If you were a sports fan in this town — a real one, a legit one — you knew who Donald “Fuzzy” Cohen was, of course. Chances are you actually knew Fuzzy, too, because if there was a game, any game really, Fuzzy was probably there and impossible to miss: bushy beard, Rangers jersey with all those signatures on it.
“Fuzzy was at the game,” Rich Glanzer, one of thousands of fellow fans who drifted into Fuzzy’s orbit through the years, said of Cohen, who died suddenly last week of a heart attack. “Doesn’t matter which game you’re talking about. He was there. Rangers games, minor league hockey games, Mets games, Yankees games. Everyone knew him.”
I’d only known of him until a night at Fordham’s Rose Hill Gym a few years back. I was there to watch the Rams host St. Bonaventure, and saw him a few rows over. I asked a friend to introduce me.
“I was at the Garden the night Bob Lanier dropped 50 on Purdue, Holiday Festival ’69,” he said by way of introduction, and that made perfect sense, because Fuzzy was at all three Yankees perfect games — Don Larsen, David Wells, David Cone — and was also at Jim Bunning’s perfecto at Shea in ’64, and just about every other game you’d have given your left arm to attend.
He was a sporting fan’s cross between Zelig and Forrest Gump, always visible, always there, always everywhere, whether it was the 1994 Rangers Stanley Cup video or — true story — in the background of the very last scene of the television series “Sex And the City.” You can look it up. Yep. That’s Fuzzy.
“Sports saved my life,” he told me that night at Rose Hill, and that wasn’t just a sports fan talking hyperbole, it was true. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, working as a messenger, he was due to deliver a package to the 96th floor of one of the Towers. He stopped in a nearby park to read a newspaper story about Roger Clemens, his favorite player, who would be trying to win his 20th game that night against the White Sox. That’s when the first plane hit.
Fuzzy was a fan first. If he became well known it was through the sheer persistence of always Being There, not because he wanted to be known, or seen. The Rangers and the Yankees were his teams, but he also trekked to the Meadowlands and the Coliseum and to Shea Stadium to offer appreciations whenever terrific Islanders or Devils or Mets got their due and their Day. He attended all five games of the ’69 Series. He made regular road trips to Baltimore to watch the minor league Skipjacks hockey team.
And he did this all without ever learning to drive, relying on trains and buses and lifts provided by a cavalcade of friends — scouts, referees, fellow true believers.
Back in the day, Fuzzy could also hook you up if he knew you, and knew you couldn’t get a ticket to the Rangers game that night. He had an in with one of the ticket takers, and in exchange for $10 he’d give you a pre-torn ticket stub and access to the proper line at the Garden, where his guy would pretend to tear it up and let you in.
“My job is to get you in,” he’d say. “Once you’re in, the rest is up to you.”
But lest you think he was in it only for the scam: In ’94, by the time the Rangers reached the Cup finals, the price for his service had increased to $40. Glanzer took his mother to Game 1, but in the pregame rush he wound up in the wrong line. It wasn’t Fuzzy’s guy. Soon, mother and son were on the train back to Lynbrook.
Eleven days later, the Rangers played Game 6 in Vancouver, with a chance to win the Cup. Glanzer and his mom wanted to watch the game in a bar by the Garden, in case a celebration broke out that night. Fuzzy was there, of course, and saw them. He’d heard what happened. And handed over the same four $20 bills Glanzer had paid him a week and a half earlier.
“Sometimes,” Glanzer said, “when I lose my faith in humanity, I think of that moment.”
That’s one story. There are thousands just like it. Fuzzy never scored a goal for his Rangers, never turned two for his Yankees. He was just a fan, and people always figured sports honored his life.
In truth, it was the other way around.