One Lap of America racers solicit bone marrow donors

Wednesday, June 4, 1997 | 10:33 a.m.

He calls his One Lap of America race team Dancing Bears Racing. But Bad to the Bone Racing might be more appropriate.

Unfortunately for 43-year-old cross-country racing enthusiast Bob Kleinman of Somers, N.Y., the latter literally applies.

Kleinman is being treated for lymphoma, a form of cancer. He is calling attention to the deadly disease by driving the Derek Daly Speedcentre/QMI Volkswagen GTI VR6 a total of 5,275 miles in the annual One Lap, a race patterned after the Cannonball Run and Gumball Rally of movie fame.

"The cancer I have is considered incurable," Kleinman said after he and co-driver Gary Gerson of Philadelphia put their VW through its paces at Las Vegas Motor Speedway Tuesday, on the fourth of eight speedway stops comprising the One Lap.

"The treatment is high doses of chemotherapy followed by a bone marrow transplant," Kleinman added of a risky procedure that has a 20-25 percent success rate.

Kleinman, the former director of marketing at Madison Square Garden, is one of about 4,000 leukemia victims nationwide who already has found a marrow donor. But there are another 2,000 patients in need of the transplant who haven't found a match.

So Kleinman decided to combine business with the pleasure of the One Lap. His race car is emblazoned with the toll-free number for the National Marrow Donor Program (1-800-MARROW-2) and the Leukemia Society of America logo and he helped arrange an actual marrow registration last Saturday at Watkins Glen, N.Y., where the One Lap originated.

Many of the 95 drivers competing in this year's One Lap were among those who registered at the famous Glen, site of the former United States Grand Prix.

Getting to race around some of the world's great tracks -- time trials at Watkins Glen, Michigan International Speedway, the just-opened Gateway International Raceway outside St. Louis and LVMS are part of this year's One Lap -- is something to which Kleinman, an avid racing enthusiast, always aspired.

"That's very true," he said. "I've always wanted to do this race but I never had a good (reason) to do it. But this (creating awareness in the national marrow program) justifies spending seven days on the road and racing across the country."

Kleinman's car is capable of 130 mph speeds. While he usually doesn't go that fast between checkpoints -- "whatever the flow of traffic will bear" he says about traversing the Interstate Highway system -- he pretty much had the throttle pegged at LVMS.

Afterward, Kleinman said he felt exhausted -- not from battling the cancer, but from the 3,000-mile virtual nonstop drive from upstate New York to Las Vegas.

The racers bedded down at the Imperial Palace Tuesday but departed at the crack of dawn today on the "Rocky Mountain Ride" segment of the journey. The One Lappers will pass through St. George, Utah; Page and Tec Nos Pas, Ariz.; and Shiprock, Farmington, Bloomfield and Taos, N.M., today en route to the Hallet Motor Racing Circuit in Hallett, Okla., near Tulsa.

The One Lap will conclude Saturday back at Watkins Glen International.

Kleinman said people can register for the marrow donor program by calling the number on his race car -- 1-800-MARROW-2. He said the program is in dire need of minority donors, especially of Native American descent.

"Hopefully, with an enlarged registry, many more matches will be readily available -- and many more lives could be saved through bone marrow transplantation," he said.