Tag Archives: pointless nostalgia

Baseball, Pointless Nostalgia

My Best Laid Plans

redfoley.jpgAs a kid, I didn’t go to too many baseball games. My family lived a little too far away from the city and had just enough money to not starve, so games involved too large an investment of time and capital. We’d make it out to Shea maybe once a year, inevitably sitting in some of the stadium’s worst seats, way up at the highest reaches of the upper deck. The players looked like pinstriped ants, but I didn’t care. The experience was still special and amazing. I didn’t dream of going any more often, because that seemed so impossible to me

Whenever we went, I’d somehow scrape together enough cash to buy a program and score the game. No one taught me how to do it. I’d learned from Red Foley’s Best Baseball Book Ever, which my grampa gave me one birthday. Once upon a time, Red was the official scorer for the Mets and Yankees. I found the book really interesting, even if Red was unable to get MLB licensing, and all the stickers had bootleg team “logos”.

The last game I went to for a very long time came the day after opening day, 1993. My mom, two brothers, and grampa snuck in chicken cutlet sandwiches and sodas to avoid crushing concession prices. It would be a horrible year for the Mets–The Worst Team Money Could Buy–but we didn’t know that yet. It was also the second game ever played by the Colorado Rockies. They were shut out the day before, so I got to see the first ever Rockie run, home run, and RBI when Dante Bichette went deep against Bret Saberhagen in the seventh. I still was young and dumb enough to consider this Witnessing History. The Mets won anyway, 6-1.

Shea gave away Opening Day Weekend pins with little Mets and Rockies hats on them. I considered it a precious thing and put it with all my other precious things, in the top drawer of my dresser. It stayed there, untouched, forever. Years later, when my grandparents were both gone and I was cleaning out grampa’s dresser, I found the same pin, nestled against watches and retirement gifts.

Continue reading My Best Laid Plans →

NYC, Pointless Nostalgia

Terror at Minus-50 Feet

This past weekend, we decided to venture into Manhattan, which was mistake number 1. Thanks to Bloomberg, subway service on Saturdays has become twisted Kafka-esque nightmare, with a smell to match. Trying to make our way to the upper west side, we changed routes several times, wasting an insane amount of time just trying to find a train that moved. It felt a lot longer than it really was, because we had The Baby in tow, and we began to acquire a child’s sense of the interminable passage of time by osmosis.

After a few geological epochs had passed, we finally got in a functional C train. Someone on that train asked us how they could hook back up with the 3 train, which was not running between 96th Street and Forever. Thanks to an investigation, this woman had heard. She was right, but “investigation” was an extreme understatement.

The investigation in question was to catch Maksim Gelman, a maniac who’d spent the previous 28 hours stabbing people across Brooklyn, killing four and wounding several others in a drug-and-rage-fueled rampage. I didn’t learn any of this until Sunday. I didn’t even know about Gelman’s one-man terrorist campaign before we left; if I had, I probably would’ve stayed home. We had even contemplated taking the 1-2-3 to our destination, the train where Gelman stabbed one last victim before being apprehended.

Aside from being one of those horrifying incidents that reminds you there are monsters in the world, Gelman’s exploits were reminiscent of those I saw on the news every night as a kid, back when senseless murders were as common in NYC as hot dog carts.
It seemed that each evening would bring some new horror on the city streets, be it a copycat Zodiac Killer or a model who was slashed in the face when she rejected her landlord’s advances. This why a subway vigilante like Bernard Goetz was elevated to the level of folk hero by some people, even though he was just a weird little creep. And if it wasn’t some unearthly horror, it was some everyday item turned deadly, like when Tylenol was suddenly filled with cyanide.

This was the landscape of my mind as a kid. This is why, whenever someone says “the 80s were awesome,” I want to karate chop them in the throat.

Football, Pointless Nostalgia

Baby’s First Super Bowl

I wrote a variation on this tale years ago at MSN Sports Filter. But since that site was taken away from us all BY THE MAN, please enjoy this loving rehash.

I didn’t grow up in a football house. My dad didn’t really care about sports, and my mom was a baseball fan with minimal interest in other games. I spent a criminally long period of my young life not knowing anything about football. Before the age of 7 or so, I’d seen it played exactly once in my life, when a neighbor gave us tickets to go see an Army game at West Point. I enjoyed the spectacle and the energy of the crowd, but I hadn’t the slightest idea what I was watching. It seemed like something from another universe.

I remember going to a friend’s birthday party as a kid. I was probably 8 years old. He suggested a game of backyard football, and I panicked, because I had literally never played the game before. I did what my brain interpreted as Football Moves, which meant running insane routes in all directions, without any regard for the line of scrimmage or what endzone I was supposed to run toward.

