Apr 18 2010 12:36 PM
Re: The Hangover: Yankee-Loving Douchebags 2010
This was in the New York Times Book Review section today...
I liked it.
 April 18, 2010 Essay Keep Your Team Out of My Book By JOE QUEENAN Not long ago I began reading David Benioff’s “City of Thieves.” The novel had come highly recommended to me by several friends, and as I had already seen Spike Lee’s excellent film “25th Hour,” which is based on Benioff’s first novel, I was really looking forward to reading the book. “City of Thieves,” set during the Nazi siege of Leningrad, is about a Russian teenager who will be shot by Stalin’s police unless he tracks down a dozen eggs to be used in baking a wedding cake for a colonel’s daughter. Since cannibalism has already broken out in the city, eggs are clearly going to be hard to come by. So, as I opened to the first page, I was primed for a rip-roaring adventure. But almost immediately the whole exercise was ruined. The narrator, the young boy’s grandson, reveals on Page 2 that after the war, his grandfather came to America and became a “devout” New York Yankees fan. I found this revelation crushing. The idea that someone who had escaped the siege of Leningrad would then voluntarily join the evil empire in the Bronx struck me as repellent. So I set the book aside and donated it to my library. Maybe some Yankees fan would enjoy it. I sure as hell wouldn’t. I do not object to Yankees fans in principle, so long as they are homegrown, preferably natives of the Bronx or Yonkers. (Yankees fans born in Queens or Brooklyn, it goes without saying, are Iscariots.) But those of us who grew up in fiendishly inbred sports towns like Philadelphia, Cleveland, St. Louis and even Boston cannot stomach the kind of parvenu, out-of-town front-runner who becomes a “die-hard” Yankees fan without any moral, cultural, ethnic, genetic or geographical connection with the team. And like most Americans, I reserve my greatest antipathy for the millions of bogus Yankees fans in the pink or green or red Yankees caps one routinely runs across in London, Rome, Sydney, Stockholm and Mombasa. Or, if driving, runs over. In the case of “City of Thieves,” it seemed to me that a survivor of the heroic siege of Leningrad — an underdog par excellence — would have a moral obligation to become a Dodgers fan, and then perhaps to transform into a Mets fan once the Bums desert Flatbush. The man’s arrival in New York would have come not long before the opening scene of Don DeLillo’s “Underworld,” which has the Dodgers facing off against the Giants at the Polo Grounds in the 1951 pennant playoff. Even though I grew up hating both these teams, neither of them is in any way revolting. Nor are the Mets, who are merely cheesy. But it is simply unconscionable that a survivor of the siege would become a Yankees fan. Stalin would have been a Yankees fan. There’s a guy who loved to gang up on the weak and defenseless. There’s a front-runner if there ever was one. My refusal to read books about the Yankees or their fans also extends to books written by supporters of the team. Thus, when I learned that Salman Rushdie had adopted the Yankees, who beat my Phillies in the World Series last year, it eliminated any chance that I would ever read “The Satanic Verses,” no matter how good it is. This attitude is rooted partly in principle and partly in pathology: I, like most Americans, resent the Yankees’ success while secretly wishing that my cheapskate teams would imitate them and go out and purchase championship after championship. But I further ridicule the notion that Yankees fans experience the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat the way the rest of us do. Rooting for the Yankees, as a friend of mine said, is like rooting for the air. It’s about as daring as rooting for a pack of ravenous pit bulls in a showdown with a blind, one-legged bunny rabbit. My revulsion does not end with the Yankees. I also refuse to read books whose characters or authors have any affiliation with the Dallas Cowboys, the Los Angeles Lakers, the Duke University men’s basketball team, the University of Southern California football team or Manchester United, the Yankees’ European football evil twin. All of these entities are promiscuously vile. So implacable is my hatred of Man United (glamour-boy David Beckham’s old team) that when I met the gifted mystery writer Val McDermid at the Dublin Writers Festival last year, and found out she was a Manchester United fan — even though she is not from Manchester — I immediately unloaded all my Val McDermid mysteries and started bad-mouthing her work to my friends. I’m dead serious about this stuff. Happily, precious few novels mention the Yankees, the Lakers, Duke, U.S.C. or Manchester United, much less the Cowboys. This is no accident. Editors have long understood that allowing an author to link his characters with a widely execrated sports franchise would turn off millions of potential readers, so they have gently urged these authors to excise such references, particularly if they occur early in the book, when the reader is still making up his mind whether it is worth plowing ahead. Here are a few examples of passages that were wisely deleted from famous writers’ manuscripts before they went to press: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Charles Darnay was rooting for the ripping side fielded by the Jacobins, while Sydney Carton was all agog about those first-rate chaps from Manchester United.” (“A Tale of Two Cities”) “For a long time I would go to bed early and conceal myself under the covers, eating stale Cracker Jack my governess had secreted in her apron, all the while reading about the latest thrilling exploits of the Bronx Bombers.” (“Swann’s Way”) “He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees, making it hard to pick up the radio broadcast of the Michigan-U.S.C. game.” (“For Whom the Bell Tolls”) “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. So Rochester suggested that we all crochet mittens with the America’s Team logo.” (“Jane Eyre”) “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: ‘Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Lakers tickets still available.’ ” (“The Stranger”) “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had. Like Gehrig batting cleanup.’ ” (“The Great Gatsby”) Or, for that matter, Alex Rodriguez. Joe Queenan’s memoir “Closing Time” has just been released in paperback. |
