Caesar on the Hudson

Tonight, with my old Columbia Daily Spectator compadre Steve Irolla, I journeyed up to our alma mater’s Francis Levien Gymnasium to see my first-ever Columbia basketball game. The result was reminiscent of the terse battle summary that Julius Caesar offered to the Roman Senate in 47 B.C. – “We came, we saw, we kicked ass!”

(Editor: That’s funny – somehow, I don’t remember that from any Latin or ancient history course I ever took. Are you sure this didn’t come from that Bill Murray movie “Stripes”? MT – Hey, if you want accuracy, pay me!)

Much of the contest was a seesaw affair until the Lions, aided largely by the “Twin Towers of John Baumann and Ben Nwachukwu (who accounted for two-thirds of the total), pulled away in the closing minutes for a 74-64 victory over Lehigh – the Lions’ first consecutive wins of the still-young season.

Steve, the former sports editor of our paper 25 years ago and counting, has kept up on the team through the years, and he offered me detailed, painstaking and welcome explanations of the team’s current talented coach, Joe Jones (whose brother leads Yale), the strong points of secondary players, and epic moments in the team’s past history (one especially vivid one: an on-court tussle – the “battle of the midgets” – between two coaches of the early ‘80s, Columbia’s Buddy Maher and Princeton’s longtime wizard, Pete Carril.)

With the university on winter break, it was easy to find a seat. After looking around, I confessed to Steve that I didn’t see one thing often seen at athletic contests: “They wear their hair long and their skirts short.”

“You mean cheerleaders?” Steve asked. He then explained that they, too, like the other fans, had lives during the winter break, going home to their families. They came back when classes resumed -- and weren't even picketed by feminists on Morningside Heights.

Hmmm…No cheerleaders that night. I didn’t recall this happening to the Dallas Cowboys. It never even occurred at St. Cecilia’s in Englewood (R.I.P.). I didn’t think my friend Brian would have liked that one bit.

After the game we went into the lobby and looked at a recent addition to the gym – Columbia’s athletic Hall of Fame. Plaques lined the walls for such greats as Cliff Montgomery, the quarterback during the football team’s legendary 1934 upset win the Rose Bowl; Lou Little, the longtime coach who engineered that result; Jim McMillan from the ’68 basketball squad; and Chet Forte, possibly the most talented basketball player in the school’s history, who went on to launch “Monday Night Football.” 

But two players stood out – Eddie Collins, the great second baseman (and one of the few honest players in the “Black Sox” scandal in the 1919 World Series) and the “Pride of the Yankees,” Lou Gehrig.

Though Steve and I parted in the biting midwinter night, we were warmed by our old friendship and the pasting our team had given Lehigh. A later “American Caesar” (William Manchester’s title), Douglas MacArthur, said it best: “There is no substitute for victory.”