COMING BACK FROM THE BIG ONE - PART 3
Three-Part Series Tells the Behind the Scenes Stories of Drag Racers Facing Insurmountable Comeback Odds …
COMING BACK, PT. 1 - THE CRASH
COMING BACK, PT. 2 – THE FIGHT WITH CANCER
For every story of unprecedented courage told here on the pages of CompetitionPlus.com, there are millions of others that will go untold.
CompetitionPlus.com wraps up this series with this third installment of the three-part series focusing on the incredible bravery, dedication and determination exerted by five of drag racing's more visible icons.
These are stories of people who did not let accident or illness end their dreams of racing.
The first lady of drag racing Shirley Muldowney, fourteen-time world champion John Force, second-generation Top Fuel driver Brandon Bernstein and cancer survivors Jack Beckman and Steve Torrence have all shared with CompetitionPlus.com their innermost struggles and fears coupled with undying determination to live.
Their stories could easily appear on Real TV’s I Survived series.
Here’s a sampling:
One came to a stop in high grass, leaving safety crews wondering where the driver was amongst the plane crash-style setting.
Another didn’t know what had happened as safety crews cut the top of the roll cage from his mangled chassis. His only thought was, “Did I win the round?”
A rookie suffered excruciating pain as he waited for safety crews to arrive, but nowhere close to the pain he would have endured had fireworks resting in his crotch detonated.
Then there were the cancer survivors. One was 17, with his whole life ahead of him. Another had just won a world championship title only to face another race with a dangerous disease with serious mortality implications.
These are their stories.
MULDOWNEY: A TRUE INSPIRATION
By all accounts, Shirley Muldowney's dragster was a total wreck following her accident at Sanair. She was in even worse condition, broken and bloodied, legs mangled, bones protruding and in more pain than one might ever imagine.
When the Safety Safari turned the dragster upright from off its side, Muldowny regained consciousness. The pain was so excruciating she begged Ronnie Davis, head NHRA EMT, to sedate her but he couldn’t. What he did do, according to Muldowny is save her life and her feet.
Davis' efforts made up for the calamity of errors which followed. Muldowny remembers the ambulance getting stuck in a muddy field en route to a local hospital and crew chief Rahn Tobler demanding a bilingual attendant in the ambulance ride since Montreal's official language is French. The local hospital took another 45 minutes stabilizing her for transport to Montreal General Hospital, where a trauma team should have been awaiting her arrival.
“Nobody was waiting on us,” Muldowney recalled. “Rahn had to run around and make a ruckus.”
“I remember they did all kinds of things to me. They ran tests on me and I’m not sure what it was they ran, but I can tell you that it hurt like crazy.”
Dr. Larry Conochie was called in to operate on Muldowney, who remembers going into surgery at 1 am that evening, well after her afternoon accident.
In today's world, Muldowny's care would have been both more comprehensive and far swifter.
Muldowney spent two months in Montreal General before fellow drag racer Connie Kalitta had her flown to Detroit where she went directly to the Detroit Receiving Hospital.
In Detroit, recovery turned into setback after setback.
The doctor in Montreal had installed 20 pounds of fixators, a device to hold her fractured right leg bones in place, during Seven months after the accident, the head of orthopedic surgery at the Detroit hospital, removed the cast on her left leg as she sat on a gurney.
The right leg, he didn’t even bother with at the time.
The doctor asked Muldowney to raise her freshly uncast leg and when she did, her heel never left the table (although her hip did) and her leg between her foot and her knee pivoted like it was a hinge.
Once again, Muldowney was taken back into surgery, where she said the head of orthopedics didn’t understand the workings of the Hoffman Device, a fairly new device at the time, and removed it.
“My leg virtually fell apart on the table,” Muldowney admitted.
Then, according to Muldowney, the doctor cast her right leg with the bones misaligned.
“I could walk and feel the bone swing in my leg,” Muldowney said, whose mobility was limited to crutches.
Muldowney entered into physical therapy suffering excruciating pain and gave it a try until the physical therapist conveyed to doctors that her condition was not improving.
“I hated the physical therapy,” Muldowney said. “Pain takes its toll on you. It really and truly tires you out.”
Muldowney ended up under the care of Dr. Terry Trammel who operated to realign the misalignment. Had Muldowney not seen Trammel, she would have been in serious danger of losing her right leg. This was in January of 1985.
In June, she underwent another surgery to fuse her left ankle. Before the surgery, it had started to decay. She was in real danger of losing that leg too.
“That foot is in a certain position that will never change for the rest of my life,” Muldowney said. “They can’t do an artificial ankle because I’m not a candidate. It is what it is.”
Muldowney had various surgeries to repair the bone damage, but that was not the only surgeries she endured. She also underwent skin grafts to the point where they took the whole front of her right thigh to put on her ankles to cover the open wounds.
“It went pretty well, I won’t win any beauty leg contests,” Muldowney said.
