No Envy for Yankee Fans

On Sunday afternoon, wandering around East 153rd St. outside Yankee Stadium with the lovely Better Half, Jennifer, my eyes were drawn to one particular t-shirt for sale outside one of the myriad Yankee souvenir stores that dot that litter-infested slum.  The shirt, in full obnoxious Yankee-blue splendor, proclaimed triumphantly, “GOT TWENTY-SIX?”The reference, of course, is to the Yankees’ record twenty-six World Series titles in their illustrious history.  If you’ve never been to (as it is known to New Yorkers) The Stadium, this record is blazoned proudly in multiple places, so that all in attendance can marvel over and be envious not only of the Yankees, but also of those privileged, fortunate souls that are lucky enough to have been born fans of the greatest franchise in the annals of American sport.

In Yankee Fan mentality, generations of parents who were not blessed by the sports gods to be Yankee followers have taken their children to games at Yankee Stadium, instructing them to stand in awe at the park’s mystique, bow their heads to Monument Park, kneel towards the grave of Babe Ruth in upstate New York, and pray to whatever Charlton Heston-esque deity they worship that maybe, if they behave and eat their vegetables, perhaps in their next life they too will be exalted as divine Yankee Fans.

To paraphrase Christine Taylor’s character from Dodgeball, that retching sound you just heard was me throwing up in my mouth.  Sunday, in my fourth trip to the South Bronx for a baseball game, I decided once and for all that Yankee Fan is a pathetic creature to be pitied, not some worshipful entity to be revered by the rest of us paeons.

(Quick disclaimer: As a die-hard Boston sports fan, it pained me greatly to write this next section.)  In many ways, the Yankees franchise represents the epitome of achievement in sport.  Except for the Rick Rhoden-Mike Pagliarulo years of the 1980’s and early 1990’s, the Yankees have been a dominant franchise in the American league since 1920.  Eighty-four years is an incredibly long time to sustain a dynasty.  Except for possibly a horse-killing dosage of Cialis, it’s unlikely that anything in life could be kept up for that long, including most Communist regimes and Dick Clark’s hair.  The sheer longevity of Yankee dominance is impressive enough that even the most loyal Sox fan (read: this writer) has the utmost respect for the Yankees franchise.  You can’t hate them for winning and for being successful.

Sadly, the same respect and admiration cannot be extended to the fans of the Bombers.

In writing this, I do not mean to revile all Yankee fans.  Many of them, perhaps even two to three dozen, are good-natured fans of baseball who love their team and value the experience of the sport.  Some of them might even be able to read this column, though that might be over-extending the benefit of the doubt.

And I do not mean to attack individual Yankee fans in a personal manner, either.  I am writing about a stereotype, one that may not exist in any one person in the exact manner in which I describe it, but one which has enough overall truth to warrant an acceptance of its existence.  

What I, and millions of other fans like me, cannot stand is not the Yankees franchise, the Yankee players themselves (with the probable exceptions of Paul O’Neill and Jorge Posada), or even the individual fans; it is what I refer to as Yankee Attitude.

Yankee Attitude (or “Y.A.”) is a state of mind that comes from a lifetime of rooting (or saying you root for) the winning team.  It is exactly the same attitude that one would have if, for example, they rooted for the Harlem Globetrotters, U.S. Steel, the Democrats in Massachusetts, or Wal-Mart.  It is a mindset which reaches beyond sport, infecting Yankee Fan’s interaction with others and the very way in which he perceives the world.  And I don’t envy it one bit.

The t-shirt on 153rd St contains the prime case of Yankee Attitude.  “Got Twenty-Six?”  This slogan suggests an intense desire to pound your chest and announce to the world that you are inherently superior to all other beings because the team to which you pledge your allegiance has won 26 World Series titles.  It suggests an unwillingness to engage in even light-hearted, free-spirited debate about sports, arrogantly assuming that all other viewpoints are moot, unless your team somehow has 27 rings.  Like many stereotypical New Yorkers, all cogent points and intelligent debate is to be met with a puzzled look, a disbelieving sneer, and a stubborn insistence that because your team has more titles, your argument automatically wins.

