A lesson on the No. 1

It’s coming up on 30 years since I graduated from Columbia, which is depressing (and embarrassing), especially as I realize the world I live in, covering baseball for the Bergen Record and ESPN.com, is populated by people younger than me.

Still, there’s a certain built-in immunity to being a sports writer. Doc Gooden might’ve lost his fastball at the age of 25, but at 50, I still make deadline. Words are still my most precious currency.

For that, I can thank my years at Columbia, where I paired my passion for baseball (I pitched for the varsity Lions) and journalism (I was Spectator sports editor), and parlayed that into my first job at the New York Post.

It was hardly glamorous—I was a clerk, assigned to answering phones, sorting mail, and taking abuse for my Ivy League education.

“Tell me one useful thing you actually learned at Columbia,” said my boss, teasing but hardly kidding. “Tell me one real-life experience you had.”

Actually, I had a doozy. It used to be that Columbia’s baseball players took the subway to Baker Field. There was no chartered bus, no school-funded van. All you got was a token for the IRT No. 1. From 116th Street to 215th, the ride usually took no more than 25 minutes, but then-coach Paul Fernandes had one law he enforced without mercy: don’t be late. Joe Torre would cut a Yankee player in two with his laser-like stare if he missed the 4 p.m. reporting time by even a minute. Same went for Fernandes and his young Lions. Running behind? Don’t even think about it.

Only, I doubt any Yankee ever had a problem quite like mine one afternoon in my junior year. I was riding the subway uptown when a gang of local kids jumped on at the 125th stop. There were five of them, staring down anyone in the subway car who might’ve challenged the decibel-level from their boom box. I looked away—I wasn’t crazy. The rest of the car’s occupants were as meek as Western Europe in the late 1930s. Mostly, they were elderly folks pretending to be asleep.

All of a sudden, a NYC transit cop arrived. He looked like a Rocky-era Sylvester Stallone, but bigger. In fact, his arms were the size of my legs. The cop approached the kid with the music box and said, “Turn that shit off.” The kid was foolish enough to ratchet up the confrontation. Not only did he disobey, but he stood up and flung the cop’s hat like a Frisbee down the length of the car.

The kid turned to his friends, all of them sneering. Their triumph didn’t last long. The cop punched the kid in the face so hard, he was unconscious before hitting the ground. The officer then pulled his .38 out of the holster, aimed it at the next kid, and said, “You want to fuck with me, too?” Instantly, the car’s occupants—the retirees who’d been pretending to hear and see nothing—sprang to life.

The four remaining kids were bawling like babies, their arrogance smashed to smithereens. “Please don’t shoot,” one said through his tears. The cop kept his gun out, using his free hand to radio ahead to the next stop. When we reached 137th Street, a dozen transit officers swarmed onto the subway car, dragging the kids away.

Me? Peel away the layers of psychological flesh, and I was just a scared kid from lily-white Leonia, N.J. But I never forgot the way the hip-hoppers were humiliated.

Even after four decades, Columbia’s gift to my memory bank endures: from the subway to the major league clubhouse (and everything in between) bullies are just cowards turned inside out. I see it all the time in the clubhouse now: major leaguers pretending to be bulletproof. I’ve had my share of confrontations in the last three decades, including one with Mets right-fielder Bobby Bonilla in 1993 that had me nose-tip to nose-tip with a potential opponent who, at 6’4 and 240 pounds, had me by four inches and 45 pounds.

But journalism begins and ends with what you believe in. Bonilla had been baiting me for a book I’d written about the hapless 1992 Mets: The Worst Team Money Could Buy. I wasn’t going to back down. Neither was that cop. I actually thought of him when I said to Bobby Bo, “You want to fight me?”

It was both a question and a challenge. I didn’t have a pistol, only a willingness to stand up to a bully. Bonilla had his opening—and, as it turned out, did nothing with it. He simply walked away. I had a hunch it would end that way, thanks to the education a Columbia baseball player got on the No. 1 way back when.