Date: Sunday, August 5, 2001
From: Kevin Hench
Subject:  Yankees Suck? No Such Luck.

There are those among us for whom great consternation only serves to sharpen
the blade of their oratory.  And there are those among us who, when
confronted by that familiar gnawing, nerve-jangling ague, bark, "Yankees
suck!"

I have dear friends in both columns, though it has never really been
explained to my satisfaction just how it is that these Yankees suck. 
Clearly, with four World Series titles in five years, they do not suck in the
Tampa Bay Devil Rays sense of sucking. With the obvious exception of Roger
Clemens, Messrs. Jeter, Williams, Martinez, Mussina et al. wouldn't appear to
suck in that Mean People Suck bumper-sticker kind of way. And while their
record-setting $115-million payroll does invite invective, it would probably
be poor form for the inveighing to come from fans of a team with a
$108-million payroll.

The battle cry would seem as wrongheaded as it is coarse and venomous.  But
is it understandable? Forgivable? Explicable? Of course.  This inarticulate
speech of the heart bursts from a deep black well of sincere contempt and
hard-earned hatred and should therefore not be judged too harshly for its
inelegance.  Still, as veterans of disappointment, the Fellowship of the
Miserable should perhaps demonstrate a little more sophistication in its
collective response to our lifetimes of adversity.

Imagine Atlanta Hawks fans chanting "Celtics suck!" in the 1980s.  Would we
have been offended? Stung? Or amused? Surely we would have laughed. Which
Celtics suck?  Bird? McHale? Parish? And if indeed we do suck, then what of
you? I would hate to think that our churlish chant was actually providing a
measure of joy for fans of the Evil Empire.  But what else could it possibily
accomplish, this bemusing, nonsensical chorus?  In the theater of athletic
competition there is almost nothing as enjoyable as the utter apoplexy of the
opponent you are vanquishing.  Let's not give them that pleasure.  Let's not
let them know that we think about them constantly; that we know their
rotation as well as we know our own; that we not-so-secretly wish Joe Torre
was our manager.

The handsome sailor Billy Budd, in the eponymous novella by Herman Melville
(Pittsfield, Ma.), is so vexed and stultified by the fasle accusations of
Master-at-Arms Claggart that he strikes and kills his accuser.  This is the
literary precursor of "Yankees suck!"  It is the frustrated fist.  Do we
forgive Billy? Certainly.  But he still dangles from the "ignominious hemp"
despite our forgiveness.  And so too we forgive our tortured brethren their
tortured taunt... all the while hoping that they will lift the ignominious
hemp from about their necks and transcend their fixation with their
oppressor, thereby commuting their sentences.

Which is not to say that there is anything wrong with throwing a chair across
your living room if a Red Sox pitcher hits a batter with an 0-2 breaking ball.

Kev