Yankee Stadium (New York Yankees)
5
To the despair of my sports-loving father, I never had the slightest interest in sports. As a kid, I was compelled to participate in numerous PAL-sponsored activities; baseball (I remember mostly standing in the outfield, gnats buzzing around my ears), basketball, boxing (all it took was one or 2 punches and I was practically kissing the canvas), etc. Perhaps the only sport I didn't have to engage in was football-- I was too skinny (thankfully). Less onerous for me was traveling to sporting events with Dad. My favorite was football games at West Point's Michie Stadium. I didn't enjoy the game...I was never really even sure how the game was played...but I loved the scenic drive up, and I loved the magnificent beauty of the West Point campus and its surroundings on the mountainous banks of the Hudson River. We also drove to Shea Stadium in Queens on occasion, the scenery of which left me pretty cold. The best thing about those trips were the hot dogs and ice cream cups I talked Dad into buying me. We didn't go to Yankee Stadium quite so often...I think they were doing renovation on it during a large part of my childhood, and I'm not sure Dad was a big Yankees fan...but we did go occasionally. On one occasion, Dad got mad at me and my friend John McDonald because we spent the entire game running up and down the stairways. For Dad, watching baseball was serious business. I was impressed, though, by the history of the stadium. While I wasn't interested in sports, per se, I was in some of the larger-than-life personalities that made the game legendary. Babe Ruth, for instance (there used to be the ruins of a restaurant called Donohue's near where I grew up and my father told me that Ruth used to dine there way back when because he was friendly with the owner, who protected his privacy and shielded him from intrusive fans. I remember walking by it as a kid just before they tore it down and you could still see the tables inside with their upturned chairs, all covered with dusty white sheets-- I halfway expected to see Babe's ghost drifting down the hallway, a lady friend hanging off one arm, a schooner of beer upraised in the other). Or Lou Gehrig-- watching his "farewell speech" can still cause me to become teary-eyed (ironically, Babe is buried in the Catholic Gate of Heaven cemetery in Westchester Country, and Lou, a Lutheran, is buried in the non-sectarian Kensico Cemetery across the street). Or Joe DiMaggio. Or Mickey Mantle. Even as a kid uninterested in sports, I could sit in those seats amidst roaring, beer-drinking crowds, and feel the unmistakable presence of those giants. The stadium wasn't located in the best neighborhood (and I'm saying this as someone who grew up around Paterson), and as the Bronx became progressively more dangerous, as more and more buildings burnt down under "suspicious circumstances", we went less and less (I remember one time when we had to park about a mile or more from the stadium and walk through ominously dark, glass-littered streets; while I wasn't a particularly squeamish or timid kid, I looked over my shoulder a lot as we walked, despite the presence of my father). America is a country that doesn't really have a true sense of its own history, or the value of that history, and I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that the venerable old stadium has been deemed obsolete by money-hungry, egomaniacal tyrants and corporate business types. Considering all that we're facing now as a nation and a world, I suppose it's hard to get that worked up over the passing of a sports stadium, but I, of all people, find it sad. Very, very sad.