SHIRLEY'S COMEBACK ON VIDEO
The doctors were also forced to take crumbled bone from her pelvis to accommodate the ankle.
“They left two big notches from my pelvis,” Muldowney admitted. “They packed that in where they did the grafts and it eventually caught.”
Muldowney, who had nine surgeries to this point, underwent a tenth after driving for five seasons in excruciating pain. Trammel went back into the ankle and discovered that the next bone down from the fusion was destroyed.
“He simply had missed it in the operation,” Muldowney said. “That was bone on bone for all of those years. I could walk and then step on a pebble or something and that would leave me feeling like an electric shock.”
In total, Muldowney estimates she’s had 13 surgeries to repair the damage caused on that Friday in Sanair and the subsequent actions afterward.
“You know I became accustomed to hearing the doctors say, ‘It’s going to burn a little bit,” Muldowney admitted. “Then you hear them say, ‘Shirley, wake up the surgery’s over.”
After this living hell of rehab, what would inspire Muldowney to return to the cockpit of a dragster?
“I didn’t have multi millions of dollars … never did,” Muldowney explained. “Driving a race car was all I really ever knew. It was all I ever cared about.”
Muldowney realizes how fortunate she was to have been able to make a comeback, something she did in January of 1986 during a test session in Phoenix, Az.
“Had it have been the right ankle instead of the left, my career would have been over,” Muldowney admitted. “There would have been no motion for the throttle.
“The fans were very good to me. For some reason the NHRA kept it quiet [the accident], the wanted it to go away. Because of my accident, there were no lawsuits involved. It did wake them up to the fact they needed to do guardrail from A to B.
“Goodyear developed the tires that they are running on now … the tubeless front-tire.”
Muldowney pauses and beams, “They call that one the Shirley tire.”
Muldowney, who during her stay at the Montreal hospital, had so many calls from fans and friends the hospital put in an extra phone line, has never considered counseling other drivers seriously injured. When John Force crashed in 2007, she wanted badly to contact him but never did.
“I had pictures that Conochie took of my foot laying on the side of my leg while on the operating table,” Muldowney said. “I wondered if I should show this to John. I finally decided not to. For all the racers out there who have been hurt, and there’s only a handful, they really have no idea how fast they are going. They go up there with the attitude, ‘It won’t happen to me.
“That’s okay, that’s probably what they should do. You have to go into there positive and can’t look at the dark side. It’s when they get the big heads that I want to stand back and say, ‘You don’t know nothing. You just think you do.”
“I don’t wish what I went through on anyone. It’s just part of the territory. It goes with the job and that’s that you can get hurt out there. I think the NHRA has done a wonderful job with their safety and their arenas. The people they have there …. They have a Life Flight and not an ambulance to get stuck. We’ve come of age and I’m very proud of the NHRA. I’d stand them alongside of any other governing body that makes rules.”
JOHN FORCE: A FORCE OF DETERMINATION
John Force was clearly a broken man as he rested (as much as Force could) in the hospital bed at Baylor University Hospital in Dallas just last year.
He was vowing to come back and race at the next race, trying to reason that he had a mathematical chance to compete for the championship. After all, the run in which he crashed put him into the top four points earners with one race left in the second phase of the Countdown.
Overwhelmed by the reasoning of those around him, both family and professional staff, that 2007 was done for the 14-time champion, Force became angered.
When his very experienced and talented publicity staff issued a statement to the press essentially stating the obvious that he wouldn’t be back for the next event in Richmond, Va., the head-strong champion lost it.
Upon learning of the public statement, Force became so angered he almost fired them.
He became demented to the point he tried to reason his way back into a race car two weeks after his crash. No matter what he came up with, the fact was just days earlier his ankle had been swinging like a hinge from the end of his leg.
Force had his moments, some painkiller induced and others from just being himself.
One of his associates even confirmed Force uttered, “You don’t know that we won’t stay in there, the four people behind me might have their rigs break down and can’t make it to the event.”
That statement understandably never reached the media.
Force was determined come hell or high water that he’d race again in 2007.
On September 23rd, he crashed. September 26, 28 and 30 his media team issued statements of Force vowing to return.
Then he tried to stand up.
On October 2, the press release was issued essentially stating that Force’s comeback literally didn’t have a leg to stand on.
As reality set in, Force’s envisioned comeback came to a screeching halt. A week later the thought of making it back for the 2008 season opener was in doubt.
“I knew what I had to do,” Force said, discussing the early days of his strict physical therapy regimen. “I had to heal. It was 2 1/2 months in Baylor Hospital in Texas and then I came home with my family and they went to work every day.”
“I was still in a walker, I couldn't walk,” Force admitted. “I was a mess. I couldn't sleep in my bed; I had to sleep in a special hospital bed that we put in my bus and in my house.“
Heavily into his rehab regime, Force wondered if coming back in 2008 was a matter of him biting off more than he could chew. His doctor, Dr. Robert Ortmayer, challenged him.
