Hate it grand?
Cities’ mutual hate at its best in postseason
New York. Boston. The playoffs. It just sounds right. The two cities have a lengthy — and contentious — history in the postseason across several sports.
BOSTON — The fun part has always been the baseball, of course, even in those overheated moments when fists have flown and blood has spilled, when Billy Martin has knocked out Jimmy Piersall cold with a straight right hand under Fenway Park’s grandstand or Pedro Martinez has ushered a 72-year-old coach named Don Zimmer to its turf.
There has always been trash talk. Always.
“We are,” the Boston Globe sniffed in a 1919 editorial, shortly before the hometown team made the worst trade in baseball history, “the capital of many things, baseball chief among them.”
“Second place suits Boston,” Billy Martin huffed in 1977, as the Yankees were extending a hex over the Red Sox to 59 years and counting. “A second-place baseball team for a second-rate town.”
Really, it was inevitable these two great cities would become such eternal rivals. There is proximity, of course: The Empire State Building sits a mere 212 miles from the Prudential Tower. Thousands of New York kids go to college in Boston; thousands of Boston-bred graduates come to New York every year to find their professional fortunes.
They’re in our hair. We’re in their face. Constantly.
For most of the country’s first century and a half, Boston was its ideal — the cultural, spiritual and philosophical hub of the nation. It was in 1858 that author and philosopher Oliver Wendell Holmes dubbed Boston “the hub of the solar system,” which turned out to be too limiting to the natives; they soon upgraded that to “Hub of the Universe.”
New York? New York had been a British stronghold during the Revolution, lousy with Tories and turncoats, while Boston had been a breeding ground for patriots and politicians. Boston bred statesmen, scholars, artists, actors, musicians; New York was a place where Tammany Hall could exist, thrive and dominate as no other political machine before or since. Two things changed that. Right around 1900 or so, New York Harbor surpassed Boston Harbor as the busiest port on the continent. And 20 years later, the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees for $100,000.
You can judge which was more definitive.
By then, the contentious neighbors had already discovered a common ground on which to air their civic disagreements: a baseball diamond, or an ice rink, or a basketball armory, or a football stadium. From the start, both cities fancied themselves as evolved centers of commerce and cosmopolitan living; when they played games together, they both became overstuffed, overgrown college towns. Starkville with a skyline. “All I know is that if I were ever given the choice between winning in Boston and losing in New York, it would be a difficult choice indeed,” John J. McGraw, manager of the New York Giants and a spiritual antecedent of Billy Martin in almost every way, joked in October 1912, a few days before his nine engaged Boston in a World Series that would become an instant classic, the first time a professional team from Boston and a professional team from New York would
e ngage in a postseason series.
“To hell with New York,” the great Red Sox outfielder, Tris Speaker, said a few days later, giving no context, figuring none was needed.
On Friday, Boston and New York will converge on another field of friendly strife to reengage in a meaningful postseason encounter, in a best-offive American League Division Series. It will be the 45th such time that has happened since 1912 in baseball, football, basketball and hockey. New York presently holds a 23-20 advantage in these engagements.
(Though if we wanted to do a little creative editing — say, take away the Islanders’ and Devils’ combined 5-1 postseason records against the Bruins, and add in the Yankees’ 1978 Game 163 win over the Red Sox — that mark would stand at a dead heat, 19-all.) The best part about the sporting chapters of the New York-Boston relationship is that there is noth- ing contrived about the anger and the rancor associated with it. We punch them, they push back. They kick us in the stomach, we kick them in the shins. If the Yanks-Sox portion of it seemed a one-sided beatdown for the better part of 86 years, that didn’t come close to representing the back-and-forth entanglement overall.
The Yankees stomped on the Sox’ souls in 1978, erasing a 14-game deficit in the standings and a two-run hole in the playoff game? The Mets rallied from the brink of Game 6 extinction eight years later? OK. The Red Sox came back from 3-0 down in 2004 to either earn the greatest upset or cause the biggest choke in sports history, depending on your outlook. Push.
The Patriots became an NFL model thanks to getting the better of the Bill Parcells/Bill Belichick follies and winning five Super Bowls (and counting), built on the chicken scratch of the “HC of the NYJ” note? The Giants ended the Pats bid for perfection in 2007, proved it was no fluke four years later. Push.
The Celtics have those 17 banners (to the Knicks’ two)? The Knicks delivered two of the most devastating blows in Boston’s basketball history, knocking off the 68-win Celtics in 1973 (becoming the first team to ever win Game 7 in Boston Garden), then rallying from 0-2 down in 1990 to end Larry Bird’s last legitimate shot at a title, Patrick Ewing (son of Boston coming home) adding the signature blow that time with a corner 3, late. And while we’re at it: Yes, the Celtics pulled off the greatest playoff comeback ever in 2002 by rallying from 25 down to two up in Game 3 of the Eastern Finals against the Nets, but that was the last game they won in the series. Push. And push. And, of course, there will always be the night of Dec. 23, 1979, when a Rangers fan reached over the boards to smack Bruins goon Stan Jonathan with a rolled-up program moments after Boston had finished off a 4-3 victory at Madison Square Garden. Another fan started swinging his belt. Sticks were grabbed. Curses were exchanged. Then Terry O’Reilly, Peter McNabb and Mike Milbury climbed OVER the boards, confronted a Rangers fan named John Kaptain … and then Milbury pulled off one of Kaptain’s shoes and slapped him with it.
Yes. This is what’s gathering at Fenway Park on Friday. With luck, we’ll have more stories to tell by next Friday …
And everyone will keep their shoes on.