Part Robin Hood to small-tire outlaw drag racers and part shrewd businessman underneath his comically floppy hillbilly hat, Donald “Duck” Long — maybe by virtue of his name alone — is a one-off-style specialty-race promoter.

But the trouble with unique breeds is the risk of their becoming extinct. And the 41-year-old Crystal Springs, Fla., showman is an endangered species. With his “Lights Out” and “No Mercy” extravaganzas at South Georgia Motorsports Park, near Valdosta, Long is as familiar to racers as the Christmas Tree and as colorful. But he isn’t nearly as predictable.

Followers can expect his unwavering policy to pay competitors on the spot and his abiding loyalty to the radial-tire racers. Aside from that, this creative force might turn out to be a meteor flashing brilliantly but briefly across the Southeastern sky.

Donald Long, it turns out, might be that drifter, off to see the world. The history buff, who’s itching to travel abroad — to Peru and Egypt and other exotic locales and on such adventures as a Pyramids visit and Nile River cruise. But he said he’s “pretty much locked in” for the next two seasons to the races that have made him a cult hero since his “Boost Vs. No Boost” event at Valdosta in May 2009.       

“We’re going to do all of 2014 and ’15, I think, for sure. After that, we’ll have to look at it, you know? If everybody is still wanting us to do it and the support’s still there, then we’ll take a look at it at that time,” he said. 

“Eventually I’ll have to step away. It is very time-consuming, and there’s still stuff I want to do, a lot of traveling I want to do. I’ve planned on leaving the country three or four times. Got my passport and every time I get ready to try to go, either this race or something seems to be standing there, blocking me. But basically I want to see some of this stuff and get out of here a little bit.

“I’m going to hang in there until at least 2015, and I’ve have to take a look at it,” Long said. “If it gets to be where it’s not fun — and it has a couple times — if it ever gets really bad, that’s when I’ll probably step away.”

Make no mistake — Long is not near that deal-breaker point. He and sidekick Jimmy “Lenco Jim” Taylor are just now hitting their strides.

Long called Taylor “a pretty witty guy” and said, “He’s my right-hand man. If he quits, I’m quitting. We’re always thinking up stupid stuff, this and that. Something that’s very, very successful, like the WWF/WWE, the Vince McMahon mentality . . . When we started promoting, that’s the way we decided to go, more of a shock-and-awe type deal at first, to get their attention. 

“We just knew we needed some characters. Back in the day, you had the WWF stuff. They were always flamboyant. They draw your attention. Even though you know the rasslin’s fake or whatever, when you got Macho Man or somebody doing crazy stuff, you’re still watching it, even if you know the guy’s just putting on a show,” he said. “We decided to come up with our own characters.”

With a stunning wardrobe from the racks of the fashion-forward local Salvation Army store, Long and Taylor took on the trick-or-treat look of a late-night local cable-access pitch man and Flavor Flav knockoff. Together, arguably, they have administered a turnbuckle smash on all other racing promoters.

Honestly, who else can morph from lawn-mowing and underground cable-laying into serving as wildly popular, coarse-but comical, feral front men for a highly specialized niche in an decidedly niche sport?

“We’ve calmed down a little bit, but it’s coming back,” Long said with a nod to his definitely-not-PG-rated Duck X Productions videos. Taylor’s –pardon the pun —  growing lawn-care service has him mowing 300 yards a week. With his busy season winding down, he’s expecting to have more time to devote to promotion.

“We’ll have probably 30 videos coming out between November and February,” Long said. “We have more time on our hands to play around — to get in trouble. 

“Oh yeah — we’ve been through some trouble, now — I’m not going to lie. We’ve made a couple of enemies along the way. We were in the middle of one of our threatening letters or lawsuits or something and somebody told me, ‘You know you’re doing something right if somebody’s trying to sue you.’ We’ve since decided to buy a whole bunch of liability insurance and then we just say what we want to,” he said, laughing.

“I’ve had haters,” he said. “That was the whole thing — First I got mad about what was going on.” The reaction from those in charge of his racing circle at the time was ‘If you know so much, go put on [a race] yourself.’ “

What had Long wound up was the caste system at events.

“These are Outlaw Drag Radial cars,” he said of his fields. “I cater to all the small-tire guys. There’s no Pro Mods. This is the real deal: In 2008, all these guys were parking out in the weeds. They were racing for $1,000. I was friends with all these guys and one of the cars I had a vested interest in. What happened was I just got mad with the way everyone was being treated. 

“The Pro Mods always parked up front on the concrete — and Outlaw 10.5 cars. And here comes the radial stock suspension guys, we’re parked out there in the swamp and the weeds and everything else,” Long said.

So he did something about it. 

