Confessions of a displaced New Yorker
By DANA DUGAN
Express Staff Writer
The morning after the Yanks won the American League Championship series
against the Seattle Mariners, this reporter awoke with another wine-induced headache.
Enough, I said, and called the cable company to hook my cable back up. Hanging out in bars
watching the games was killing me.
But what’s a displaced, cable-less New Yorker supposed to do when her
team is on the brink of playing in the first subway series in 44 years?
Photos line the walls in my home of the original Yankee stadium, of my
children at games when they were younger, of me and my best friends at game after game. I
have framed baseball cards and autographed photos of players.
Thinking about the games’ being played in New York, I can feel the
Number Four subway shake the stadium slightly as it goes by, smell the hot dogs and beer
and see the pristinely cut green grass, white uniforms with blue pinstripes and the
shockingly blue sky over the New York City sky line.
I do know people with televisions, but they aren’t inviting me over
to watch. Maybe it’s the way I yell, or hush everyone else. Maybe they’re just
sick to death of the Yankees.
There are a lot of people who are crabby about the Yanks, but they
don’t remember, as I do, the bad years. The late ‘60s and early ‘70s were
not fun. Results didn’t pick up until the Thurman Munson, Ron Guidry, Willie Randolph
and Graig Nettles years of the late ‘70s. Following that there were fifteen years
between 1981, when the Yankees lost in the World Series to the Los Angeles Dodgers, until
1996 when the current dynasty finally prevailed.
Managers were hired and fired, fatal accidents took Munson in a plane
crash, and Billy Martin in a Christmas Day car crash. Other stars died too
early—Roger Maris from cancer and Mickey Mantle from liver problems. And the boss
kept angering everyone by trading away young stars of the future for aging has-beens that
didn't contribute enough to warrant their salaries and were gone by the next season.
I lived in New York all those years and was a vigilant fan, faithful to
the boys in pinstripes. Believe me, true fans paid dues then.
The Yankees, having won 25 World Series, have always dominated their sport
by means both of wealthy owners who spend money on them and the fact that they are in a
serious baseball town.
But the subway series is about more than baseball, and there are
deep-seated reasons why a person might be a fan of one team and not the other. Let me
clarify.
The Dodgers and Giants were New York teams until the ‘50s when they
migrated west, taking National League fans’ hearts with them. Not until the Mets
arrived in Queens in 1962 did those fans have a local team again.
In the meantime, the Yankees had been flourishing through the DiMaggio
years, and the Mantle, Maris, Martin, Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford years---bliss years.
When the Mets were good, the Yanks weren’t (1969 and 1986), and vice
versa. Until last year.
Since the Mets play at Shea in the borough of Queens, many of their fans
come from Long Island, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island--otherwise known as the outer
boroughs.
Alternately, Yankee Stadium in the Bronx is more accessible from
Manhattan, northern New Jersey, Westchester County and the south-western end of
Connecticut.
My children, rooting for mom’s team by default, have during the past
two weeks received a grand tour of Hailey restaurants that have televisions. Most of these
sets are too small and the sound is usually turned off.
Thank God for Hailey’s Red Elephant Bar and Grill, where the owners,
Rob Cronin and Brendan Dennehy, are both ex-New Yorkers and Yankee fans. I was stunned one
day to find a New York channel via satellite beaming at me from over the bar.
"The subway series is one of the things that makes you appreciate
living in New York," Cronin said, "You get goose bumps hearing the national
anthem sung at the stadium—there’s no other place like it."
It’s enough to make one weep. Whichever way it goes, New York is
alive with positive and intense rivalry this week.
"It’d be killer to be back in New York right now" Dennehy
said to me.
I wish I were there.
