I once attended a roundtable for writers put on by Susan Shapiro, where editors from big-name publications like the New York Times gave advice to how (and what) to pitch first-person articles. Many of the details of the event escape me now, but I do remember a sports editor practically begging the audience not to pitch any stories about how they became baseball fans because of their fathers. That whole Field of Dreams-type of story had been done too many times, apparently.
So this Squawk is not about how my father got me into the Yankees. In fact, it’s the opposite. Here is a shocking Subway Squawkers fact for Father’s Day: my late father was *not* originally a Yankee fan. In fact, he *hated* the Yankees! But when my older brother Patrick, ever the rebel, started rooting for the Bronx Bombers in the late 1960s (you know, when the Mets were taking over New York), my dad started rooting for the Yankees.
That says a little something about the kind of man he was. He chose an interest in a team he didn’t like because of his son’s extreme interest in the team. That’s amazing to me, when I look back on it. And it was not a personality trait that was really passed on to me. Heck, as I noted in a Squawk this winter, it was like pulling teeth for me to decide to watch Star Wars again! Granted, my dad didn’t really have a team he rooted for first instead, but still.
This trend of his newfound baseball fandom continued when I became a Yankee fan. My dad took us to the 1978 World Series ticker tape parade and got me out of Catholic school at St. Clare’s for the day to do it. When he showed up that morning to the school to surprise us and take us to New York, Sister Clare, the school’s principal, agreed, but said “Don’t let it happen again.” It didn’t happen again. In fact, the Yankees didn’t win another World Series for another 18 years! It took Joe Torre and his nun sister to lift that “curse” of sorts on the Yanks.
My father also got us tickets to the 1981 playoffs (Yankees vs. Oakland) and Game 2 of the World Series (Yankees vs. Dodgers). We were very excited after Game 2, thinking that the Yankees had the World Series in the bag. Unfortunately, it was the opposite of the New York/Los Angeles 1978 matchup, with the Dodgers winning the next four games after losing the first two. That would be the last playoff win the Yankees would have until 1996.
Going to baseball games (we went to a lot of them together, including on a Sunday home plan when I was 17) was one of the few things I got to do with my father. That’s because when we were growing up, my dad was mostly working. Not just as a police officer, but at all sorts of part-time jobs, from grocery store security to being a limo driver, pallbearer, and usher at several of the local funeral homes.
My mother was a stay-at-home parent, and there were four kids at home, all of whom attended Catholic school. So my dad was always looking for a way to make a little extra money. When my brother Patrick gave the eulogy at our father’s funeral (at St. Clare’s, of course) in 2007, he poignantly described all of these jobs, saying, “I sometimes wonder if he ever slept at all during the years” of our childhoods. And I think I’m exhausted from marathon training!
My dad lived until he was 86 — a good long life until the last few years of it. So when I know so many people who lost their dads at a young age, or who didn’t have fathers, or who had problematic relations with their fathers, I know I have nothing to complain about. Yet I do wish my father could have been alive and aware to see two things in my life, though: my writing Subway Squawkers, and my getting into running. He would have been my biggest fan in both endeavors.
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