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The Importance of Hating New York Teams

By Hugo LindgrenPosted Tuesday, July 11, 2000, at 3:00 AM ET

I Hate NY graphic Ever since Major League Soccer started up four years ago, it's been said that the league's inability to draw a national audience—or much of an audience at all—is due, in part, to the misfortunes of the New York club, which is known, pointlessly, as the MetroStars. The MLS founding fathers were very clear about the importance of fielding a winning team in the nation's media capital. Utilizing its unusual power to control the rosters of every team, MLS awarded the finest American player at that time, midfielder Tab Ramos, to New York. If they'd looked into Ramos' colorful medical history—he once fractured his skull in a World Cup game and has endured countless knee and leg ailments—they'd have known that the talented but fragile playmaker was not exactly a solid bet to carry a team. And, indeed, he has barely been fit enough to carry himself, sitting out most of last season with a pulled hamstring, and the one before that with something else, etc. At various points, famous reinforcements have been brought in. Two years ago, the league arranged for the MetroStars to acquire pro soccer's closest approximation of Dennis Rodman—a painfully slow but flamboyant fullback named Alexi Lalas—but he turned out to be a dud, too. As the New York franchise floundered, so did the league, and in the eyes of many soccer boosters, this was no mere coincidence.

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Major League Soccer has a new problem this season: Despite the fact that yet another high-profile acquisition has tanked on them, the MetroStars are winning. Attendance around the league, meanwhile, is sinking like a rock. In the MetroStars last home game, a smartly played victory over Dallas, about 9,000 fans rattled around Giants Stadium.

It would appear, then, that this notion that a winning New York team is essential to the popularity of a professional sport is false. After all, 20 years ago, the old New York Cosmos bought up huge international stars and filled stadiums with screaming fans and couldn't save their doomed league, either. But in other sports, the theory does stand up, albeit in modified form.

Consider the NBA. In 1985, Commissioner David Stern was just starting to get the league's superstar machinery up and running when the Knicks, somewhat shockingly, defied the odds and won the draft lottery, allowing them to select Georgetown University center Patrick Ewing. At the time, there was much scuttlebutt that the fix was in—the health of the league, it was said, depended on a strong team in New York, and so the lottery was rigged to give the Knicks the marquee player.

Few people have ever given this conspiracy theory much credence, but one can only marvel at how well it has all worked out for the NBA. Not because the Knicks went on to be glorious champions—we all know that never happened—but that by landing Ewing, the Knicks essentially guaranteed themselves a decade of hard-fought near greatness. Ewing has occasionally been described as the worst of his generation of NBA superstars, which is a kinder assessment than it sounds like, and I think it's quite apt. Blessed with superhuman size, strength, and work ethic, Ewing has, throughout his career, made the Knicks good enough to hate, and that, in turn, has worked wonders for the NBA. Ewing and the Knicks served as the perfect foil for Jordan—a hard-fouling, mean-spirited team that was just the kind of club that Americans wanted to see from New York City. They had to be good, but it was more important that, in the end, they walk off the court humbled and humiliated. Year after year, the Knicks have done just that. They even provided the same service last year to fledgling superstar Tim Duncan. Meanwhile, the NBA has soared.

Baseball is a slightly different story, but it supports the same general principle. While the Yankees rack up championships, baseball prospers. But I think the NBA has found a better formula. Indeed, it's hard to find anyone outside the Bronx who isn't bored stiff by the Yankees' mini-dynasty. It's not just that fans are turned off by Steinbrenner's ability to buy championships. It's that the team doesn't inspire hatred. They're hard-working, efficient, relatively colorless guys. I think that's one of the reasons that the home run derby has become such a pathological obsession over the last couple of seasons. We all know who's actually going to win the World Series, but the home run race … well, that's neck and neck. It's gotten to the point where the niceness of the Yankees is almost bad for baseball. They could use some guys like Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson, or maybe Charles Oakley, to get people's blood boiling again.

So, for that matter, could the MetroStars.

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Hugo Lindgren is a New York City sports fan.

COMMENTS

Reader Response from The Fray:

Growing up in western New York, I had the opportunity to hate many NY Yankee teams. Rochester's Triple-A baseball team is affiliated with the Orioles and I grew up revering guys named Brooks, Grich, Flanagan, Dennis Martinez, and a couple of Ripkens, not Reggie, Murcer, or Catfish. I live in Seattle now, but that hasn't lessened my hate for Yankee teams. The Yankees were able to buy Tino Martinez and Jeff Nelson away from the Mariners. I've hated George Steinbrenner for over 25 years now because, even as a teenager, I could see what he was doing to baseball when he threw money at Catfish Hunter, Ken Holtzman, and Reggie Jackson. There is no reason why the Kansas City Royals should not be as successful as the Chiefs are in football; baseball just does it wrong. A Yankees fan might say, "Hey, he did what he needed to do to bring a championship back to New York, where it belongs." Deep down, though, you know that if the Yankees do anything less than win the World Championship again, you will be bitterly dissappointed. If they do win, in the back of your mind you'll know that it was because baseball lets guys like GS fix the game. And you'll never know the joy that fans in the rest of the country will experience when the fluke happens and the Yankees lose this year. It's a pleasure not unlike that of a guy taking a casino for a stack of bills; the game's rigged against him, but he still wins--ooh, that is the ultimate satisfaction. Think of Ken Griffey Jr's face as the rest of the team piles on him at home plate in '95 after inexplicably coming back from the dead against the Yanks--there's a memory worth a million right there.

--Gorymovie

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So NYC needs to have a successful team for the league to prosper? Your thinking is a little self-indulgent. The majority of the nation and its citizenry are amused by the colorful stories and characters that comprise your good city. I imagine the feeling that New York is some uber tough city with an unmatched "urban jungle" quality that inspires both hatred and envy is an opinnion held only by those who live in New York and never venture outside.

As for soccer, its problems are fairly simple. Most children will be drawn to the sports their parents and friends play with them before they are old enough to join an organized league. This includes tossing the pigskin or baseball with dad or shooting hoops in the driveway. Over the years their interest and understanding of these games grows to the point they can appreciate someone who can play the sport at a level they could never approach. Soccer suffers from both a lack of organized and unorganized availability to the youngest of athletes, and a complexity that makes it hard to appreciate without having played the sport. I can watch Sosa hit a 500-foot tater, or Vince Carter throw down a hammer dunk and be amazed. Somehow a great forwarding pass just isn't as exciting.

--Scott

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Hugo appears to be making a good point about the Yankees needing a player that fans can hate, but seems to have missed the fact that they may already have one. What about Roger Clemens? He's made it pretty plain that, if he stays in the league long enough, he'll eventually kill someone. In addition to Piazza and all the Met faithful hating him, serious Yankees fans hate Clemens because he sucks and because most of us haven't forgotten the Knoblauch/Jeter/Brosius incident from two years ago. Roger seems to be the perfectly thuggish, dangerously egomaniacal whack-job that Hugo says people are looking for.

--Joe Schlabotnik

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(7/12)

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