Shirley Muldowney, Tony Stewart to Be Honored at Buoniconti Fund To Cure Paralysis Dinner

• Once on-track rivals, Shirley Muldowney and Darrell Gwynn are now partners in quest to cure paralysis through The Miami Project and The Buoniconti Foundation.

• Other athletes to be honored Oct. 24 at New York City bash, include Tony Stewart, whose many assets include co-ownership of a NASCAR Cup team and a two-car NHRA team.

Barely able to walk properly herself even six years since her own horrific racing crash in a foreign country (in 1984, at Montreal), Shirley Muldowney feared for her friend and on-track rival Darrell Gwynn.

He had lost part of his left arm and was left paralyzed from the chest down in an Easter Sunday 1990 accident at England’s Santa Pod Raceway. And Muldowney was concerned about this young drag-racing sensation who had been at the height of his career and the care he might be receiving thousands of miles from his Davie, Fla., home.

So Muldowney visited him at Aylesbury, north of London, at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, home to Europe’s largest spinal-injuries ward and birthplace of the Paralympic movement. She delivered heartfelt encouragement to him and parents Jerry and Joan Gwynn, along with $15,000 she had collected from Gwynn’s colleagues and fans.

Gwynn since has become an inspiration to thousands of individuals living with paralysis, first establishing his own foundation that offered motorized wheelchairs to those in need and prevention messages to the general public. In 2015, as the 25th anniversary of his life-changing wreck approached, Gwynn folded his foundation into the Buoniconti Fund To Cure Paralysis. Today it’s known as the Darrell Gwynn Quality of Life Chapter of the Buoniconti Fund To Cure Paralysis, which is the fundraising extension of The Miami Project To Cure Paralysis.

The past and future connect next Monday night, Oct. 24, at New York City’s Marriott Marquis Times Square, when Muldowney will be honored at the 37th annual Great Sports Legends Dinner, a charity gala to benefit the Buoniconti Fund To Cure Paralysis.

She will share the spotlight with motorsports magnate Tony Stewart, who owns, among other properties, the two-car race team featuring Top Fuel’s Leah Pruett and Funny Car’s Matt Hagan. Other honorees Monday will be football’s Edgerrin James, baseball’s Vladimir Guerrero, basketball’s Tim Hardaway, and skiing’s Lindsey Vonn and Sarah Will.

Muldowney is a three-time Top Fuel champion with 18 victories and is a member of the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America (1990), the International Motorsports Hall of Fame (2004), the Automotive Hall of Fame (2005), and the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame (2003).

The Buoniconti Foundation / The Miami Project grew from the paralyzing college football accident in 1985 to Marc Bouniconti, who was a player for The Citadel. He is the son of the late Nick Buoniconti, the wildly popular linebacker for the Miami Dolphins.