Let’s face it, 2013 kicked you in the teeth. It kneed you in the solar plexus. It had you on the ground in a sleeper hold, got a few rabbit punches in, a few kidney punches, kept daring you to tap out, kept taunting you to keep caring.
It wasn’t just the losing, either, and it wasn’t just the hopelessness. When you added all of it up, the relentless tide of losing day to day and season to season, there was an element of joylessness that seeped through, too.
And that’s when you start to question all of the hours you devote to these games, and these teams, right?
If it isn’t fun, what’s the point?
That’s why, as we start fresh this New Year’s, as we get as close to a mulligan as the law allows, there are two images that we would be wise to keep close to us as we start this cycle all over again, one from a couple of months ago, one from just a couple of days ago.
Together, they allow us to remember that for all the times we wonder if the athletes and coaches to whom so many full measures of devotion are given truly care as much as we do — even care a fraction as much as we do — there really are moments when we see there is a human soul behind these steely faces.
Joe Girardi and Rex Ryan couldn’t be further apart on the spectrum of coaching personalities on so many levels. Their paths crossed, rather famously, once, in Ryan’s first season, when Girardi visited Florham Park and gave Mark Sanchez a lesson in how to properly hook slide. Otherwise … well, it’s hard to imagine two divergent men, two more separate approaches.
Yet on the evening of Sept. 26, Girardi allowed a most human emotion to wash across him, for 50,000 people in person — and anyone else watching on television — to see. And late in the afternoon of Dec. 29, behind the closed doors of the Jets locker room in Miami, in very different circumstances, so did Ryan.
Neither of these things will guarantee anything tangible on the field in 2014, understood. Neither will make a real difference in what the Yankees or the Jets — or any of the other seven teams for whom 2013 was such a slog — are able to do in 2014, we can acknowledge that right at the start.
But in the last year, we’ve too often seen what happens when the disconnect between players and coaches becomes something beyond the annoyances of daily contact, yielding something poisonous instead.
We saw the Rangers all but point John Tortorella to the gangplank even as they were competing in the playoffs. The Nets, the doyennes of dysfunction, mutinied against two coaches and are well on the way to exiling a third. The look on Terry Collins’ face two or three times a week relayed how often the Mets seemed to tune him out last year. Even Tom Coughlin’s usually reliable tricks seemed a little dusty this year.
And yet there was Girardi, engineering one of the great moments you’ll ever see, sending Derek Jeter and Andy Pettitte out to get Mariano Rivera for the last time, and unabashedly, unashamedly weeping at the moment.
Girardi’s reputation is as a numbers-driven autocrat, corporate and efficient, stoic to a fault. We saw a crack of the flip side when he flipped out in Boston a few weeks before that after Ryan Dempster plunked Alex Rodriguez, when he went all Joe Pesci on home plate umpire Brian O’Nora, all but asking, “Do I amuse you?”
The Rivera moment, though, was Girardi’s finest hour. “He made my job fun,” he said afterward. “He made my job easy. And he made all of our lives better.”
The moment Woody Johnson announced Rex’ return to the team last Sunday was a different level of humanity. Forget that Ryan knew what was coming — and, if you want to really be cynical, that he almost certainly had known for some time, even when he’d hinted “word on the street” was he was getting whacked a week earlier.
The instant his players got the news, the spontaneous joy, the roar, the backslapping, the bearhugs … that’s hard to ignore. Now, in more sober moments, even Jets fans who like Ryan would admit that it would be far more agreeable to have players who win 11 and 12 games a year as opposed to players who so clearly adore their coach.
Nevertheless, it was a real moment, a genuine moment, same as Girardi’s moment was, and at a time when there is too little joy attached to our games, they are a couple of beacons that allow us to believe even if 2014 doesn’t bring as much winning as we’d like, at least we can feel good about caring as much as we do. Still. Even after the year we’ve just endured.
Because they care, too, as it turns out.