WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” can be purchased here at Amazon

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An Unknown Hero Among Heroes

For the first five days of August, I was in the august company of heroes in our nation’s capital.

Heroes like astronauts John Glenn and Neil Armstrong and earlier fliers like Charles Lindbergh and the Wright Brothers, all in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

Men and women, heroes, interred in Arlington National Cemetery, a heartbreaking landscape that is ironically beautiful.

My tour of heroes included monuments for those who served in World Wars I and II; the Korean War Memorial; and the Vietnam Memorial Wall.

In the National Archives I peered at Founding heroes like Benjamin Franklin and John Hancock’s faded “John Hancocks” on the original Declaration of Independence.

And, of course, there are the marble heroes in the National Mall: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Yet the hero who arguably engraved the deepest impression on me was one I encountered shortly after my late-night arrival at Ronald Reagan National Airport when I boarded the Metro Blue Line to my downtown D.C. hotel.

The first few minutes of the ride were quiet, sans the pleasant rhythmic sounds of the train itself, when suddenly came clamor.

A passenger facing me two rows ahead in the near-empty train car – a tall, sinewy man in his 20s, his bare arms covered with long sleeves of tattoos, his electrocuted blond hair making Einstein’s look tame – jumped from his seat like a jack-in-the-box. He shouted at a goateed man, about the same age as he although shorter and stockier, sitting across the aisle.

Apparently the goateed man had “disrespected” the mangy tattooed man’s dog. In a flash the two men were nose-to-nose although only the tattooed man spoke – or rather, shouted. He cursed at the goateed man; challenged his manhood; unleashed racial taunts. Exclamation marks punctuated his torrent.

At any second I expected weapons to come out and I don’t think I was alone; a young woman facing me across the aisle looked absolutely petrified. As the vile racial epithets from the crazed tattooed man intensified, I signaled with my eyes that she – we – should sneak out the door at the next stop.

Just then, THUMP! The goateed man unloaded a punch. And another and a third. Frankly, Gandhi might not have blamed him at this point. Meanwhile, the tattooed man’s large dog remarkably remained nonviolent.

In slow motion this is what I next witnessed: a baldheaded man with his back to the fray bolted from his seat and in one fluid motion spun 180 degrees into the aisle, took three lightening-quick strides and grabbed the goateed man from behind before he could throw a fourth punch. Breaking apart two pit bulls would have required less courage.

It was as if Batman was aboard.

Sitting beside his gray-haired wife, the baldheaded man had been as unimposing as Bruce Wayne: he was wearing peach slacks and a white sweater and appeared old enough to receive Social Security.

Once he rose, however, the Teddy bear came into focus like a grizzly. If not a former NFL linebacker, my guess is he was once an Army sergeant or perhaps a retired police officer for he exuded the authority of both.

After getting between the combatants who were now both screaming bloodily at each other, the baldheaded man barked commands: “Knock it off! Now! Get out of here! Now! Before you get arrested!”

All the while the baldheaded man strode forward slowly and wide-footed, a heavyweight boxer backing up a foe, herding the goateed man towards the exit door as a German Shepherd would direct a sheep.

At the next stop the goateed man and tattooed man both got off; the baldheaded man returned to his gray-haired wife’s side; and the rest of us in the train car breathed easier.

When my stop came, I used the exit door furthest from me but nearer the baldheaded man.

“Thanks,” I said, shaking his hand. “You’re a hero.”

He smiled humbly, but appreciatively, and almost as widely as did his wife.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Check out my new memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece”

• Personalized signed copies are available at WoodyWoodburn.com
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