The Yankees are vying for their 28th championship. The Liberty just notched their first. What does winning do for cities, anyway?
So the New York Yankees are back in the World Series at last, after a 15-year hiatus. (To Yankees fans, it feels like a millennium or two.) They clinched the American League pennant just a day before the New York Liberty, the city’s representative in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), ended a 28-year drought of their own, winning a league title with a thrilling overtime victory over the Minnesota Lynx.
It has been a tough sports century for a town that likes to think of itself as the very best of everything. No doubt this accounts, in part, for New York rushing to schedule a ticker-tape parade for the Liberty, which is a wonderful milestone in and of itself: the first time that a women’s sports team from the city has received such an honor.
We are hungry for a winner. Besides the Yankees’ World Series wins in 2009 and 2000 (against the crosstown rival Mets) and two astonishing Super Bowl upsets by the New York Football Giants over the Patriots, no team in the metropolitan area has won a title this century. (Well, all right, there were the New Jersey Devils, who won Stanley Cups in 2000 and 2003, but this was achieved playing, as Bruce Springsteen might put it, “somewhere in the swamps of Jersey.”)
Long-suffering Rangers fans (is there any other kind?) were giddy when the team finally broke a 54-year Cup-less streak in 1994. Well, it’s now been another three decades, and that cup runneth over a long time ago. The Islanders have not won a cup since 1983, while the Mets have not won a World Series since 1986, nor the Jets since Joe Willie Namath stole off with the 1969 Super Bowl. The Brooklyn Nets — now on their fourth name and eighth home court — have never won an NBA championship. As for the Knicks, yes, they had an exciting team last season, but it’s been over half-a-century since they hoisted a banner at Madison Square Garden.
Nor is there any big-time college power to take up the slack. New York hasn't known any great success in college football since Vince Lombardi and the "Seven Blocks of Granite" at Fordham in the 1930s. The city was once the hotbed of college hoops, but that hasn’t been the case since the point-fixing scandals of the 1950s.
For many decades, well over a century, New York’s status as the nation’s richest and biggest city, its trendsetter, its greatest stage — even its iniquity — shaped its sporting success.
All of this has been fairly demoralizing for a city that calls itself “the greatest” more than Muhammad Ali ever did. “And if I can make it there, I’m gonna make it anywhere,” Frank Sinatra reminds us after every Yankees win. “There’s nothing you can’t do/ Now you’re in New York,” Alicia Keys and Jay-Z affirmed in that long-ago year when the Yanks last won it all. New Yorkers have been reminded of the city’s greatness for so long now that a skeptic might wonder if we’re trying to convince ourselves, but never mind. New York is all about being A-number-one, top of the heap, king of the hill — so why aren’t we on the sporting field?
For many decades, well over a century, New York’s status as the nation’s richest and biggest city, its trendsetter, its greatest stage — even its iniquity — shaped its sporting success. New leagues had to have a franchise in New York to show they were serious (and to tap into some of that lucre). It’s no surprise that TV ratings for the WNBA’s finals doubled this year. Back in 1915, offered a chance to buy the Cubs, Jacob Ruppert, the transformational owner of the Yankees, scoffed that Chicago was “too far from Broadway.” (One marvels over how the baseball world might have been turned upside down if he had thought differently.) Instead, Col. Ruppert brought Babe Ruth to New York, which was already what The New Yorker called a “gymnasium of celebrities.”
“The whole world revolves around New York,” agreed another newcomer of the time, named Duke Ellington. “Very little happens anywhere unless someone in New York presses a button.” Ann Douglas, writing about New York’s 20s some years later, appraised that: “What the city could not supply, it could attract, seduce and control. You ‘made it’ in New York, and everyone who was anyone knew it.”
So it would go on, year after year, decade after decade, the city’s teams the visible proof of its primacy. Just as other cities measured themselves against New York, other franchises measured themselves against the Yankees, but also the New York Baseball Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers during their long dynasties in the National League. It was often feared that the city’s sheer wealth and size alone would provide it with insuperable advantages: For example, when the Dodgers and Giants developed vast regional radio networks in the late 1940s (and the Dodgers even developed a secondary network of “recreated” games); when the nation’s leading television network, CBS, bought the Yankees (the “Tiffany Network” acquired them for about the same price it paid for Fender Guitars, at about the same moment); or when the players finally won the right to be free agents, and George Steinbrenner seemed intent on bringing every one of them to the Bronx.
Other towns combined and connived to contain New York’s power, instituting orderly amateur drafts and salary caps in sport after sport. After a dominating Yankees’ run from 1936-1939, when the Bombers lost only three games in winning four straight World Series, the American League passed a rule forbidding any other AL club from trading with the league’s pennant winner, from the end of the World Series until said pennant winner was eliminated from the race the next season.
The rule was rescinded after one season — no one seemed to have noticed that New York was winning not through trades, but by colonizing the outlands with a massive farm system — and the Yankees won three more pennants and two World Series, before the boys went off to war.
When they came back, the city and its teams seemed more dominant than ever, in everything.
