New York City’s sports culture can tell you a lot about the
people, and also how they changed over the years. In the first essay of this
book Steven Reiss describes the dynamic (and conflict) of the Yankees, Dodgers,
and Giants, in terms of the product and consumer. The Dodgers, Brooklyn’s “lost”
team, usually had inferior players, and in the eyes of the press, inferior
fans. There was a pervasive stereotype of the Dodgers fan as a loudmouth
working-class Brooklynite, be it a Jew, Italian, Irishman, Pole, or any of the vast
ethnic groups in the borough. The Yankees, however, were cartooned as
pinstriped players and pinstripe-suited wealthy fans. The Dodgers became symbolic of working-class manners,
criminal behavior, and Bugs Bunny speech. The author theorizes that Brooklyn
had low self-esteem; thanks to consolidation, they were no longer a city, just
the poor little brother of Manhattan, which got the privilege of being called “the
city.” But no matter how low-class it seemed, The Dodgers were Brooklyn’s team,
and few in the borough wanted to trek all the way to Yankee Stadium.
New York had another baseball team, for which the next
author, Harry D. Fetter, titles The Team That Time Forgot. He writes how the
New York Giants, of the now-demolished Polo Grounds, recruited more Black
players than other teams, yet were not as ethnically entrenched as the Dodgers.
Yet according to Steven Reiss, the Giants and Yankees had several things in
common, the most obvious was the wealthy fans. The Giants scheduled their games
after the last bell of the stock exchange, so they could get the wealthy Wall
Street brokers who would drive up via the highway, and both had parking. Fans
included the local Democrat politicians, and thanks to the recruitment of Jewish
players, they had a sizeable Jewish following as well. Both teams had New
Jersey fans, but the Yankees had more; they used the Newark Bears as their farm
team to recruit players.
The authors aren’t especially nostalgic for the teams that
the city lost. The Yankees and Giants had fancy lounges, but not Ebbets field,
which unlike Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds did not have parking.
Baby-Boom era fans went to Yankee Stadium to see Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, and
all the other Italian-American players whom they considered their own. But the
Dodgers didn’t fare well after WWII. First there was Leo Durocher’s divorce,
which the Catholic clergy didn’t like, and then there was the pervasive
stereotype working class Jew/Italian/Irish which people wanted to be rid of.
The fans were all moving out to Long Island, they couldn’t get to Ebbets field
by any way but the car, and there was almost no parking. Brooklyn’s politicians
couldn’t give the Dodgers any perks, and Los Angeles had more land. The move to
LA would hurt Brooklyn sorely, both in terms of economics and self-esteem.
Football in New York City ended when the New York Giants
moved to New Jersey. It wasn’t much of an attraction before WWII, but in
Stephen Norwood’s essay, it had a huge post-war following because of the
violence! The combat veterans of WWII and Korea saw the rough, all-weather game
as a show of toughness, and the Giants had a sizeable number of ex-marines.
They liked the boot camp atmosphere of the training camp, and for suit-wearing
salaryman, the all-weather game was their way to show how manly they were. Basketball,
on the other hand, appealed to inner-city youth who grew up with YMCA sports.
Basketball was a great sport when you had no budget, or if you lacked big
fields for baseball and football. The early football stars were from the Midwest,
where schools all had huge fields. The New York youth, especially a poor one
from Harlem, would be relegated to an empty lot and a peach basket. However, it
wasn’t until giants (physical and metaphorical) like Lew Alcindor came along
that pro basketball would have a huge following.
New York has always been a sports-loving city, with two major
league baseball teams (we once had three) plus the NYC Marathon and whatever
sports events we can get into Madison Square Garden. Sports teams are always a
source of pride for a city, but they can also put the mayor on a bind over funding
and tax breaks. Some towns may have had an incident, where in the middle of the
game, they all hear on the loudspeaker “Mayor Greasypalm, report to the owner’s
skybox, mandatory, I repeat, mandatory.” The mayor goes up to see the owner,
and the tycoon grabs the mayor by his shirt, blows smoke in the mayor’s face,
and what does he roar? Something in the way of “You will build me a brand-new
ballpark, or I will move the team!” Will the mayor think about it? Will he bend
down and kiss the team owner’s feet? Will he say “fine, don’t let the door hit
you in the ass,” like Rudy Giuliani did with George Steinbrenner? Sports can be
an anchor for a city, or a money pit, white elephant, den of vice, but whatever
they are for New York, these pages will show.
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