Emperors and Idiots: The Hundred Year Rivalry between the Yankees and Red Sox, From the Very Beginning to the End of the Curse - Hardcover

Vaccaro, Mike

 
9780385513548: Emperors and Idiots: The Hundred Year Rivalry between the Yankees and Red Sox, From the Very Beginning to the End of the Curse
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385513542 ISBN 13: 9780385513548
Verlag: Doubleday, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

A veteran sports columnist journeys inside the contentious rivalry between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox to offer a behind-the-scenes look at the legendary competition between the two teams and their ardent fans, examining the origins and history of the teams and their notorious conflict over nearly a century. 75,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MIKE VACCARO is a senior sports columnist for the New York Post. He has won more than fifty major journalism awards since 1989 and has been cited for distinguished writing by the Associated Press Sports Editors, the New York State Publishers Association, and the Poynter Institute. He lives in New Jersey.

Aus dem Klappentext

The contention between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox goes on and on and on. Even the most casual of baseball watchers was riveted by the battle for the American League pennant in 2003, reacting with either gleeful elation or grim despair as little-known Yankee third baseman Aaron Boone hit a homer in the early-morning hours of an extra-inning game to send New York to yet another World Series and the Red Sox once again packing for a long winter.

Mike Vaccaro covered that game and hundreds of other explosive Yankees-Red Sox confrontations. In DAMN YANKEES, DAMNED SOX, the veteran sports columnist uses the 2003 play-offs as a starting point for a thorough, and thoroughly balanced, journey into the legendary rivalry between the teams. He examines the seeds of the animosity, its most recent manifestations, and everything in between. Did the fierce competition begin with the Red Sox s sale of Babe Ruth in 1919 (widely believed to have triggered the notorious Curse of the Bambino ) or did the sweet ring of East Coast rivalry exist long before? Did it resonate loudest through Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio in their remarkable, head-to-head, record-setting 1941 seasons or at the climax of the October 1978 series, when Bucky Dent hit his famous homer over Fenway Park s Green Monster to ruin another Red Sox season?

No other baseball teams have had the extensive national followings that the Yankees and the Red Sox share. Vaccaro s in-depth, energetic, and incredibly knowledgeable history is bound to be a big, countrywide hit.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

Not Again

I don’t know if I believe in curses, or jinxes, or anything like that. But I’ll tell you what I do believe: I believe in ghosts. And we’ve got some ghosts in this stadium.
–Derek Jeter, October 17, 2003

Every day you sit in front of your locker and ask God, “What the hell is going on?”
–Rick Burleson, September 17, 1978

He’d been asleep for only a second or two, the kind of restless, involuntary slumber that arrives only after you’ve stretched your work-night bedtime way too long. Through much of working-class America, millions of people were fighting a similar battle, not wanting to give in to their eyelids, certain that something unforgettable would soon fill their television screens. Clocks up and down the East Coast had just clicked to 12:15 A.M. on this morning of October 17, 2003, including the digital Armitron chronometer that dominated the center field scoreboard at Yankee Stadium, right above where the most important numbers were posted: Red Sox 5, Yankees 5, bottom of the eleventh inning, seventh and deciding game of the American League Championship Series.

It was quiet inside the eighty-year-old stadium, a spooky silence having long before seeped into the bleachers and grandstands, where 56,279 had gathered to watch these two old foes play out the final moves of their sweaty chess match. It was a duel that had ground two cities to a halt, reduced millions of fingernails to the quick, even captured the imaginations of otherwise sane citizens who spend their days blissfully unaffected by baseball. This was why so many people in so many parts of the country were trying to blink away their exhaustion as Thursday night bled into Friday morning, as Yankees third baseman Aaron Boone stepped to the plate to face a Boston knuckleball specialist named Tim Wakefield, as all those timepieces ticked over to 12:16.

The exact minute, as it happens, that Bucky Dent fell asleep.

It was the shouting that jarred him back to life.

“What happened?” Marianne Dent yelped.

“Huh?” her husband sputtered.

“Look at the TV! They’re mobbing somebody! The Yankees just won the game! They won the pennant! I think someone hit a home run!”