“…New York is the biggest, richest city the world has ever seen…its wealth is incalculable. It is the world’s greatest port, the world’s greatest tourist attraction, the world’s greatest manufacturing city and the world’s greatest marketplace,” TIME magazine gushed in 1948. It was, “the fountain-spout of U.S. culture, the intellectual gateway to England and Europe…” a place that “prizes confidence and rewards brilliance.”
This was the city that New Yorkers liked to know they belonged to, where a literary legend sat in an unimposing, midtown saloon, deifying a sports legend who was married to a goddess.
A brilliance that was embodied, again, on the ballfield. The Dodgers, Giants and Yankees finished the regular season in first place a combined 19 times from 1946-1957. No one much complained about the seven “Subway Series” during this era. For sportswriters, it meant a week catching the hottest Broadway shows, the best jazz in the world and gallivanting in the top nightclubs, epitomized by Toots Shor’s famous watering hole at 51 West 51st, just around the corner from Swing Street. Everybody — well, every male body — went to Toots’, a fact he illustrated one night shortly after the war by walking down the main aisle of his joint with Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey on one arm and Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby on the other. But the reigning deity there was Joe DiMaggio, his legend soon put between covers by another regular, Ernest Hemingway. This was the city that New Yorkers liked to know they belonged to, where a literary legend sat in an unimposing, midtown saloon, deifying a sports legend who was married to a goddess.
The first cracks in New York’s sports dominance, and its general postwar confidence, came when both the Dodgers and the baseball Giants absconded to California. The motives of their owners were clear enough: They thought New York — and particularly the regions of Flatbush and Harlem where they played — were getting too poor, too shoddy, too… dark. The city learned all the wrong lessons from this, showering its sports teams with money ever since, lest they be tempted to move out of what is still the biggest market in America, and the richest city in the world.
In response, New York’s teams have come to embody all the ugliest elements of today’s capitalism. Our franchises now are lousy with nepo-baby owners, pocketing enormous taxpayer subsidies while they hack out seats meant for the general public in favor of luxury boxes, and charge extortionate prices to watch their teams on television. Yet even as the championships have dried up, Hal Steinbrenner, the man who inherited the Yankees, and his longtime general manager, Brian Cashman, have used fans’ expectations as an excuse not to rebuild the team, claiming New Yorkers “won’t stand for it.” Sports commentators routinely refer to New York fans — and especially Yankees fans — as being entitled, and impossibly demanding.
Are New Yorkers uniquely unwilling to accept losing? I’ve yet to meet any devoted sports fans, anywhere, who didn’t want to win.
Our franchises now are lousy with nepo-baby owners, pocketing enormous taxpayer subsidies while they hack out seats meant for the general public in favor of luxury boxes, and charge extortionate prices to watch their teams on television.
This baseball season also marked the first time that any team has exceeded the New York Mets’ post-1900 record of 120 losses in a major-league baseball season, as the Chicago White Sox went 41-121. The Mets, when they set this mark, shortly after replacing the Giants and Dodgers as the city’s National League team, were the only “lovable losers” in New York’s history. The Mets lost over 100 games in five of their first six seasons of existence, and finished no higher than ninth in the NL through 1968. Yet their attendance soared, far surpassing that of the pennant-winning Yankees by 1964.
The antics and enthusiasm of Mets fans was much celebrated in the press, bestowing a plucky, underdog persona on the team it would never quite shake. But in fact, the Mets would have finished a distant last in NL attendance for their first five years of existence — were it not for visits from the newly minted Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants. Through 1966, the Giants and Dodgers drew at least twice, and once three times as many fans as the other seven NL teams combined when they came to New York. In other words, Mets fans were not so much going to celebrate the city’s funny new losers as they were to sigh over their departed heroes, men like Willie Mays and Sandy Koufax and Duke Snider.
I believe it is much the same everywhere, even with those teams and cities known for their famous losses. Unpardonable as the abuse of Steve Bartman was, it demonstrated one thing: Cubs fans didn’t find decades of falling short cute. Roger Angell, deploring the literary excesses of Red Sox angst during that team’s run-up to disaster in the 1986 World Series, wondered if “the true function of the Red Sox may be not to win but to provide New England authors with a theme, now that guilt and whaling have gone out of style.” He wrote instead of the unpublished fans, who “had not always been as happy or philosophical about the Sox.” Allen Barra, covering the takeover of the Dallas Cowboys by Jerry Jones and his coach, Jimmy Johnson, back in 1989, found a cab driver to sum up the local feeling about the team’s recent slough: “I think they [Jones and Johnson] know that fans here aren’t going to put up with the Cowboys as a losing team. They think that’s unnatural.”
Fans don’t like to lose. Anywhere, anytime. Now, in New York, there is talk of looking to the World Series to alleviate the funk the city seems to have fallen into, a general sense of dysfunction that can be seen in the decline of its public spaces and subways, the closing of so many street shops — and yet another recurrence of mayoral scandals. How much these impressions are just impressions — the city’s economy is mostly thriving, its nightlife bustling again and crime is falling — is hard to say. But ticker-tape parades for the Yankees and the Liberty, the old and the truly new, men and women, would be a boost for all. An ephemeral lift, to be sure, but that’s what sports is, a wonderful contrivance to distract us momentarily from the cares of modern life (especially when we win).