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What: “From Ballfields to Battlefields.”

Where: CSTV, tonight, 5 and 5:30.

With this special, College Sports Television pays tribute to athletes who have served their country in wartime.

Among those profiled is Nile Kinnick, considered the greatest football player in the history of the University of Iowa.

Kinnick won the 1939 Heisman Trophy after single-handedly turning around a downtrodden Hawkeye football program. He passed, ran, returned kickoffs, punted and drop-kicked extra points. And played defense too.

Kinnick enrolled in the Naval Airs Corps Reserve while attending law school and was called to active duty three days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. In 1943, he was assigned to an aircraft carrier in the Caribbean. He was killed during a training flight. Iowa named Kinnick Stadium in his honor in 1972.

Also profiled is Matt Sheftic, a University of Vermont basketball star who led his team to conference championships in 2003 and 2004 after sitting out the 2001-02 season. He sat out because he had joined the Army ROTC program a week after Sept. 11. He also needed time to help care for his sister, Lauren, who had a brain aneurysm. She died in December 2001.

Another segment features Bob Johnson, a Vietnam veteran who is the basketball coach at Emory and Henry College in Virginia, and one of his star players, Cortez Watson, who enrolled in the National Guard and was sent to Iraq last year.

The special is produced by Dutch Productions in association with CSTV. It is introduced by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and narrated by ABC’s Charles Gibson.

-- Larry Stewart