11.16.06 |
Yankee Diaspora
I was raised on the Yankees. The baseball team, that is, not the general culture, though if my experience living in Georgia is any indication, the latter is true as well. Despite my complete inability to play any sport, the New York Yankees were a defining part of my childhood. After a very long sabbatical, my affinity for the team has resurfaced since my arrival in Oakland. My dad has one of those tragic - and tragically common - stories in which a New York kid collects all the rookie baseball cards of all the superstar mid-century Yankees, only to leave for college and find that they’ve disappeared in a bout of spring cleaning. I grew up hearing that story (as well as my grandmother’s apologetic corollary version) along with astonishing quantities of trivial knowledge about the team and its players. My father, the historian, knows everything there is to know about everything on earth. When he’s passionate about something, there’s no stopping the deluge of facts, figures, and anecdotes. Curiously, though my brain usually maintains a death grip on trivial knowledge, I remember almost none of the Gospel According to Yankee. What I did retain is this: the Yankees are the best team ever, and baseball is the only real sport. Until the mid-1990s, everyone in my family knew that. Enter 1994. The strike turned my father away from baseball. I won’t identify the sport he claimed as his new obsession, except to say that it requires dorky clothing and is ungodly boring to watch. He and my stepmother embraced the dorkiness, watched hundreds of hours of live coverage, and, worst of all, corrupted my innocent 10-year-old brother in their zeal for the anti-baseball. I was 16 at the time, heavily involved in the alterna-grunge-etc scene, and mortified. This was even worse than their purchase of the Ace of Base “I Saw the Sign” single. My athletic incompetence had always kept me on the periphery of the sports culture, but this change of allegiance to something so not punk rock pushed me right off the map. Twelve years, a college education, a marriage, a career, and a blissfully athletic-free existence later, I live in Oakland. People here are crazy about their team in a way that is very reminiscent of my early childhood home. A’s paraphernalia is everywhere, and most people I know go to a game or two every season. My straight-from-the-gut reaction? I need a Yankees hat. 2 Responses So FarSay your words |
rdl said,
November 16, 2006 @ 7:35 pm
From NJ originally and my mom was a Yankees fan; my son is a diehard Redsox fan. Watching him watch them win 2 yrs. ago was great!!
Grimes said,
November 17, 2006 @ 5:18 pm
Yeah, like Yankees cloche hat. You know that somewhere one exists. If you find one and put it on, I will forgive you for putting that I-Saw-The-Sign song in my head.