“He took me and he said, ‘Boy you wanna do this in 4 months or 5 months? How long you got. I said 2 1/2 months until testing. That was a crash course, 5 days a week plus the weekends. I want to be totally honest, I was supposed to do 5 workouts a day and I did 4 and sometimes only 3. Some days I just didn't have the strength to do it but I lived it and I was there some mornings for two hours.”
He refused to quit.
“That's John Force's mindset. I take a negative and I turned it into a positive,” Force added. “I'm glad my crash happened because it showed us how to build a car. We may never be able to stop tires that fail because they can run over a nail or something on the track. We may never be able to stop that but now we can build a chassis that will protect you.”
Why did he refuse to quit? Force had a lot of personal reasons to come back, all of which had everything to do with Eric Medlen and a smaller measure of his desire to return.
“I had a lot of depression during physical therapy, I had my good days and I had my bad days,” Force admitted. “The doctor said that you'll have good days and you'll have bad days. My brother Louie told me to get up in the morning and get some coffee. If you can't get up out of bed then get up and shadowbox. That was his deal to me. He's had depression because he's been through it. My brother Louie has broken every bone in his body and he's lived through it. He's been through depression and it's the worst because you think you're failing. You work hard to get back but you go downhill before you get better.”
Force can be a motivator of others, but one has to wonder if he could motivate another severely injured driver to return to competition after a debilitating crash?
“I think a person’s got to want to come back,” Force said. “You can’t talk them into it. I came back because I had no choice. My pain is nothing compared to those like John Medlen and Doug Herbert who have lost children. I don't know if I'd have that strength. My injuries were nothing. Every day I kissed the picture of Eric Medlen. I have a plaque of him on the end of my bed, swear. It was given to me as a gift and I took it home with me and every day I tell him I'm not gonna whine today Eric, I'm going to go to work and we're going to make something out of this.
“He's shown the way to get us to do something. He saved my life in that crash, I believe that with all my heart -- Him and God. So at the end of the day I have no complaints here. I want to protect my daughters Brittany, Courtney and Ashley. I want to take care of the future and I want to help all my racing buddies, even if they get mad at me from time to time.”
BRANDON BERNSTEIN: LIVE TO RACE ANOTHER DAY
Brandon Bernstein remembered looking up at his dad Kenny, who had sprinted down-track to his son, and uttered the only
words he could generate at the time, “I’m hurt. I’m really hurt bad, I can feel it in my back.”
He had broken his back and suffered a fracture of his spine, one which could have easily left him paralyzed.
Bernstein faced the reality early in the prognosis that his season was over, despite Kenny’s constant reminders that he didn’t have to come back.
The kid wanted to because, with all due respect to those who have ever had to wear the Turtle Shell brace, he was going to make a positive out of the negative associated with wearing the brace which spanned from his waist to his chin, twenty-four hours a day for four months.
“The pain was just unbearable,” Bernstein admitted. “Where the fracture was you just couldn’t breathe, because where the fracture was you couldn’t really move it. I couldn’t cough, I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t make any sudden movements. Wearing that brace 24/7 for four months was just unbearable. It was so uncomfortable to be in that thing all the time, it was frustrating.
“The rehab was just rehab, trying to get better for the next four months. In the beginning that hurt because my muscles were done, in atrophy. I wasn’t able to do anything; I wasn’t able to go anywhere. It was basically bed rest with that turtle shell. Your muscles just totally shut down. It was tough back rehab but once I got back after those two months then I finally started feeling results in my muscles. I was feeling a lot better; the pain had really subsided and we were on our way to recovery totally.”
Bernstein remembers the nights at the hospital following his accident.
“It was kind of fun because lying in the hospital that night, my Dad stood over my bed and said ‘You don’t have to do this anymore; you can go and do something else,” Bernstein said. “I didn’t even hesitate two seconds I said ‘No way, I’m going to get back in that car.’ There’s not even a hint of me trying to get away from this because I just love the sport and love to drive so much. I was going to do my best to get back into it and drive again.”
Bernstein’s accident was compounded three years later when he lost close friend Eric Medlen in a testing crash and of all people, Kenny was in the opposite lane during John Force’s crash.
“That was tough,” Bernstein explained. “When I heard [about the crash] … we had just run and I was in the pit, all of a sudden I hear that they crashed. I was like wow, this is not happening, I can’t believe this. I immediately jumped on the golf cart. It was a real nerve wracking deal knowing that he could’ve been seriously hurt or killed.”
A negative experience can often lead to positives and for the second-generation Bernstein, the experience of crash and rehab has changed him as a driver.
“I think you learn a lot through these during times like this,” Bernstein said. “I think I learned a huge, huge thing about driving these race cars, you can push the envelope and push and push but you have to have the nice mixture of reasoning because there is always going to be another drag race. You’re going to race another day, I learned if it’s out of control to leave it and live to see it another day. You don’t need to push these race cars as hard because they can be real dangerous.”
That lesson is compounded with every serious accident that transpires.
| {loadposition feedback} |