They were showing replays, and Dent, wide awake now inside his Boynton Beach, Florida, home, watched Wakefield deliver a flat, fat knuckleball, watched Boone all but jump out of his spikes as he dove into the pitch, watched the camera follow the baseball as it sketched a beautiful white path against the black Bronx sky, watched it settle into the lower left-field stands, watched Wakefield march solemnly off the mound, watched Boone jump onto home plate with both feet, watched as the crowd, suddenly liberated from nearly four hours of unbearable tension, exploded in a giddy rush of joy.
“Look at you,” Marianne Dent said. “You’re beaming.”

It was more than that, of course. Dent’s eyes remained locked on the TV, but the moment he saw it all unfold, his soul had immediately drifted....

Suddenly, he was rounding first base on another October day, exactly twenty-five years and fifteen days before, the last time the Red Sox and Yankees had met under these circumstances, one game for a championship, only then the game was played in the middle of a glorious afternoon, in another grand old ball field called Fenway Park. Dent had greeted Mike Torrez’ fastball with the sweet spot of his borrowed Max 44 bat, and now his eyes were trained on the left fielder, Carl Yastrzemski, who was drifting back toward the left-field wall, only 310 feet from home plate. Nobody ever played that thirty-seven-foot-high wall at Fenway like Yaz, everyone knew that, so Dent waited for a sign as he started chugging into second. Did I really get enough of it?

When Yastrzemski’s knees buckled, Dent knew he had.

He looked up in time to see the ball settle softly against the net behind the wall. He thrust his right fist into the air, clapped his hands together, and floated the final 180 feet of his journey home. A 2—0 Red Sox lead had become a 3—2 Yankees lead with one swing of Dent’s bat, with two outs in the bottom of the seventh inning. The Yankees would win, 5—4. It was October 2, 1978, and Bucky Dent was twenty-six years old, and if you had told him that he would ever feel the same rush that bubbled his bloodstream that day, when he staggered Old Man Yaz’ legs and broke New England’s spirit and fueled the New York Yankees on to their twenty-second world championship, he would never have believed you.

Except that’s exactly how he felt all these years later, inside his bedroom, watching mayhem tumble out of his television.

“You called it earlier, didn’t you?” Marianne asked.

Dent laughed. It was true. Before he’d even washed the champagne from his hair that afternoon a quarter century earlier, Dent acquired an instant appreciation for the link he’d just crafted for himself within the long chain connecting the Yankees and the Red Sox. He quickly embraced the humbling reality that a twelve-year career that included two World Series rings and three trips to the All-Star Game would forever be reduced to and remembered for that singular trip to the plate, one of 4,512 official at-bats he would accrue as a major leaguer. That was fine with him. Dent had been born in Savannah, Georgia, and raised in Florida, but he had rooted for the Yankees as a kid. He knew all about the Yankee mystique before he ever added to it. He believed in the almost mystical way the Red Sox taunt the Yankees, and the Yankees haunt the Red Sox, how they’ve stubbornly refused to exit each other’s shadow from the first time they encountered each other, on May 7, 1903, a 6—2 Boston victory.

Hell, how could he not know?

By 1983, Dent had been traded away to the Texas Rangers, though he still owned a house in Wyckoff, New Jersey, which he rented out during the season. That year, the lease belonged to the man who’d recently been hired as the Yankees’ third-base coach, a baseball lifer named Don Zimmer, the same man who’d been the Red Sox manager on October 2, 1978, and whose professional fate was irreversibly sealed with that one swing of Dent’s bat.

“First time I go in there,” Zimmer recalled years later, during his second tour of duty on the Yankees coaching staff, “I notice a picture on the wall, and guess what? It’s a picture of that son of a bitch hitting that home run. I go into the next room–same thing, another picture. And the next. And the next. Every fucking room. You know what I did? I turned ’em all around. Then I called him up on the phone and I told him I’d turned ’em all around.”

So Dent, having done as much as any one man could to stir the Red Sox—Yankees embers, understood better than anyone that something different was bound to happen in this game, eventually. He had become something of a student of the Red Sox’ tortured history, one whose unholy trinity of infamy involved three separate incidents–the selling of Babe Ruth, the Bucky Dent home run, and the fabled ground ball that leaked through Bill Buckner’s legs in game six of the 1986 World Series–with one notable thing in common.

“As the game is building up,” Dent would say a few months later, “I’m going, ‘OK, who’s going to do something? Who’s got a B in their name–Bernie [Williams] or [Aaron] Boone–to keep the B’s going?’ And then after I dozed off for a second, then woke up, I said,...

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Verlag
Doubleday
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385513542
ISBN 13 
9780385513548
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
364
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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