RICK LEPRE

Max Maxwell was at Cobbleheads listening to the blues. By coincidence he found himself seated next to Rick Lepre who was inducted into the New York Schoolboy Hall of Fame this year. Maxwell remembers a far less tranquil time. He tells a story that few locals know:

"I saw Brownsville coach Rick Lepre and the memories returned in the rush of a gulf breeze. Despite the different circumstances between then and now, the fidgety Lepre who couldn't sit in his seat was no different than the Marine who nervously awaited the next Viet Cong attack as we hunkered behind sandbags together.

"I was a private when I reported to Vietnam in 1967. He wasn't Coach Lepre; he was Captain Lepre in those bloody days. We called him Captain Yank because he never stopped recounting his youth in New York City or his love for the Yankees.

"Most of us were high school dropouts who had been sent overseas before we became drug addicts, but Lepre was a college graduate. We were continually asking ourselves why a man so smart would involve himself in a war so stupid.

"It was only after he was seriously wounded (He took a bullet in the groin area) during the Tet Offensive that we discovered the answer. We visited him in a Saigon hospital before he was shipped back to the United States. He wasn't pleased that he would no longer be with us in the trenches.

"'I played baseball all my life,' he said as he winked at a passing nurse who was helping him rehabilitate his mangled member. 'But nothing compares to a firefight when your life is on the line. That's competition. No home run ever equalled the glorious sensation of blowing a gook's head off his goddamn shoulders. I'm going to miss this wonderful war.'"