My seats, second row, section 120: waiting for me now in eternity . . .


Beyond the wrecking ball

ESPN interviewed me for a documentary on the Stadium Friday. I'm pretty sure I was my usual incoherent self, so there's no danger of anything I said actually being used. But the interview did make me think about the Stadium and its last days before fading into the great maul of remembered and disremembered history.

I'm talking about Yankee Stadium, of course. If you grew up in New York, even if you're not a Yankee fan, that's what "Stadium" means.

I resisted all the forced and for-sale nostalgia crap this season, turned off by the forced hype that seemed designed more to make money than generate memories. If the people who own the Yankees really cared about the Stadium itself, they would have renovated the place; instead, tearing it down became just one more opportunity to separate fans, semi-fans, and the merely curious from their money.

But I have come to understand and appreciate the real nostalgia for the place, the memories and emotion that transcend the dollar signs. All the fans talk about the players they've seen there, the Mantles and Mattinglys and Jeters, but the real nostalgia is for the people they've been there with, the fathers and sons and brothers, the wives and lovers, the friends they've gotten drunk with and the strangers they shared a bond with in the stands.

Like my dad, who bought me so many peanuts the first time we went to a game that to this day I don't eat them any more...

My uncle, a Bronx kid who showed me all, or almost all, the joints still standing that he used to frequent before, after, and during the games. ("Ten percent of what was here once. But this place was good. And over there . . .")

Like Kit, Luce, and Melf, the best friends a derelict 13-year-old could ever have ...

The Blaze Brothers, who walked with me through East Harlem to get there ...

Smith, the Diehard, screaming at people leaving in the 7th, knowing the Yanks would come back seven runs down. (They did.) ...

Ford, who never met a beer curfew he couldn't get around ...

Jerome, who maybe can punch out a cop and an EMT on a bad day, but won't brave the sushi on a good one ...

Fred, a Mets fan who found the Dark Side impossible to resist ...

And on and on. My own history with the Stadium is somewhat checkered. I didn't tell ESPN that I'd been kicked out one and a half times for intense and earnest philosophical discussions with members of the Red Sux Nation. (One of those times is only a half because really, honestly, in my heart, I was trying to be a peacemaker. Just sometimes you have to be forceful about it.)

I also neglected to mentioned the time the piece of railroad track fell off the el and missed me by six or eight inches. (Fortunately, NYPD was right on it, surrounding the wayward iron plate so it couldn't get away.)

Or how easy it used to be to sneak beer in, or bribe an usher for a better seat. Or how old I was before I stopped getting hoarse by the second inning.

Some of these things - the fights especially - happened several lifetimes ago. Going to the Stadium was much different then, not least of all because you could walk up on game day and buy good seats from the little blue booths. But I've changed a bit myself.

I'm sure the new ballpark will be fun, and when it is replaced eighty years from now people will wax poetic about what a great place it was to see a game. But that glint in their eyes won't really be about the park; it'll be about the people they went there with, and the person they were when they did.

Thanks for being there, friends. And thank you, Yankee Stadium. You'll stand forever in our hearts.

And by the way - I ate the sushi, and lived to tell about it.

* - Why me? Dunno - I think they confused me with Studs Terkel. Musta been the stogie.