it. You can’t make it.’ And I remember people there getting off the bus the first week, going, ‘I can’t — I don’t know how I’m going to make it through these push-ups. I’m not going to make this two-mile run. I don’t know how I’m going to do this. I can’t do this.’ You hear all ‘I can’t.’ Then (after) two or three weeks, you start hearing them saying, ‘I will’ and ‘I can.’ And that stuck with me. I went through the whole thing with the people who were graduating. They have transformed the mindsets of these soldiers to where they were indestructible, and nothing was going to stand in their way. No matter what was in their way, they were going to find a way to go around it, over the top of it, to the left of it, to the right of it to get through the obstacle that was standing in their way. And they were never going to accept defeat. They were going to keep going, no matter what.
“When I got out of basic training, that’s when my whole mindset changed on my professional career. That’s what changed me. It honestly changed me when I went through that,” Brown continued.
“It’s like anything else in life. If you want to be successful, you prepare for it. That’s all I’ve been doing for my whole life, preparing myself for different situations. I’ve always prepared for my future. You’ve got to put the seed in the field because the rain will come,” he said. “That’s always how I’ve lived my life.”
Brown broke into drag racing in the Pro Stock Motorcycle class in partnership with Troy Vincent, who today is the executive vice president of the National Football League, but Brown took over the team when Vincent left motorsports.
“I said, ‘A dream of mine was always to drive a Top Fuel car or Funny Car. But man, that’s a huge dream.’ Someone said, ‘Well, why’s that a dream? Why don’t you just make that happen?’ It never dawned on me,” Brown said. “I remember (Top Fuel legend) Darrell Gwynn telling me when I started racing Pro Stock Bike, ‘Man, you need to be a Top Fuel racer.’ And I thought, ‘Man, how am I going to drive a Top Fuel car? I’m just a rookie. I drive a motorcycle right now.’
“It’s crazy how certain people can see things in other people, but you can’t see that inside yourself. When you believe that you can do something like that is when you take the initiative. I heard all these things in the earlier part of my career in NHRA drag racing.”
Then, when he and Sampey joined multi-time Top Fuel champion Tony Schumacher under the Army sponsorship banner, he got the chance to have a leadership mentality drummed into him.
And what the U.S. Army didn’t instill in him, Don Schumacher did.
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