COACH'S CORNER MAY 28, 1998

WHY I NEVER WAS A YANKEE FAN

In the prehistoric days before ESPN, kids would rather play baseball than watch it on TV. Baseball games were rarely on TV anyway and most kids were not allowed to watch that late on a school night (usually 8 p.m., for cryin' out loud). And if the New York teams were on the road to, say, Chicago, there was a chance that the game would not start until the absurdly late hour of 9 p.m. As we would say in New York, fuggedaboudit.

So it was not surprising that I had not yet picked a favorite team when I hit grammar school. This was not because I had no choices. In fact, New York baseball resembled a Civil War with Dodger fans, Giant fans, and Yankee fans in constant battle. Families divided along team lines, with fights erupting at weddings and funerals over bad calls, bad breaks, and bad plays which had occurred years before.

The perennial winners on the field, if not in the bars, were the New York Yankees. They were the Wall Street, pin-striped Icon of professional sports, successful and rich, with their endless supply of all-star talent at every position. It was even rumored that they had a major league farm team in the form of the Kansas City Athletics, which seemed to trade every all star prospect immediately to the Yankees for 5 unknown minor league players.

Now to me, channeling the proletarian side of my Irish-Italian-Polish immigrant family, it seemed positively Unamerican to root for the Yankees. I mean, cheering for a team so evidently devoid of passion and for which everything came so easily seemed extremely Republican and therefore warped. They looked so confident and successful, you just wanted to slap them.

Nevertheless, my anti-Yankee position was not cemented until one hot summer day when my dad took us to our first Yankee game.

First of all, he made me wear a dress. Even though I think this was due to his own sense of propriety, I have always blamed this on the Yankees. Then, we had to leave four hours early to get a parking place. My dad explained that if you parked too close to the stadium, you had to pay protection money to the neighborhood kids so they would leave the tires on your car. Since my dad was too proper to do this, we had to leave early to get a coveted parking spot a mile away. Strike two.

But strike three was not the parking, the dress, the snotty fans, but the guy who sold the tickets to my dad. Here it was, a nothing game in the middle of a nothing summer, with millions of tickets available. My father, who grew up knowing about such things, slipped the guy an extra five so that he wouldn’t sell us seats behind a pole. The guy took the five, puffed meaningfully on his ten cent cigar, and riffled through his huge ticket stash for the five best seats in the house. We thought. We ended up high on the second deck, behind a pole. This was an act of war. From then on, I made it a point of honor to cheer for anybody who would put these cheating rich guys in their place. Like maybe, the Dodgers. But that's the next story.

© Adrienne Larkin