Dirt
‘Bats, Balls
& Burnouts’
Longtime NHRA team PR
rep publishes memoir
By Brandon W. Mudd
I
When did you decide to
write a book?
There’s two answers to
that question. The first one
goes all the way back to
when I think I was 15. I write
about this in the book. My
mother had a great idea, that
all of us in the family should
collaborate on a book. Unfor-
tunately, she and I were the
only two that wrote anything.
We didn’t have enough! But
it got me started. She was a
PR person and such a good
PR person, she got it published in a St. Louis fan
magazine. So being published at the age of 15 was
on my résumé, probably until I was 30 (laughs).
At what point in your career did you realize
you had a book in you?
In 2001, working for Del Worsham, I started
on January 1 and wrote literally a daily diary of
the whole season. Self-publishing then was in
42 | D r a g
I l l u s t r a t e d | DragIllustrated.com
its infancy and it was really
complicated, it was really
cheesy. And this was pre-blog days. No one knew
me; I was still the behind-the-scenes guy no one
knew. I wrote the whole year, everything that
happened, including 9/11. It was just a crazy year,
2001, and I happened to have chosen that year to
write it all down in some wild idea that I might
somehow get it published. When I was done, I
printed it out and it was about three inches thick
and I ran it by a few people. But again, it was ‘Why
would anyone want to read about you?’ (laughs)
They didn’t mean that in a bad way, but it was
the truth. No one knew who I was.
But I had it printed out and the guys on the
CSK team kind of handed it around and all re-
ally, really enjoyed it. We had a crew member--a
real Southern boy from South Carolina--named
Shannon Plumley. He read it and a couple days
later, he brought it back up into the lounge in
Issue 123
met Bob Wilber in 2007 when I was
the PR director at what is now Gateway
Motorsports Park and he was doing PR
for Del Worsham. My background was
in NASCAR and it was Bob, along with some
other incredible PR and media veterans in NHRA,
who helped acclimate me to what would become
my passion.
Recently, Bob saw his memoirs, “Bats, Balls,
and Burnouts” published to much acclaim. It’s
the story of how the son of a former pro base-
ball player and PR professional—Del and Taffy
Wilber—came up through the minor and major
leagues of baseball, with stops in indoor soccer
and various other occupations, before landing as
an NHRA publicist for 20+ years. Before retiring
at the end of the 2015 NHRA Mello Yello Series
season, Wilber worked for drivers Whit Bazemore,
Worsham, and, finally, Tim Wilkerson.
The book is an incredible story and
I talked to Bob recently
about the journey that
has led him to become a
published author.