“There’s people that talk about doing stuff, and there’s people that just do it. With me, I’m always, ‘You just got to put it out there and do it.’ I always figured this: If you treat everybody right and they always got paid [your event would be considered successful]. Another big thing I didn’t like with what was going on [was that] people would cut the purses,” Long said.

“They’d advertise $5,000 to win. And you’d get there and they’re like, ‘OK, we got nine cars, so you’re going to get $1500 or something.’ So we kind of figured as long as you took care of everybody and treated the like they needed to be treated and you paid them their money, we knew we could make it big,” he said.

“But it’s hard to say how big. There’s a lot more cars out there than there used to be. When we first started, if we got 150 cars, we were like, ‘Man, we’ve got almost everybody in the country here!’ Now you could get 400, 500 – there’s so many out there now. The sport’s in the spotlight now. The radial stuff is at the top of the game right now,” he said.

“When I first started it, I got together with all my buddies and we came up with a $15,000 to win deal. That’s how I promoted that. So that’s how I got started,” Long said. 

“I won’t actually allow any Pro Mods, anybody like that, on the property. This is all catered to the small-tire guys. And they’re very, very loyal. We’ll get four or five hundred of ’em there from all across the country and from Australia, just from everywhere,” he said. “I have Pro Mod organizations that contact me all the time that want me to add stuff to the race. But it would take away from what I’m doing. That’s why I don’t want to allow any of the big-tire stuff there.”

 Not everybody can be Donald Long, but many have tried. 

“They’re piggybacking. I’ve got so many people [copying his race format]. I want these guys to have a place to race. It’s just funny how nobody cared before, but they think they can all make a buck. So now everybody’s a promoter. Everybody’s a radial -tire promoter,” he said. “It’s funny to sit back and watch. It really is.

“Everyone in the country is trying to get in on it, trying to capitalize on it. Everybody’s putting on a radial race. In 2008, that’s not the way it was. If you went with a radial-tire car, your ass was parked down in the swamp and all the big-tire guys were pared on the concrete, with power[-supplied] spots. And nobody cared about the radial guys. That was the whole reason that we started it,” he said. 

“Luckily I had a lot of good friends. We were all in the underground utility business. At the time there was a lot of money floating around. To get each person to put up $1,000 was no big deal. That’s when we put up $15,000. At that time, $3,000 was the most that had ever been paid. We figured that would get their attention also.” 

An average car count of between 400 and 500, one that would be the envy of the National Hot Rod Association, sometimes in a two-race span. 

“It’s like a national event,” Long said of Lights Out and No Mercy. “They take their vacation time in February and September to come to these races. The original race was going to be a Friday-Saturday deal. That’s all it was going to be. So many people showed up that it ended up being Friday-Saturday-Sunday. Well, then it started being Thursday-Friday-Saturday-Sunday. Then it was Wednesday-Thursday-Friday-Saturday-Sunday. Now I’m getting there Tuesday night and there’s 60-70 rigs in line. It’s just getting bigger.

“I’m really happy with the support and loyalty of the guys, for sure,” he said.

And why wouldn’t they just love Donald Long and gobble him up like funnel cakes and curly fries from the midway?

“I’m tell-it-like-it-is. I don’t like for people to come in and try to piggyback something people have worked hard to make and throw these big [payout] numbers out there in the social media and then they don’t stand behind what they say. If you’re going to say you’re going to pay somebody this amount of money, then you need to pay him. Honestly, if people pay cash coming through the gate, then you should be able to pay [the racers] cash or write ’em a check right on the spot. They shouldn’t have to wait 30 or 45 days or 100 days that some of these guys are waiting to get paid. It’s not fair to the racer.”

Long was promoting a May 2010 race that was rain-cursed with three straight days of wet weather and no more than 100 spectators, if he was lucky, versus the thousands he had anticipated. “We drove three and a half hours through the night to come home and get $20,000 in cash for the next day, to be able to pay these people. It just happened to be one of those deals. You live and die by it. If you say you’re going to pay people that much money, then you need to have the money to back it up,” he said. 

“I know that when we were racing, I liked to make sure there was a cool trophy there. I liked to make sure that we got our jackets,” he said. “I’m more like a personalized-type deal. I want the racer to have his name on the jacket.     

Against the advice of his associates who argue for time-saving measures, Long wants to go that extra mile — for example, having the racer’s name embroidered on the jacket he’s awarded. “I don’t care if it takes extra time to do it,” he said.

That personal touch grew out of his experience of spending $100,000 in a year racing in the Pro Mod and 10.5 classes, only to have the track hand him a generic T-shirt as a lukewarm token of appreciation.

Nothing from Donald Long — whose high-school nickname “Duck” resurfaced in a heated Internet discussion with outlaw legend “Big Daddy” Dwayne Gutridge — is lukewarm. He’s cool and he’s hot, all at the same time. His passion still burns. Outlaw drag radial racers had better come and get him while he’s hot.