By Jason Keidel
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Ignore local allegiances for a moment. Forget my Fan Guy monologues and my virulent hatred of the Knickerbockers.
Let’s look at the sports world through a five-borough prism. For better or worse, we are New Yorkers, proud of our heritage and big-city sensibilities. We can hate and hug each other over sports because we have the shared, singular arrogance that we are from the best city in the nation, on the planet, in the galaxy.
But beyond our native hubris, do we have absolutely anything to be proud of? Do we have any hardihood on the hardwood, diamond or gridiron?
We have the Jets, who just hired a head coach. We have the Giants, who almost fired theirs. We have the Yankees, who are a .500 team on paper. We have the Mets, who have been so bad for so long we can only tepidly project a solid season from their blossoming rotation. They should be good, but they have often broken the Big Apple’s heart when the city gets geared up for a resurgence or even a fun run to the Fall Classic. (Yadier Molina, anyone?)
The Mets have a 1984 feel to them, with all kinds of youth, talent and temerity on their starting staff. But they are run by an owner who has never won anything, a GM who hasn’t won since 1989 and a manager who’s hovered around .500 his entire career. No one disputes Sandy Alderson’s intelligence — just his competence. For the first time in a long time, he and the Mets have a great chance to bogart the bold ink from the Bronx Bombers. But even the most jaded Mets fan meets this season with one eye open, despite the club’s seemingly fertile future.
We have the Knicks, perhaps the worst team in NBA history, their recent win over the equally wretched 76ers notwithstanding. We have the Brooklyn Nets, NBA gypsies who started on Long Island and then toiled in the middle of the Meadowlands for three decades, thrashing about in the North Jersey swamp, barely 5,000 fans snoozing through their soporific home games.
As much as WFAN host Mike Francesa and I love to tweak Jets fans, as much as Joe Evan cherish chiding Yankees fans and as much as Craig Carton mocks Brook Lopez, bad sports teams are bad for business. You don’t watch the games and hence you won’t call WFAN to complain or laud your beloved, local club. Then you don’t read the columns from media blowhards like yours truly. There’s a palpable malaise among New Yorkers right now, and rightfully so.
Sure, the Rangers reached the Stanley Cup Final last year, and it looks like the Islanders are elbowing their way to NHL eminence. But even at its best, hockey is a fringe sport, relegated to the back alleys of the sports section and buried in the three-digit netherworld of cable channels. That’s not my brand of elitism. I can relate. My beloved sport, boxing, also dwells in the publicity and ratings graveyard, nestled nicely between horse racing and high school wrestling.
We’re blasting the New England Patriots for their latest “Gate,” reportedly deflating footballs to give them an acute competitive nod. But perhaps there’s a muted envy behind our hatred. While I’d rather live in Kabul than Boston, I’d trade our teams in a second. The Sox have clearly leapfrogged the Yankees in the standings, in recent World Series rings and in playoff expectations.
The Yankees’ hypnotic hold over the Red Sox, the curse we so celebrated, is dead. Boston is no longer afraid of us. Nor is the rest of baseball. Because of their colossal cable network, epic war chest and platinum ticket prices, the Yanks can always buy some muted form of contention, even if the needle hovers around 85 wins for a while.
Being rich generally avoids being bad. Only at their abject worst — chirping over King George’s suspension, reeling over their failed spending splurges of the ’80s that landed them a forest of epic lumber but no golden arms — did the Yankees finally turn their fortunes around, like flora growing back after a wildfire.
So the Red Sox have a far more fertile future than the Yanks. The Pats have been to six Super Bowls since Tom Brady started under center, toying with the Jets in the process. If that weren’t enough, there’s the irony that the Jets contributed greatly to his greatness.
You may recall that Drew Bledsoe was blasted by Mo Lewis. He suffered a collapsed lung and got Brady the gig. Meanwhile, as Francesa has pointed out during his Super Bowl trivia orgy, the Jets have the most playoff wins since the merger sans a Super Bowl appearance.
Sure, the Giants delightfully ruined the Pats’ perfect season and beat them again four years later, nixing any chance that the Belichick/Brady duet will ever trump Noll/Bradshaw or Montana/Walsh as the front face on the Mt. Rushmore of HC/QB combos. But unlike Big Blue, the Patriots find their way back to the Super Bowl without a precipitous dip in performance. The Giants need a few years of apathy before the next apotheosis.
Gang Green loves going green with head coaches, sure to recycle every few years. As Joe Evan asserted after Todd Bowles’ first presser as head coach of the Jets, new Jets head coaches often dart out to stellar starts. The last three made the playoffs in their maiden campaigns. Even Al Groh went 9-7 his first season. So you don’t know whether to wish Bowles good or rotten luck right away, considering their curious past.
The Giants are a mess. They have tanked before, but we got used to them surging for a season. Now they have a growing bottleneck of years since their last inspired run to the Super Bowl. Eli Manning is not getting younger, he doesn’t have a robust running game and the team’s defense is decaying. The unit’s best player, Jason Pierre-Paul, has hinted that he might bolt for free-agency dollars. Tom Coughlin is on his last legs. Despite his dedication, he’s perilously close to 70, a line you usually cross on the quick path to retirement. Indeed, perhaps the only reason he’s here is the rocketing rise of Odell Beckham, Jr. Heck, even our two NYC teams really play in NJ.
The Nets took a shot at, well, something last year. They signed Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett, hoping to carbon copy the fairy tale in Boston when the duo teamed up with Ray Allen. But they forgot that all involved were six years younger in Boston.
Their past is morbid and their future is messy. Pierce bolted to Washington and is loving D.C., with the Wizards’ revival standing in stark contrast to the Nets’ ineptitude. Garnett is an injury-addled geriatric and the team looks lost. For the record, the Nets haven’t won a title since the ’70s. And even that was in the ABA, while Dr. J’s epic Afro soared over local rims. The Nets have not won a ring since joining the NBA.
We used to enjoy St. John’s. But they long ago plunged down the rungs of relevance, vanishing along with Lou Carnesecca’s puke-colored sweaters. The only pro sport that consistently prospers inside MSG is the sweet science, and there’s no local fervor or flavor to that, except when Miguel Cotto fights and our city’s Puerto Rican pride soars for a few rounds.
Maybe we haven’t suffered the biblical snowstorms we had last year, when a conga line of white blobs on the weatherman’s screen seemed to materialize every week. But it’s been arctic cold in Gotham. And expect it to remain frigid for a while, even when the summer and the Boys of Summer fly up from Florida this spring.
It kills this writer to write this. But it’s better to be a Bostonian right now.
Follow Jason on Twitter @JasonKeidel.
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