The Fat Cats Win Again: The Death of Yankee Stadium and the End of Hope

Another nail has been driven into the coffin of sporting tradition by a world that no longer views professional sports as a pastime or a game with teams that are no longer representative of communities and players who no longer have too many bonds that tie them to the fans that pay to watch them. The commercialisation of sport continues with little regard for its history, its traditions, its monuments or its meaning. The only issue of any import is the bottom line. Even winning is secondary to turning a profit. Even winning and profits aren’t enough to protect history.

Yankee Stadium, the most famous and historical of all sporting buildings, no longer exists. Not in the sense that it is an active ballpark where fans of the fabled New York Yankees traverse to watch their Bombers play and more often than not win. And soon it won’t exist at all with the hallowed arena set to be demolished the same way they demolished Ebbets Field after Walter O’Malley took the Dodgers out of Brooklyn and the same way they demolished the Polo Grounds where so many Giants fans paid homage to their team. Little regard was paid to the Legends of Flatbush, those fantastic ballplayers like Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese, the Boys of Summer and the fans who bled Dodger blue, when they put the wrecking ball into Ebbets Field and erected a set of apartments, consigning one of baseball’s great shrines to hazy memory and fading photographs. No heed was paid to the legend of Christy Mathewson and Mel Ott and John McGraw and Casey Stengel and Willie Mays and Hoyt Wilhelm and The Shot Heard Around the World and The Catch or to the fans whose lives were defined by the events at the Polo Grounds when they tore the stadium down and erected a housing project in its place.

The same lack of consideration for sporting history, for tradition, for the impact a single building can have on a person’s life is being shown with the tearing down of Yankee Stadium. Churchill once said “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” To New Yorkers and baseball fanatics and sports fans around the globe, Yankee Stadium has contributed to our formation as not only sports lovers but people.

The dastardly fate of destruction awaits Yankee Stadium. After eighty-five historical years that began with The Babe’s christening of the stadium with a called shot that just kept on going, greed and an voracious arrogance has killed it. A new fangled monstrosity with no soul, an art gallery, a steakhouse and a martini bar to go along with an increased number of luxury boxes for “event-goers” will be the new home of those New York Yankees while the site of the Yankee Stadium we all know will be cleared for parklands that will inevitably have some calamitous apartment structure built upon it as those who remember the beauty of the old ballpark die off and with them, the importance of the old ground. Tears will be shed by the faithful, as they were for Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds, but tears are not a particularly valuable currency to those with political clout and a fistful of dollars. Yankee Stadium has been consigned to history and men will one day traverse to some sad decay-ridden building in an angry and forgotten neighbourhood and attempt to conjure the images of the great deeds and great moments of yesterday.

They will stand among crumbling buildings in a decomposing neighbourhood invoking the images of The Babe and Joltin’ Joe and The Mick and Yogi and Reggie and Lou and Mr. October. They will think of the day the Babe hit his 60th long ball of the season and Don Larsen’s perfect game in the ’56 series and Roger Maris breaking The Babe’s single season home run record. They will picture The Mick’s shot to the façade and Reggie’s three homer game in the ’77 series and George Brett’s craziness after the Pine Tar Incident. They will try with all their might to recall one-handed pitcher Jim Abbott’s no-hitter and Jeffrey Maier (the reverse Bartman) “saving” game one of the ’96 ALCS and the consecutive walk-offs by Jeter and Brosius in the ’01 series. They will imagine Joe Louis downing Max Schmeling in one of the most important heavyweight fights of all time and they will paint their own portrait of the Baltimore Colts defeating the New York Football Giants 23-17 in overtime in 1958, a game labeled “The Game of the Century”, and undoubtedly the most important professional football game ever played. The winds will cry with Lou Gehrig declaring himself the “luckiest man on the face of the earth” in the months before he died and Knute Rockne calling for his Notre Dame team to “win one for the Gipper.” Men will also briefly taste the peanuts and smell the fresh green grass and hear the crack of the bat and recall with fondness or imagine with glee their time in the bleachers talking and watching and absorbing baseball on lazy summer afternoons and tense October nights.

The last time I was at the spiritual home of American sports, the Yankees got blasted by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, then the worst team in baseball. I had taken the D from midtown to the Bronx on what was a burning July afternoon. When I exited on River Avenue, it was made abundantly clear that this was not a place for a white Australian sportswriter on any day the Yankees weren’t scheduled to play at home. That sweltering July afternoon, however, the Yanks were playing and the Bronx was buzzing. We walked among the Jeter number two pinstripes and the Rivera number forty-two tees, bumping and hustling until we found the most trustworthy looking scalper, an overweight mustachioed gentleman named Sal who sold us three seats along the first base line in the right field stands for $60 a pop. It seemed reasonable and besides, we weren’t really in a position of negotiating strength. The game turned out to be a bust- The Moose got smacked around and was done in 4 2/3, the Rays winning 14-4- but the occasion will never be forgotten. It is a strange and wonderful feeling sitting in such history with die-hard New Yorkers talking baseball and drinking tumblers of Coors Light and sucking back Nathan’s Famous hot dogs. Trips to sporting events, particularly run-of-the-mill mundane affairs like a mid-July Rays-Yanks game, are rarely as exhilarating, as meaningful, as acutely reverent.

Of course, that sense of history won’t be felt again anytime soon. Not by me and not by Yankee fans and not by the many who would once have made the pilgrimage to the Bronx to pay homage to one of the most valued American landmarks.

For Australians it may mean very little that a baseball stadium in a far off city has been demolished and with it the living proof of the history made within its bounds. The razing of Yankee Stadium should be, however, taken as a warning of what awaits Australian sport. We are cultural followers and we are already well down the path of commercializing our professional sports, letting the bottom line dictate the fate of our teams and where we watch our sport and even what we are allowed to watch.

The North Sydney Bears and the Fitzroy Lions have both been consigned to history. It is no longer possible to watch Australian Rules football at suburban grounds with character such as Punt Road and Arden Street and Windy Hill and Glenferrie Oval with all games in Melbourne now played at the MCG and the Telstra Dome where the food is tasteless and the beer is pricey. The choice in rugby league is hardly much better with four of the nine Sydney teams playing home games at the insult to the senses known as ANZ Stadium. Grounds like Belmore Sports Ground, Redfern Oval and Henson Park, grounds of our youth, are long gone. It would come as no surprise if all Sydney teams played out of ANZ or the Sydney Football Stadium in two decades time. Our dollar is coveted until it comes time for Grand Final day when the moneyed event-goers are preferred to the regular footy fan. Just ask the plethora of Geelong and Hawthorn fans who won’t be at the MCG this Saturday while the corporate sponsors entertain their guests from the best seats in the house.

Egalitarianism in professional sports, here and abroad, is dead. Commercial interest will always win out over such fanciful notions as history, tradition, meaning, community, atmosphere and equality. We are destined to watch our teams, when we can afford the overpriced tickets that may or may not be available, from mostly empty monstrosities where the atmosphere is non-existent, the feeling of community dead and the innocent sense of history long overtaken by the bitterness of remembering how things once were and how they now are. The fat cats have wrested control of our games from us and we are no hope of winning them back. All we can do is pray for mercy and take the small offerings handed to us.

If Yankee Stadium can be demolished, nothing is safe. There used to be a ballpark there. All that is left now are the memories of the heady days of yore. They are heavy words and sadly, they are words mired in truth.

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