As a lifelong citizen of New York City, I have never put much store in the fiat that says, when it comes to pledging baseball allegiance, you pays your money and you makes your choice: Mets or Yankees. For me, hometown pride has always trumped team loyalty, and I love them both.
In 1969, when I was in the second grade, my uncle took my cousin and me to Shea Stadium to watch Gil Hodges's boys spank the Baltimore Orioles 5–3 and win the World Series. I took home a clump of outfield sod and went on to devour every book about the team I could find, including The Year the Mets Lost Last Place and The Life Story of the One and Only Cleon, as in Jones. As Tom Seaver reportedly put it: "God is living in New York City, and he's a Mets fan." Back then, the Almighty was also a Jets and a Knicks fan, delivering, after the national heartbreak of 1968, one of the most joyous years ever for the city.
The Yankees were my father's team, his boyhood heroes. By the time of my boyhood, the once-great dynasty was, despite the talents of Roy White and Bobby Murcer, moping around the basement of the American League. My father, for whom even the DiMaggio years were a letdown, took me out to Yankee Stadium a few times, until he got tired of watching the listless Bronx Bombers get pounded by lesser clubs.
The Yankees, of course, came roaring back a few years later and, in 1977, won the World Series in six games against the Los Angeles Dodgers. My father refused to watch Game 6, convinced that his presence, even in front of our den's TV set, would jinx it. So he didn't see Reggie Jackson's titanic three home runs in three at-bats (off three pitches!) and the spectacle of thousands of crazed New Yorkers storming the field. Still, it was a moment of redemption for a 16-year-old kid with long hair and dodgy skin who had spent the summer in the Berkshires watching Red Sox games and not getting laid—not to mention for a beleaguered city that had just suffered through bankruptcy, humiliation ("Ford to City: Drop Dead"), Abe Beame, the Son of Sam, a heat wave, a blackout, widespread looting, and the arrival of spread-collar Qiana shirts and Rupert Murdoch.
That roller-coaster New York year is the subject of Jonathan Mahler's highly entertaining 2005 book, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning, which this month comes to the small screen as an eight-part ESPN miniseries, with the truncated title The Bronx Is Burning. Throughout the book, Mahler deftly weaves the story of New York's annus horribilis with the saga of the Yankees. Showing a keen eye for big events and the colorful players behind them, he manages to convey the blend of urban decay, political cupidity, bad taste, and cosmopolitan brio particular to a great city on the fault line between two eras. Ed Koch, Mario Cuomo, and Bella Abzug battle one another for the mayoralty as George Steinbrenner, Billy Martin, and Reggie Jackson duke it out for clubhouse supremacy and their team fights to regain its dynastic glory.