Y.A. is the kind of mindset that propels a group of young men and women (with whom I traveled; you can imagine the horror of that bus ride) from Rhode Island to sing proudly and obnoxiously to Sinatra’s “New York, New York” while leaving the ballpark after a 10-3 Yankee win over the Devil Rays.  Last I checked, the Ocean State is planted firmly in New England, not within a 100-mile radius of Manhattan.  It was as if they were touting the virtues of their home state, forgetting (due to their Y.A.) that they are actually singing about some faraway land a three-hour bus ride from their homes.  One wonders if they would sing “Rhode Island’s It For Me” with the same fervor.  (Side note: First stanza, “I’ve been to every state we have, and I think that I’m inclined to say, that Rhody stole my heart; You can keep the forty-nine.”  Nice rhyme scheme.)  

Y.A. is about bandwagoning.  It’s about fans who don’t follow the team on a daily basis and who couldn’t name two players besides Jeter, Posada, Giambi, and A-Rod, yet who still brag about the result of a game and poke fun at friends who follow other teams that don’t wear an “NY” on their cap.  (This is the fan I refer to as the “Since When” fan.  Sunday, for example, the “Since When” fan would have asked, “Since when does Tino Martinez play for Tampa Bay?” or “Since when do people have last names that don’t end in a vowel?”)  Mostly, it’s about fair-weather fans who are lacking some innate security in themselves, so they look for self-assurance in the results of an arbitrary baseball club, as if the status of being a Yankee fan improves their lot in life.

Y.A. is about taunting.  Not the good-natured ribbing and back-and-forth arguments that are such essential aspects of being a true sports fan.  Y.A. isn’t satisfied with merely watching your team win.  To be complete, the other fan must be totally humiliated, his or her face thrown into the mud and then stepped on while you celebrate, all the while doing your best to remind him that you are of course better than he because your team scored more runs than his team.

This may sound (especially to someone who has Y.A.) as a case of a tortured, pathetic Red Sox fan wailing for sympathy with an over-the-top, self-indulgent, Ken Burns-style romanticism.  While partially true (I am a Red Sox fan), such an attitude merely proves my scorn for Yankee Attitude.

I truly do not envy Yankee Fan.  Yankee Attitude causes Yankee Fan to misplace his priorities.  For Yankee Fan, baseball is not about the sport; it is about himself.  For thousands (millions?) of Yankee fans, Sunday’s game against the Devil Rays was not a contest between two major-league baseball teams.  It was a scripted morality play, an allegory with the result of a Yankee victory acting as a validation of each fan’s worth as a human being.  The Yankees won; therefore, I am better than you.  Pound your chest, whoop it up, obnoxiously gloat, walk around with that swagger.  That’s what it means to be a Yankee fan: the birthright of victory, the expectation of greatness, the self-image of a champion.

That is what Yankee Attitude is all about.  Grown men and women, actively thumping their chests, desperately wanting to believe that they are better than everyone else.  Otherwise rational human beings, frantically and insecurely reaching for an insatiable desire to feel better than everyone else, at everyone else’s expense.  Masses of sports fans, rushing to humiliate friends and enemies alike, with arrogant assumptions of superiority and perplexed puzzlement when confronted with any rational debate on any issue.  To them, the issue is simple: “Got Twenty-Six?”  It can never be about the game for them, ever again.  And because of that, Yankee Fan misses out.  They miss out on a genuine experience of sports because they can only arrogantly see themselves and their egos, never the bigger picture of athletic competition.

Yankee Attitude disguises loyalty as a sad self-actualization through a desperate, vicarious identification with a team.  Call me a jealous Sox fan if you want, but given the choice between the pathos of using a baseball team to define my self-worth or suffering through an 86 year title drought… well, we can always hoist the pennant again in 2090.    

By Ryan McGowan    2004