A Year Later, He’s a World Away From East L.A.

A high school football player from East Los Angeles packed up and headed east to play in the Ivy League this season.

Abel Montanez, who had a key interception for La Puente Bishop Amat in last year’s Southern Section Division I championship victory over Loyola, is a freshman at Columbia University in New York City.

And he’s struggling in his “new world.”

Montanez is without a winter jacket or flannel sheets. He has to pay for his food, and the food is bad. The carpet in his apartment is soaked because of a leak in the roof. When the heater is on, the place smells of mildew, so he’s caught several colds.

He knew nothing about New York’s mass transportation.

His father, Abel Montanez Sr., said when they took a cab from Columbia to a restaurant on 92nd Street and Broadway, they owed a $5 fare. As they got out of the car, the driver became angry.

“Little Abel didn’t know you had to tip,” Abel Sr. said.

With many athletes using college scholarships as steppingstones to the professional ranks and treating their classes as secondary, Montanez is banking on a degree.

And while many scholarship athletes complain they don’t receive extra money to cover things like “dates or dry cleaning,” Montanez is without even that. Ivy League schools don’t offer athletic scholarships.

All of the adjustments have been difficult for Montanez, who had never traveled outside California before enrolling at Columbia. And on the football field, where he figured to feel most at home, he has not played a down with the varsity. With Columbia off to its best start (5-0) since 1946, he feels left out.

“He’s talked about coming home or transferring,” Abel Sr. said. “I know he can stick it out, though.”

Montanez, a defensive back, considered going to college closer to home, but chose to try to make it at the best academic school that would accept him.

He’s doing fine academically, but the demands on his time are greater than he anticipated.

“I don’t sleep any more,” Montanez said.

His day starts at 7:40 a.m. with a football meeting and ends well after midnight. In between, the day is full with classes, studying, weightlifting, practice and a mandatory study hall.

“All this work, I realize the things I used to care about aren’t that important,” Montanez said. “I miss my family, and it gets really lonely here, but I know that after I graduate, I’ll be ahead of the game, so I have to make it.”

If he graduates, he will be the first in his family to earn a degree.

Nobody is happier with Abel Jr.’s decision to be a student-athlete at Columbia than his father.

“I’ve been a construction worker most of my life,” Abel Sr. said. “I kind of screwed up in school. Walking around the campus and seeing the architecture, the awesome buildings over 100 years old. . . . I say to myself that my son goes here.”

*

Two weeks ago, Dorsey tennis standout Kendra Segura, along with her mother and older sister, was confronted by three men, one armed with a pistol and another with a knife, while Kendra was practicing late one evening at Rancho Cienega Park.

They took cash, Kendra’s ball machine and tennis balls.

When one of the thieves picked up Segura’s tennis racket and started leaving, Segura started panicking and said, “You don’t play tennis.”

Said Segura later: “You can’t fight or say anything when they have a gun, but why would he need that [racket]?”

The thief stopped, paused a few moments and put the racket back where he found it.