Casual
Tell, David
Casual MY INNER YANKEES FAN About a week ago, I spent a few days struggling with the suspicion that I was spiritually polluted. It was something David Brooks wrote that got me started. As I'm...
...So first I had my wife check my back for hair growth...
...Then I set about constructing ex post facto rationalizations for abandoning family tradition and choosing one New York ballclub over the other...
...The Yankees are aesthetically superior, I told myself, old-fashioned baseball formalists who call their manager "Mr...
...Never would I wish illness or injury on the "other" team's stars...
...This was my plan, anyway...
...And we have grown accustomed to having this double affection rewarded...
...Failing that, of course, they are always free to gloat some more...
...And on the other hand, you had . . . well, the urGoliaths themselves, the two-time defending champion New York Yankees, auction-purchased superstars whose fans are power-loving gorillas with "gold chains" and "back hair...
...That works, too, I find...
...And finally, when game five was finished and a Yankees three-peat safely secured, I gloated...
...In the 31 years preceding the 2000 season, our favored teams collected 10 league championships and 7 World Series victories—each of which I remember with unmodulated pleasure...
...And at the end of the Series, come what may, I would still be able to bask in the winner's glow...
...So what if family man Roger Clemens, no doubt offended by Piazza's infantile conception of eros, threw a baseball bat at him...
...For there would be no "other" team, really, and so nothing could go wrong...
...Torre...
...On the one hand, you had the New York Mets, "exuberant boys somehow touched by grace" who delight their "innocent" fans by bravely wielding mere ballpark "pixie dust" against opposing teams full of faceless, freeagent Goliaths...
...I did not want to believe it...
...This is the question that briefly plagued me last week...
...The Mets, by contrast, are sports vulgarity personified...
...And I figured this one would come at no risk to my nerves and self-respect...
...Suddenly I cared very much that the incumbent Yankees should win...
...Never once would I frighten my children by shrieking at the television set when something went wrong...
...Had my gloating revealed me to be the kind of Yankees-booster goon David Brooks described in his essay—a man of bad character...
...I told my children that Mets batters reminded me of nearsighted fat kids I knew in Little League...
...At one point during game three, when a crowd reaction shot briefly filled our TV screen, I told my children that all 55,000 people in Shea Stadium that night were relatives of a man named Joey Buttafuoco...
...Three weeks ago, as the Yankees and Mets wrapped up pennants numbers 11 and 12 simultaneously, I figured I had it made...
...I figured a Subway Series meant I was sure to witness my eighth New York world title...
...In considerable detail...
...I hated them, even...
...Which result would have been okay with me, or so I imagined before the Series began...
...During game two, I told my children that Mets catcher Mike Piazza intended for his broken bat to spin toward the pitcher's mound at Roger Clemens and knock him unconscious...
...I would be a model of emotional equipoise and good sportsmanship during every at-bat of every inning...
...The Series, he explained, would be decided not by skillful play but through the functioning of an absolute moral imperative...
...Shea favorite Mike Piazza, to take but one of many possible examples I've considered, dates a Peruvian bimbo who posed nude in Playboy—with her own twin sister...
...For hours...
...Such arguments as these have helped me recover confidence in my own integrity, and I hope they will prove a comfort to Yankees fans everywhere...
...But it fell apart five minutes into game one at Yankee Stadium, when a lifetime of carefully maintained New York baseball agnosticism suddenly deserted me and I found myself transformed into a rabid home-team partisan...
...there was none, thank heavens...
...Surely, instead, God has created baseball in His image and the Mets must therefore win...
...New York baseball is an ancient but highly abstracted loyalty in my family...
...Honor demanded it...
...I told my children that Clemens should have thrown the bat back at Piazza—and that it was too bad he'd missed...
...And I prayed the upstart Mets would lose...
...DAVID TELL...
...Then I told them who Joey Buttafuoco is...
...Why...
...We Tells, that is to say, have long been in the habit of pulling for both the Yankees and the Mets at the same time...
...Surely, friend Brooks announced, this primitive tribe is not to be granted a third-straight October excuse to gloat and swagger...
...As I'm sure you recall, two weeks ago on this page my esteemed colleague published a characteristically elegant and funny essay in which he made bold to predict the outcome of this year's all-Gotham World Series...
Vol. 6 • November 2000 • No. 9
