Southern “mountain folks” have an unwritten code of conduct: work hard, help your neighbor, always treat one another fairly, but don’t take any nonsense off anyone.

Newly crowned NHRA Pro Modified champion Rickie Smith, of King, N.C., has been that rock in a snowball. He has that soft, hospitable accent that’s as thick as the molasses in shoofly pie, but he’s tougher than a $2 steak.

He said, “I’ll come over and help a guy [a racer in a thrash], but when we get up there on that starting line, when it’s time to race, I’m going to try to beat you. He warned right up front, “I’m going to play mind games with you. That’s fun.” That’s how he acquired the nickname “Tricky Rickie.”

Just ask his former nemesis Warren Johnson, the Professor of Pro Stock, who surely would have given him an “A” for audacity. “Oh, me and Warren Johnson, we used to have some of the awfulest burndowns,” Smith said.

“Ronnie Sox and Warren Johnson, when I got into racin’, they wore me out. They had me so messed up I didn’t know whether I was coming or going,” Smith said. “But when 1980 came around, I made up my mind – I was a young punk then – I said, ‘Two can play this game.’ I wrestled like that in high school. I didn’t care what it took.”

He said Sox and Johnson soon found out that “it backfired a lot on them.” Even before 1980, he sometimes had them a bit flummoxed. In a 1977 Pro Stock match race at East Bend, N.C., Smith remembered that against Sox “I knocked the clock over. They had cement blocks holding ‘em up. It killed the front end. We fixed all that up and we go back up there to run again and do a burnout. And Ronnie said, ‘I’m broke.’ I think he didn’t want to run me no more.”

Rickie Smith laughs that I’ve-seen-all-the-craziness-before kind of laugh. He did as he earned seven International Hot Rod Association championships (five in Pro Stock, two in Super Modified) and brought his wily ways to the Pro Mod and outlaw doorslammer ranks.

And it’s clear when his son, Matt – whom he calls Matthew – takes center stage that the apple didn’t fall far from the Christmas tree.

“I love to play the game,” Matt Smith said many times this past season on the way to his second NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle series title that made history, giving him and his dad the distinction of being the only father-son combo to win series crowns in the same year. In July at Norwalk, Ohio, they were the first professional father and son to share the winners circle at the same national event.  

“The whole game thing, growing up and watching my dad, that was huge in the IHRA days,” the younger Smith said. “As for every competitor: Come mess with me and I will play the game. Everybody can talk all they want. I will play the game with anybody.”

He toyed with fellow bike racers Andrew Hines and the Hector Arana family trio throughout 2013, including a verbal sparring match in June that wound up costing one Arana crewmember a stout fine and suspension for turning the fight physical. Smith said he wasn’t trying to disrupt the Arana camp, which had Hector Arana Jr. in the lead at the time. But he said he had no trouble doing that.

“If that’s what it takes, we’ll get ‘em out of their game, if they want,” he said. “Once you get under somebody’s skin, you get to them and they have a tendency to mess up more.”

Matt Smith, cool and calm, just got better and better as he methodically marched from as far back as 10^th place in the standings in April at Race No. 3, at Houston. He reeled off eight final-round appearances in the last 11 races of the 16-event bike season.

In the six-race Countdown to the Championship, Smith advanced to the finals four times and won three straight times (at St. Louis, Reading, and Las Vegas) to record three of his four victories on the Viper Motorcycle Company / Matt Smith Racing Buell.  He ended the season with a 34-12 elimination-round mark.

But the owner-rider finished with an achievement that left him satisfied and proud.

“What else can you ask for? With me winning the championship and Dad winning the Pro Mod championship, it’s been great. It’s emotional. But for me and my dad to win the same race [Norwalk] and to win championships in the same year, in the whole motorsports world, there has never been a father-son who have won the same thing in any other form of major motorsports. That is just amazing in my opinion.”

Said his dad, driver of the IDG Chevy Camaro Pro Mod, “It’s hard to pull these things off at the same time. When you get a father and son and get that done, it’s just a major accomplishment.”

As the first NHRA season with Mello Yello branding came to a close, Matt Smith said he didn’t think that feat would be eclipsed for quite some time, allowing that perhaps someday Funny Car’s freshly minted 16-time champion John Force and Top Fuel-driving daughter Brittany Force might pull that off.

One factor that helped Smith was the new set of engine-spec mandates that forced the dominant Vance & Hines Harley-Davidson team to redesign its engines and cost them immense amounts of time to become competitive again.

“NHRA did a fabulous job this year of getting our class back under control where Harley-Davidson had such a big advantage last year with a motor that nobody could buy or build. I applaud NHRA for getting our class back on a level playing field,” Smith said. “You’ve had all three makes (Buell, Suzuki, Harley-Davidson) running within two or three hundredths at every race. It’s coming down to tuners’ and riders’ racing again.”

Rickie Smith said his son “has worked for everything he’s got. He’s done everything on his own, just like I have. He has absolutely not had a sugar daddy to give him anything. I would have let him drive before now, but it takes every nickel and dime to do this stuff. It’s not that I don’t want him to drive. It’s just that I can’t afford it. I wish that I could put him in a car.”

That makes two of them. Said the son, “Our family never had a lot of money. We didn’t have the big sponsors to where he could put me in a car. He told me if I wanted to do it, I had to do it on my own. The bikes were cheaper to do than a car.

“That’s what all it boils down to. I’m a little guy. That’s what I followed. I followed my dream to be able to drag race. I had to take up a hobby I could afford. I could afford bikes. I couldn’t afford a car,” Matt Smith said.

“So I did it on my own and found little sponsors to be able to run a motorcycle. The last three years I drove a Pro Mod car off and on for the last three years. I would really love to be able to drive a car a lot, but my heart is in the bikes,” he said. “We have a four-bike team [that includes wife Angie Smith, Epping, N.H., winner John Hall, and toward the end of the year Sovereign-Star Racing emigrant Scotty Pollacheck]. That’s where I want to be. I want to help somebody else win races and win a championship.”

He admitted that he has become a little restless, tossing out the notion that maybe his dad – who was supposed to retire but decided he will drive for another year – would “put me in a car and I’ll just start working on the bikes a little bit and have my bike team but not be on it.”

His sponsor, Colton Seagraves, threw a hypothetical at him: “If Don Schumacher offered you a Funny Car, would you do it?” Without hesitation, Smith said, “Well, yeah. Why wouldn’t I? If he told me I could drive a Funny Car or Top Fuel [dragster] and had a three-year deal, I would go in a heartbeat. I would drop everything I had, because I want to make myself better.”

Smith said, “Andrew [Hines], he talks about he wants to go drive a car. I told him, ‘If you want to go drive a car, I’ll come over and ride the bike and help tune it and get the teams tricked out.’ I would do it, because it’s a struggle sometimes. We’ve got a great sponsor behind us now, but anything can happen at any minute and it’d be gone. So to know that you have Vance & Hines behind you . . . they’re not goin’ nowhere.”

His scenario isn’t going anywhere, either, and he knows that: “You want to better yourself. It’d make my workload a lot easier, by far. I’d still keep my own team – which is why they’d never allow it. But it’s a fun story.”

Like father, like son. Make that . . . like champion father, like champion son.