Another kid screamed at me WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?! DON’T YOU KNOW THE RULES?! No, I didn’t, not in the slightest. So I leaned on humor and spent the rest of the afternoon doing stupid stuff, pretending I was just goofing around, when in fact faking was not necessary.

Another embarrassing fact of my feckless youth: I was poor. Let’s amend that: I was suburban poor, which is very different from urban poor or rural poor. Growing up, we had a house and enough to eat. We just didn’t have a lot of Stuff, and new clothes ranked among the many subsets of Stuff. A good 75 percent of my wardrobe was inherited from my two older cousins, who were seven and five years older than me.

Not that this mattered to Little Kid Me. I had clothes that fit and didn’t have holes in them, and that was good enough for me. It only strikes me as a little sad now when I look back on old photos and wonder, “Why am I dressed like Greg Brady?”

So I knew nothing about football and I had no new clothes. That’s the setup. Got it? Good.

The first Super Bowl I have any conscious memory of was Super Bowl XX. That was because it involved the Chicago Bears, who had become a full-blown multimedia juggernaut. “The Super Bowl Shuffle” was unironically enjoyed by millions of Americans who did not yet know that Zubaz and headbands were hilarious. Jim McMahon became a household name and a symbol of rebellion and upheaval because, in the staid world of the NFL, his slightly spiky hair might as well have been assless chaps.

The Super Bowl was going to be such an event that my teacher, a lady of a certain age who usually had no use for sports, decided to let all her kids draw pennants for the impending Big Game on behalf of the team they wanted to win. Naturally, the entire class chose the Bears because everybody loved the Bears. To say you didn’t like the Bears would’ve branded you a weirdo, as surely as if you’d said you weren’t too keen on Ronald Reagan or Rambo.

oldpatriotslogo.jpgAgain, I knew absolutely nothing about football. I couldn’t have picked Refrigerator Perry out of a lineup filled with vegans. (I might have been able to if he’d been turned into a G.I. Joe figure, but that had yet to happen.) The older cousins who supplied my wardrobe lived in Connecticut, and they bequeathed me a red Patriots sweatshirt that I liked to wear. It had a very large old-school Pat the Patriot logo on it, and it was one of the few items of clothing I had that I truly loved.

I knew the Patriots were a football team and this was their mascot. My love of the sweatshirt had nothing to do with that. I loved this sweatshirt because I loved reading about history, and the patriot figure invoked the American revolution. Seriously.

So in tribute to the cousins responsible for my hand-me-downs, and my favorite sweatshirt, and my love of history, I opted to dedicate a pennant to the underdog Patriots, the Bears’ sacrificial lamb opponent in The Big Game. I copied Pat the Patriot from my t-shirt, embellished it with a few football-y things like goalposts (because I had no idea who played for New England), and handed it in.

My pennant was not well received. My teacher supported my right to free speech, but the other kids were less forgiving. I was soon treated to a plethora of arguments, some more nuanced than others, about why I was insane to root for the Patriots. 

Some kids quoted chapter and verse about how good the Bears were, citing stats and players who were awesome. Others simply said THEY’RE GONNA GET DESTROYYYYYYED. (Only kids can truly emphasize the letter Y.) I could counter with nothing, because again, I didn’t know anything about football to begin with.

But as the Super Bowl neared, I felt more and more defiant. Even as a kid, I was a contrarian. In kindergarten, I picked orange as my favorite color because no one else had picked it. That wasn’t why I went with the Patriots, but that became why I stayed with them.

That was how I demanded that our family watch the Super Bowl, which otherwise would have gone untuned-to in our household. I was gonna root for New England with all my might. I was gonna will them to win and shock all the loudmouths in my class. Boy, were they gonna eat crow when I gave it to them on Monday! And hey, look at that, they scored a kick-goal like a minute into the game! This is gonna be sweet!

Of course, it was all downhill for New England after that. Before halftime rolled around, I realized two things: 1) the Patriots were not going to win, and 2) I still didn’t like football. Guys hit each other, then stop. Hit, stop, hit, stop. Everyone talked about how boring baseball was but this dumb game never got started! And they hardly use their feet at all, so why call it football? Stupid game.

The next day, other kids got in my face, even though I had never trash talked at all (mostly because I was unable to). Their words shouldn’t have bothered me, because I didn’t really give a shit about the Patriots, or football. But I was a kid, so they did. Rooting for a lost cause didn’t feel noble. It just felt like losing.

The Patriots sweatshirt was quietly retired. I never wore it again. The next year, the Giants went to the Super Bowl and I found it a lot easier to get swept up in the local fervor. This time, I drew pictures of Giants helmets and Phil Simms jerseys. I’d learned my lesson.