Thursday, January 17, 2019

Sustained Excellence

I was doing my usual complaining the other day with some friends, about how dreary and mediocre the city is becoming.

Oh, sure, in the aggregate it's better than ever.  Richer, safer, less corrupt.  Even quieter (Don't think so?  Imagine about 500,000 wagon wheels with iron rims, passing continuously over uneven paving stones.)

And that's no small thing.  I hold zero nostalgia for crime, filth, decay, etc.

But at the same time...

Looks, it' now all millionaires living over empty storefronts.

Does rich mean we can't have style?  Does rich mean we can't have beauty, and cultivation?

Does rich now mean no great buildings, no great restaurants, no great art, dive bars, newspaper columnists, night clubs, music, great plays, and on and on and on?

Used to be, many of those things seemed to come WITH money.  In fact, they seemed like the whole reason for money.

Not so much anymore.

Take the New York Yankees (you knew I was getting there).

Hey, I'm not saying the team was ever run by people who wouldn't cut your throat for an extra doubloon.  But they brought something to it all.

The Yankees were supposed to be about class, right down their classy pinstripes, and their interlocking "NY" (a Tiffany's design), and their "hat-in-the-ring" logo (lifted from Eddie Rickenbacker's flying squadron, no less).

The Yankees were about a ballpark that looked like a cathedral, and players who seemed like gods.  Don Mattingly was actually amazed to learn that Babe Ruth was a real person.  A hundred years from now, some fresh busher from Indiana will think the same thing about Joe DiMaggio, or Mickey Mantle, or maybe Aaron Judge.

And yes, the Yankees were about dollars.  But also about winning.

Well, even that sounds pretty crass, doesn't it?  At least, that's what generations of sportswriters—from here and elsewhere—and hordes of fans from Boston and Chicago and L.A. have tried to make us think.  "Oh, you Yankees fans just like to win all the time!"

Let's drop the malarkey right now.  Yes, we like to win.  All the time.  And so do those other fans, once they get a taste of it.

Even the lovable Mets, back in the early sixties?  A huge percentage of their gate every year was for Giants and Dodgers games.  In other words, people turning out to see their old favorites.  When it came to just the lovable losers...not so much.

Somebody asked me once how I could like this big, terrible, arrogant team.

My answer was:  sustained excellence.

Isn't that how we should measure accomplishment in most endeavors?  Vocationally, I mean.  Sustained excellence.  Building terrific cars, year after year.  Showing up and teaching a great class to your students, year after year.

You can have all your teams with their miracle years.  Anyone can get lucky, particularly nowadays, when everyone makes the playoffs.

No one is lucky for fifty years.  Or a hundred.

Sustained excellence.

I even admired it in teams I didn't like, such as the Boston Celtics, or that I actively despised, such as the Dallas Cowboys.

That's the standard you measure yourself against.  Without it, sports means less and less.  I know, I know, it's what the owners would like for their cartels:  every year a crapshoot of mediocrity.  Every year, everybody wins between, say, 78-82 games.  Hurrah.

Sustained excellence.  Not simply money.  That is—was—the New York Yankees.












8 comments:

  1. I do get where Mattingly was coming from. hearing of their accomplishments when I was a kid, I could not believe that men such as Washington, Lincoln, and Ruth actually existed. their accomplishments were just beyond what I could see as plausible. too other-worldly. How is it possible that such men existed? were they actually human at all? They were like super heroes to me. as I grew older, I retained some of that wonder. I still have my heroes, no matter how cynical and jaded the world can now sometimes seem. I am, after all, a Yankees fan.

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  2. A great piece, Hoss. And I agree with everything you said about the city in general. It's not completely homogenized yet, but it's more like a theme park now than the city it used to be.

    "Sustained excellence" is on a decline in our culture overall. The Yankees were a wonderful holdout. Looks like Hal and Cashman are changing that.

    Sad.

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  3. Agree 100%.

    It's like we're not allowed myth anymore. Ruth the ballplayer would still thrive today but Ruth the Legend could not.

    What I think we are lamenting is the loss of magic and awe in all things. The Yankees embodied it. The old building embodied it. That moment when you emerge from the vomitorium and first see the field...

    Now it's a Vegas hotel and the team that plays there is sadly, only a product.

    Ownership pretends to support the myth to the degree that they can use it to sell things but they don't even bother to acquire the players who buy into what remains of it.

    Harper wants to be a Yankee because he wants to be a part of that myth. He will get his money somewhere but he knows that being a Yankee represents something more.

    If only ownership felt the same way.

    Doug K.


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  4. Thanks, guys.

    And yes, once you dispel the magic, it's hard to ever bring it back.

    I remember visiting the old Boston Garden. It was something. Old, dense, wildly vertiginous. Up in a North End full of elevated rail lines and Benton's Little Italy. Now it's something like the "TD Bank Garden" in the anonymous, homogenous yuppie citadel that Boston has become.

    Same thing with Les Canadiens. I remember watching the hockey games of the week with the Rangers playing up in the Forum. Crazy old barn so filled with cigarette smoke that guys seemed to be skating out of fires. No more.

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  5. Oh and to my point...

    “When he called me two nights ago and told me, he had the sound of happiness in his voice I haven’t heard in a very long time. He could not possibly be happier,” said Ottavino’s father to Zach Braziller. “I’m happy whenever anybody gets what they want, and he really got what he wanted. Playing for the Yankees was worth an awful lot to him. At the end, playing for the Yankees was very important to him.”

    This!

    Doug K.

    ReplyDelete
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  7. One of your best-ever, Horatio - - two words that succintly & accurately sum up why I have rooted for this team since 1955.

    More & more, you seem like a 12 year younger brother to me (and why not, my sister was 12 years older than I) - - I had the very same experience with the Habs - - used to love that team, when they had LaFleur, Robinson, Richard, Dryden, Savard, et al., and Scotty Bowman at the helm. So long gone, now, and nothing like them since.

    You & I even despise the same teams: the Cowpunks, the Celtics, and (at least, in my case), the Patriots...but we recognize sustained excellence, nonetheless (and, in the case of the latter, sustained excellence and CHEATING). Ugh.

    ...and, yes, I, too, loved Boston (the city), years ago (70s & 80s), even though I despised their sports teams.

    This post really brought all of that back, and crystallized it precisely & eloquently. Bravo. LB (No J)

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