SPEAKING OF SPORTS

by Barry Stagg

December 1996

Joe DiMaggio

The New York Yankees took six games to wrestle the World Series away from the Atlanta Braves. In the year of juvenile spittle assaults from Robbie Alomar, the Yanks put a little dignity and tradition back into baseball. Eighty-one year old Joe DiMaggio was the symbol of all of the dignity and tradition of a Yankee team that defined baseball for most of this century. As a way of gauging baseball time it is interesting to note that veteran baseball man Joe Torre, the New York manager was a year old when the magnificent DiMaggio ran off his fifty-six game hitting streak in 1941.

Joe DiMaggio threw our the first ball in the Series in front of a full house at Yankee Stadium while various morons and their agents sat at home and calculated their next signing bonuses. The man who personified grace and quiet dignity in sport was in the spotlight so rightfully denied the shallow Alomars of the sport. Surely seventy-eight year old Phil Rizzuto must have been on site as well after a delightful year of telecasting the Yankee games on New York station WPIX. These guys are baseball and they will define the game long after they depart this mortal diamond. The brats who break contracts and communicate in saliva will be just bad memories for baseball fans. The game is bigger than even its greatest louts. The sport even transcends the self-destructive compulsions of Yankee owner George Steinbrenner. He resisted an urge to fire his general manager, Bob Watson long enough to let Watson trade for the key players who put the team back on top for the first time since 1978.

The Yankees as objects of athletic affection or hostility pre-date the arrival of major league baseball in Canada. The Yankees and their arch-rivals in Boston were significant factors in the hearts and minds of Newfoundland baseball fans long before Alex Gonzalez was sneering through a no-hit, two-error night for the Blue Jays. The reason was darkness and the magic that it performed on AM Radio signals . Basically it made the broadcasts of night games out of New York and Boston and Baltimore and Washington and Pittsburgh and Philadelphia travel all the way up the Eastern Seaboard so young and old fans alike in Boswarlos and Lourdes and Port au Port and Corner Brook and Burin and Grand Bruit and even St. John's could listen to the boys of summer every single year. This made us into baseball fans who had a much greater nightly menu of ball games to choose from than did our landlocked cousins on the mainland where mountains and perhaps a magnetic ego or two distorted and blocked the wonders of the night.

We became Yankee fans and Dodger fans and Red Sox fans and I am having such a good time with repeating the word "and" over and over until I run out of teams to remember this snowy old off-season. Anyway we are blessed with geography and plenty of open water between ourselves with our radios and the great clear channel stations on the shores of Long Island Sound.

Now this has become a full tilt chain of consciousness run about baseball and Newfoundland and the great place it is and was for hearing and imagining all that great American culture from all these big sea ports along the shore due south of us where our relatives found work and trade and built skyscrapers and got married and became Americans and never forgot about Harbour Main and Brigus and Burgeo and Grand Bank and Stephenville. That was a real long sentence and I hope that when Grant Young downloads this column off the Internet that the bells and whistles and little cyber-gremlins forgive me and let the whole truth and nothing but the truth flow down out of the heavens like some sort of amber in the gloaming that is December in a Northern land where the people are strong and remember and favour the traveller and the dreamer and the tough old survivors of battles with baseballs and bullets and force ten storms and where vicious politicians with offices on the mainland get told that the sleet and the ice and the misery are here for a reason and keeping them away is a good enough reason.

The final tally is here at the evening when baseball is frozen and Joe DiMaggio's leaving and he's always remembered as the son of a fisherman from old San Francisco where Newfoundlanders can gather and smell the breeze and feel at home on the shore in a far away land where the New York Giants are visiting for forty years or so and everybody remembers the salt spray from our own side of this island they call North America. Merry Christmas.

Until next month, next year: Be proud, be prosperous.


Back to the 1996 Index