From Bronx to Broncs (and Bulls)

All right, class, the subject for today will be: “So you think you know sports teams, do you?” Papers will be graded not on neatness but on clarity of argument.

For two tickets to the seventh game of the 1985 playoffs between the Dodgers and St. Louis Cardinals, plus a souvenir replica of the bat Joaquin Andujar used to bust up a toilet in Kansas City, which was the roughest, toughest team in the history of sports?

Take your time, now. One answer and one answer only will win. There is no second prize unless you want a taped collection of the utterances made by Tommy Lasorda when Jack Clark hit his home run in the ninth inning of that game last fall.

You like the Chicago Bears? The Refrigerator and Gary Fencik? Ditka’s daunters?

Bah! My team would grind them into hamburger.

You like the 1927 Yankees? Are you kidding? Wimps! Pantywaists! Quiche eaters!

Maybe you fancy the 1940 Bears, who beat the Redskins in the title game, 73-0.

Don’t give it a thought. The team I have in mind would not only have beaten the Washington Redskins, it would have even beaten Custer’s redskins.

You think Marvin Hagler’s a tough guy? Chopped liver, I guarantee you, if he takes on my guys.

You can take the Monsters of the Midway, Murderers’ Row, the Gas House Gang, the Vow Boys, the Seven Blocks of Granite, the Big Red Machine, put them all in a pot and mix them well, and my team will scatter them to the four winds.

My team is so tough it can’t even talk. I know lots of backfields that can’t read or write, but how about one that can’t even count?

Listen, you think John Riggins is a tough guy? Well, he doesn’t have horns, does he? He won’t stomp you to death, will he? For one thing, he’s only got two legs.

Hate to tackle William Perry, would you? Why? He weighs only 300 pounds. The lightest player on my squad goes 750. The big ones go 2,000.

I’m talking America’s Team here. I’m talking of the most awesome lineup ever seen in one sporting arena. You think hockey teams brawl? Let me tell you, my cast of characters would make the hockey guys look like the Ice Capades.

I’m referring to a lineup of four-footed Mafiosi who are taking the field nightly here at the Thomas & Mack Arena against the flower of America’s cowboys in the National Finals Rodeo, which Las Vegas Events, Inc., lured west from Oklahoma City at a cost of millions and a promise to pay for any bone grafts, oral surgery and head wraps that may be necessary.

They pick the cowboys very carefully for these things. You have to have ridden your way in by staying on nearly every blade-backed cayuse you ever got on in rodeos, from the shores of New Jersey to the mountains of Oregon.

But they’re even more picky about the livestock.

To get star billing in this elemental struggle of man against beast, an animal has to be a certified homicidal maniac with several priors and a positive hatred for anything wearing boots or a big hat or buckle. I don’t know if Nero picked the lions for the Christians in the Roman Colosseum any more carefully than they pick the bulls and broncs for these things. The only difference here is that the winners can’t eat the losers, although Lord knows they try.

You would think that in this last stand of the Old West in this century, the cowpokes would all be the direct descendants of Billy the Kid or Wyatt Earp, and the grandsons of the trail hands who drove the dogies along the old Chisholm Trail past the rustlers and Geronimo’s original bareback riders.

You wouldn’t think a guy who rides bulls is a guy who never rode anything more dangerous than a subway till he was almost 15 years old.

This old cowpoke is not from the Rio Grande, he’s from the Rio Hudson and he really never saw a cow till he was in high school. You might say, he rode the first cow he ever saw.

You look at Bobby del Vecchio and you don’t see Billy the Kid, you see a Dead End Kid. You don’t think of “Oh, Bury Me On The Lone Prairie,” you think of “O Sole Mio.” You wonder what a Bronx street kid is doing riding bulls instead of stealing hubcaps.

But Bobby, like a lot of American kids--and he’s third-generation American of Italian stock--used to dream of the wide-open spaces and Dodge City and a home where the buffalo roam. He didn’t want Fort Apache, the Bronx, he wanted the real article. The one John Wayne rode out of.

He took to riding horses at an early age. Not along the old Chisholm Trail but along the Pelham Parkway, where he learned to plate horses at a city bridle path stable.

Other kids wanted to play shortstop for the Yankees or fight the semi-main at the Garden. Bobby didn’t want to break Joe DiMaggio’s records, he wanted to break Hoot Gibson’s.

He went down to Cowtown at the age of 14. Now, lest you think that’s a suburb of Laramie or the site of the O.K. Corral, be advised it’s a suburb of Trenton and the site of one of the only amateur bull-riding rings the other side of the Pecos.

Bobby, the old cowhand from P.S. 135, got on a pint-sized Brahma, if there is any such thing, wearing studded construction boots (Bobby, not the bull) and Bobby was hooked. Almost literally.

Phil Rizzuto must have felt that way the first time he gobbled up a slow ground ball. Bobby was a born bull rider.

Personally, I would never want to get on anything that didn’t have a steering wheel and AM-FM radio. If you’ve never seen one, a rodeo bull looks like a locomotive with horns. Your life flashes before your eyes just looking at one, but Bobby del Vecchio rides them the way most people ride a Cadillac.

That is not to say he hasn’t torn a medial collateral ligament or broken a shoulder or two or been gored and stomped once or twice before they could send in the clowns, but Bobby loves his bull-sitting life.

“I used to come home from rodeos in Jersey,” he says, “and I would get rosin from the violin shops and wax my ropes and put my gear out on the fire escape and the guys from the old neighborhood would say, ‘Hey, looka John Wayne! Hey, Bobby, the Sundance Kid was looking fer ya!’ And then, they’d double-up with laughter.”

Bobby has the last laugh. He’s made more money out of bull than 20 politicians--$289,234 in his career up to this year, when he may almost double it. He now has a Texas accent you could wrap a lariat around.

He has ridden all four bulls he’s had in the current National Finals, the Super Bowl of rodeo, and in case you think that’s unspectacular, be advised that the bulls won Tuesday night’s competition, 9-6. They gave one guy a re-ride on a technicality and he stayed aboard to make it 8-7, but the bull was bored by then.

One bull tore a rider’s ear in half earlier in the week. In this version of tauromachy, it’s the bull who gets the ears. The bull throws the Texan for a change.

Bobby’s old neighborhood was hardly Murder Inc., since his dad was a white collar worker in Tarrytown.

But it’s nice to see a guy from the tenements go on national TV without a bag over his head and to know that this is no midnight cowboy but the first genuine article to come from that part of the country and become a legend of the Old West since Henry McCarty, alias William H. Bonney, a/k/a Billy the Kid, left Brooklyn more than a century ago.