October 9, 2007--My Yankees

I grew up in Brooklyn while the Dodgers were still in residence; and under the powerful and perverse influence of my Cousin Chuck (who coincidentally today would have been 73) was a diehard Yankee fan. In that era we were used to having the Yanks pretty routinely proceed to the World Series as if it were their private preserve and once there they would often encounter one of their local rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers or the New York Giants. And just as invariably they would win. How could they miss with Joe DiMaggio or Mickey Mantle roaming centerfield? But that was then and this is now. Just last night, the Yankees were eliminated from something called “The American League Division Series.” (See NY Times story linked below.) They got into this first-stage playoff round by winning the Wild Card, whatever that is, though I presume it’s something that was dreamed up by the team owners to, what else, squeeze more revenue out of the system and extend the baseball season into November. I of course prefer the old system whereby you either won the National or American League Pennant and went right on to the World Series. Or you went home. With the players, when they arrived home, resuming their off-season jobs selling cars or insurance—they were paid that poorly. Being a Yankee fan in Brooklyn placed one’s life at risk. We did more than argue about who was better—Mantle or Willie Mays or Duke Snyder—but, by intuiting our favorite teams to represent different kinds of metaphors for the meaning of life, we engaged in blood sport. At times, more literally than metaphorically. The Giants represented the patrician way. Jews and other ethnic groups were thus not encouraged to become fans. The true Giant supporters (I suspect they would be reluctant to even be thought of as fans considering the etymology—from fanatic) came from the Manhattan Wasp and Irish elites—the Polo Grounds was the only stadium in Manhattan proper—who dressed in bespoke clothes and smoked Cuban cigars and were delivered to the games in limousines. When there was something to cheer, they tended to applaud, as if at the opera or the Belmont Stakes. Much of this was a veneer of gentility as there were many gangsters and nouveau riche in attendance, but glimpsed from the far reaches of Flatbush, including on 12-inch black and white TVs with the images full of electronic snow, it was as off-putting as the Giant’s followers were hoping to be. The Dodgers, by contrast, were for the outer-borough lumpen proletariat—working stiffs who after 12-hour days on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon would guzzle a Rheingold at Ebbets Field or while huddled at their television sets in their finished basements. These were life’s losers, and they knew it—struggling to pay the rent or keep one step ahead of the bank which held their mortgage--as were the Dodgers—called, appropriately, the Bums and represented as such in vivid cartoons drawn by Willard Mullins. They were perennially losers—especially in the World Series where the Yankees, even when outplayed, would find some inner resource or benefit by some fluke or miracle to dash their hopeless hopes. The Bums, as a result, became famous for eternally waiting ‘til next year, just like their fans for whom next year never came. (At least not until 1955 when the Dodgers won the Series and which two years later contributed to the Bums being lured out to Los Angeles where things were never the same for them or in Brooklyn, which went into a long period of resentful mourning, underscoring for their abandoned fans just how unfair and rigged life in fact was.) Since neither Chuck nor I, though we came from modest backgrounds (read poor) thought in proletariat terms (except politically—we were versions of red-diaper babies), the Dodgers, as bums, were obviously not for us. We were thinking college and escape from economic struggle and the neighborhood. The Giants also were not available to us—we could not identify with anything that elite, even if paper thin or phony. This then left us with only the Yankees. True, they were more corporate than we were inclined to like—both our fathers had at times been victims of early forms of corporate exploitation—but their stadium was in a Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx, near the Grand Concourse where upward-aspiring Jews aspired to eventually move. And they always won. The always-winning part was clearly most appealing to us. We too wanted to win; and if by riding along vicariously with the successful Yanks we could get a leg up on life, we would figure out a way to absorb the abuse that would be heaped on us by our class and street-mates. And, there was plenty of that. We were considered as much traitors as if we had been Nazi sympathizers during the War. But our friends’ attacks, which became more and more personal when our plans to leave them behind began to leak out, only intensified our feelings of superiority. Which was fine with us! We were, weren’t we, like our Yankees, how else to put it, superior? So why do I now feel so all right with the fact that my Yankees haven’t won a World Series in six or seven years? Easy. You can’t get to be my age and maintain such a relentless interest in winning. Doing well occasionally is more than good enough. So now the vulnerable Yanks have morphed into a metaphor more appropriate for me. And this America’s era. Things aren’t that clear and innocent anymore—they never should have been--and we have learned how to lose as well as win. Which, I think, is a long-overdue good thing.