In An article as timeless and as remarkable as “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” — John Updike writing in The New Yorker about Ted Williams’ final at-bat, Fenway Park, 1960 — there always has been one singular sentence that has stuck with me the most.
Williams, remember, wasn’t exactly given a king’s send off by the Fenway faithful, but rather an intimate goodbye by just more than 10,000 fans. The Sox were long out of the postseason hunt, and in that seminal autumn, most of New England’s attention already had been shifted to the coming Election Day hopes of native son John Kennedy.
This was part of how Updike describes what he saw at the Fens that day:
“The air was soggy, the season was exhausted.”
The season was exhausted.
That’s the one that always gets to me, because if you are a sports fan — if you have lived and died and breathed and bled with your teams through peaks and valleys, through championship parades and Baggie days — you know this feeling all too well.
If you are a Knicks fan, for instance, for every season in your lifetime that has ended with triumph at best and optimism at worst, there have been two that ended the way so many of the seasons of the first decade of the 2000s ended: no playoffs, no hope, no meaningful games, just an endless slog of playing out the string.
If you are a Mets fan, this is the fourth straight September to end with a collection of home games that seem a chore to watch, yet you watch them anyway, and a stunning number of you decide to honor your tickets even if you sometimes wonder why. If you are a Jets fan, and certainly a Giants fan of a certain age, you know what it is to keep watching after Thanksgiving in years that were nouns for 4-12 or 6-10, the helpless and inevitable trudge toward oblivion.
We have all been there, at one time or another, unless you are a Yankees fan still in your teens, unable to remember the early ’90s and games that were played in The Bronx in front of 40,000 empty chairs. Older fans recall the great Red Barber once lost his job thanks to an exhausted season, thanks to a game in September 1966 in which 413 brave souls attended a midweek date, Barber ordering the cameras to scan the swatches of emptiness.
Yankees brass deemed that a magazine spasm of insubordination. To his dying day, Barber thought otherwise.
“The people who were there,” he said, “were every bit a part of the story.”
It’s true, same as the old story about victory having a thousand fathers and defeat being an orphan. At any one time, there have been 200,000 people who insisted they were there for Larsen’s perfect game, for Game 6 in ’86, for the Willis Reed game, for the Jets’ Monday Night Miracle.
How many of those 413 ever claimed to have been where they were? And yet they are the fans who had the latest reason to cheer the various Yankees renaissances that have followed these past 46 years. They have the scars — and maybe the ticket stubs — to show for it.
I salute you. I was at Fan Appreciation Day at Shea in 1979 when the Mets saluted us — both of us — who were there. My first football game? Yale Bowl, 1973, the end of a 2-12 Giants season. And before the Nets abandoned Long Island, I battled loneliness on quite a few nights at the Coliseum.
Doesn’t mean I merit a sporting purple heart. But does mean I understand why you’ll battle the L.I.E. to reach Citi Field next week. Even if you don’t quite understand why.
Whack Back at Vac
Andy Romanic: There’s going to be meaningful games played at Citi Field in September — by the Phillies and the Pirates!
Vac: Here’s a new parlor game for you: Guess the date of the first-ever meaningful Mets game in the stadium’s history. I’ll get the party started: Sept. 17, 2014.
Dominic Galani: The NHL season is in jeopardy and nobody but die-hard hockey fans seem to care. What a shame.
Vac: Is it me, or does the NHL always seem to wait until it is right on the cusp of mainstream popularity before picking these stupid labor fights?
@EvanShaps: Will we ever see another No. 1 serve-and-volley tennis player? Since Pete Sampras and Patrick Rafter there hasn’t been anyone near the top.
@MikeVacc: I hope so. Murray-Djokovic was a wonderful match, but I did find yourself screaming at the TV a lot: Will someone please rush the net once in a while?
Alan Van Ees: I wonder how much of Russell Martin’s troubles stem from the $24 million offer he turned down from the Yankees at the start of the season, figuring he could get Molina money by holding off.
Vac: Well, I would say he’s definitely in line for Molina money. Gustavo Molina.
Vac’s Whacks
The guy in “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” had a less torturous time trying to score than the Mets do at Citi Field.
* There probably are 25 good reasons why the Jets should lose to the Steelers today in Pittsburgh. But if they can find even one good reason to win — and then do — then we really may have ourselves a renaissance in Florham Park.
* I really want to like this new Matthew Perry sit-com. That’s my primary autumn rooting interest at this point.
* Gosh, it sure would be fun if Jay Cutler played here, wouldn’t it?