Damn Yankees

I'll probably never really know just how much my father loved the Brooklyn Dodgers. He talked about listening to the games on the radio as a boy in Larchmont, and I think he may have even ventured into Brooklyn and caught a few games. I did come close to understanding his devotion to that team fully, I think, during a visit to Little Rock, Arkansas of all places. We were there visiting my mother's parents, and my father came into our hotel room after having been out at the pool. His face was barely recognizable. He looked like a kid.

"I don't believe it. Ducky Medwick is here! At our hotel!"

My brother, mother and I all looked at each other. We had no idea what he was talking about.

"He played for the Dodgers. When they were in Brooklyn. He was one of my favorite players. I just met him. I just shook Ducky Medwick's hand."

I think we may have met Joe Medwick, former Brooklyn Dodger at that point. He may have flashed a big, fancy World Series ring. It's one of those things that either happened, or I "filled it in" to make for a better story. To this day, I'm not sure what he was doing in Little Rock in the middle of summer. It wasn't the kind of heat you wanted to be in if you could avoid it.

Like many, my father was disappointed by the Dodger's departure from New York. He explained that back then there was a class thing going on; the pinstripes of the Yankees represented the pin-striped suits of Big Business, whereas the Dodgers were the team of the people. It's well documented that they used to take the streetcars and buses down Eastern Parkway, where they lived among their fans, in order to get to the park.

The Yankees were the enemy. They were the rich cousin who always made the Dodgers look bad in their many battles for the world championship. (Except for that one, lone victory in 1955, the one bright spot for Dodger fans in that storied rivalry.)

This rivalry created a generation of Yankee-haters. It seethed from my father's pores. He barely allowed us to watch the Yankees. In our home, it was Channel 9 and the Mets only. We didn't dare switch to the Yankees on Channel 11. I'm not sure what he would have done. My father was a gentle man, but there was something about his demeanor that told us this might change if we ever flicked that dial two clicks clockwise. So we never did.

He was a National League loyalist who always rooted against the American League during the World Series. Those two back-to-back losses in 77 and 78 had my father feeling the despair of his youth; you could see it on his face. The 1981 win over the Yankees brought back a bit of that 1955 adulation for him.

I say all this to preface my brief love affair with -- dare I say it -- the Yankees. The 1996 team was hard not to love, even for someone brought up as a hardcore Yankee-hater. They were homegrown young players like Jeter, Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada and Mariano Rivera, and they were a lot of fun to watch, because they seemed to be having more fun than everyone else out there. I also had a great time going to games that year with James Savoca, a long-time Yankee fan. When I showed up at my dad's place in Irvington for dinner one night, he saw the Yankee cap on my head and said, "What is that?" as if I were wearing a satanic head dress or something.

Flash forward to my Dominican father-in-law, Daniel Reyes, another Yankee lover. He was convinced, when I married his daughter, that I was a Yankee fan like him. I started dating his daughter right around the time I had my brief love affair with his team, so I can see why. Of course, now he's figured out the truth. He enjoys rubbing my nose in Yankee victories, but in his polite, smiling way.

And it's true, since the acquisition of numerous big-ticket superstars who will remain nameless, I've kind of gone back to being a Yankee hater again. I get a deep joy from seeing them lose -- something that must go back genetically to my father's painful experience as a Brooklyn Dodger fan. Sorry, suegro. It's just the way I was raised.