Driver serves as inspiration for local vets

Because this is Veterans Day, I thought I should write about one. A veteran with a sports background.

Actually, if people had priorities in order, I should write about veterans in sports more than once a year. Serving one's country is so much more admirable than serving up batting practice fastballs, or serving up crazy jump shots beyond the 3-point line, or serving up, well, tennis balls. It's so much more admirable that it would be laughable, if guys wearing camouflage and chevrons on their shoulders weren't always getting shot at.

It would have been cool, I think, to chat with a soldier who had charged up San Juan Hill. But that was in the Spanish-American War, and Teddy Roosevelt and most of that ilk died around 1920.

So then I thought about dashing Eddie Rickenbacker and the great flying aces of World War I, mostly because those guys were like modern knights; it must have been wild - and frightening - to literally hear a bullet rip through the fuselage, when the fuselage was made of fabric.

Rickenbacker drove racecars, and owned Indianapolis Motor Speedway from 1927 through 1941, and then it closed for World War II and weeds began to grow in Turn 1.

But Eddie Rickenbacker died in 1973.

So I have decided to write about Jack Beckman, who is racing for his first NHRA Funny Car title today in Pomona, Calif.

Beckman was like Rickenbacker in that he races cars, and dreamed of flying fighter planes. So he joined the Air Force in 1983, when he was 17.

Well, that was only part of it. Yes, Beckman yearned to be a pilot when he was a little boy, probably after he yearned of being a fireman or an astronaut or a ballplayer.

In one of Jack Beckman's official biographies, it says he enlisted in the Air Force because he realized "the necessity of education and the value of good training." That differs slightly from what he told me: That he was shiftless, undisciplined, a high school dropout who needed a haircut.

It was either join the Air Force or unload tool trucks for the rest of his life.

He didn't get to fly fighter jets - that would come later, after he became a star on the drag racing circuit and one of the F-16 pilots at Nellis took him up, and Beckman didn't toss cookies, he's proud to say - but he learned a trade, electronics, and he learned how to race hot rods at the Lubbock, Texas, strip, a couple of hours from Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico, where he was stationed.

He got a haircut, and he got discipline - so much discipline that he was an Air Force sergeant at the time of discharge. And Jack Beckman developed an admiration for servicemen and women that continues to this day.

Then he got cancer, Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and he got an even shorter haircut, thanks to the chemotherapy.

Eventually, his cancer went into remission, and it was then Beckman started visiting military hospitals around the drag racing circuit, because he could relate to those guys on different fronts.

Maybe he couldn't fix their broken limbs and shot-up bodies and chase away the mental demons. But he could provide a word of encouragement, and he could fire up the 8,000-horsepower engine in his Funny Car out in the parking lot, if the injured servicemen wanted to see the whole burn ward rumble.

Jack Beckman has visited the O'Callaghan Federal Medical Center at Nellis Air Force Base 13 times.

He never tells anybody he is going.

This is between him and the servicemen and women.

This is not a photo op.

(I read where Aaron Rodgers is upset because "60 Minutes" showed the Green Bay Packers quarterback getting miffed at a fan for joking about his height, when Scott Pelley could have shown him raising cancer awareness. Yes, Rodgers is to be admired for his charity work; no, this is something Jack Beckman never would have done, blowing his own horn like that.)

The only reason I learned of Beckman's visits to the wounded servicemen is a former Special Forces Navy officer named William Stine.

William Stine is the kind of man who would charge up San Juan Hill right next to Teddy Roosevelt; he has been shot four times, in the shoulder, upper thigh, mouth and back; in Lebanon, Kuwait City, Iraq and some other godforsaken wretched place he doesn't remember, other than it was hotter than hell and there probably were caves.

Before he became one of those guys who wades through swamps with a bayonet between his teeth, Stine was a fullback at Burroughs High School in Burbank, Calif., who had been recruited by Harvey Hyde and UNLV. But he signed instead with Uncle Sam, and, 12 years later, after they extracted all the lead and shrapnel from his body, he, too, contracted Non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

And like Jack Beckman, he was a SoCal car guy. So when he heard Beckman's crew fire the engine one day, and the burn ward began to rumble, William Stine got out of bed - with the IV still hanging from his arm, he said - so he could shake Beckman's hand and ask if John Force is as wacky in real life as he appears on TV.

Words of encouragement and email addresses were exchanged. And then William Stine beat cancer, too. Now he, too, gives back, as a chef at the Three Square food bank.

And maybe this isn't like charging up San Juan Hill, and maybe it's not shooting down Fokkers in the leaden skies over France.

But, I dunno, it still seems like a pretty neat story to share on Veterans Day.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.