Cape Cod Sports Desk

Sixty minute hate--NY & Boston--it's better that way

New York And Boston Hate Each Other, And It's Better That Way

I was born in France. I had never seen baseball before moving to Massachusetts as a child. I thought of all America as being members of the Yanqui family. Yet somehow, by the end of my first summer here, I hated the New York Yankees. To this day, I'm not 100% sure that they don't do some subliminal stuff with the local TV news to gain that effect.

I could now laugh and even drink a celebratory six pack if the Yankees all perished in a bus crash or a school shooting.I remember those halcyon days of innocence, because I really got into sports as I became more American, and I could now laugh and even drink a celebratory six pack if the Yankees all perished in a bus crash or a school shooting or whatever. I know that this is wrong, but I don't make any attempts to control it. In fact, I revel in it.

New Yorkers feel the same way, so I don't feel badly about it....except for moments like this, when I seek to explain it. There's really not a good reason to hate New York. Yet New York hates Boston, and Boston hates New York.

200 miles and a universe apart

Boston and New York are 200 or so miles apart. We all sound like gangsters to 90% of the country or 99% of the world. While we both have a solid group of Brahmin/Wall Street wealth, we're very liberal compared to the rest of America. We've teamed up to fight the British, the Native Americans, the Confederacy, the Nazis, the Taliban and whoever else wanted some. Even our orgnized crime families work together. Massachusetts is America's de facto Educational Epicenter, while New York is our Monetary Mecca.

We're actually, if you throw in Philly, New Jersey and maybe Baltimore, fairly distinct from the rest of the USA. You can base a pretty good Gingrichian campaign strategy on painting a rival candidate as both a Massachusetts Moderate and a Wall Street vulture capitalist. It will win you South Carolina, at the very least. You lose Florida with it, but I've got the NHL franchise in Florida that says that New Yorkers and Bostonians retire there in large numbers.

We're not really rivals in many senses. We have Connecticut between us. It's not the biggest city vs the second biggest city... New York is first in population, while Boston is 22nd. We don't have a Wall Street, a Broadway, or a Statue of Liberty. There is really nothing we have that they want, and the feeling is mutual. New York could dismiss Boston as a bunch of small-timers, but- to their eternal credit- they instead jump into the mud with us.

In theory, we should most likely be very close, and sort of resent the Midwest, California and the South. This, however, is why there is both Theory and Practice.

As I said before... New York and Boston can team up to free the slaves or stop the Holocaust or what have you... but when we lack a good external threat, we sort of turn on each other. It's kind of like when two brothers fight.

A good example is 9/11/01

Planes full of Bostonians were slammed into NYC's World Trade Center. We were bound together in mutual sorrow and teamed up in the Army to gain mutual vengeance. As the French said, we were all New Yorkers after 9/11.

Not a lot of people know this, but even Iran had a national Day of Mourning after those attacks. I mention this because, ten years later, we're just starting to gear ourselves up to attack them. The relative goodwill between Iran and the Great Satan lasted a decade.

By contrast, my 9/11 sympathy for New York evaporated in October of 2003, when Aaron Boone hit an extra inning home run to once again eliminate Boston from the baseball playoffs. I'm amazed that it lasted that long, to be honest. I know that I'm not alone on this, because I immediately went on the Internet after the game.... and the talk was all, "Not only am I glad your buildings got knocked down, but I'm glad that it was our planes that did it!"

By 2007 or so, you could get a baseball bat beating in Hyannis for wearing a Yankees shirt in public. This wasn't even the street outside of Fenway Park... the attack went down about 5 minutes from the Kennedy Compound. I'd have intervened to stop the beating, but I would have had to put the bat down.

Fortunately, this hatred is mostly confined to Sports. Our ties are too close in the commercial, political, cultural, familial, and educational realms. Once you step outside the realm of Sports, the worst enmity between New York and Boston is that they, for some reason I can't fathom, put tomato into their clam chowder.

New York Yankees ruled their sport more than any other city has ever ruled a sport.
Boston teams have dominated Sports in this new century.The problem is that Sports make up a huge part of the life of the average New Yorker or New Englander. You'd think that the Educational and Cultural opportunities each city offers would produce a citizen who likes Sports, but also has so many other interests that he doesn't kick a Jets fan in the head when he sees him... but No.

The New York Yankees have ruled their sport more than any other city has ever ruled a sport. However, Boston teams have dominated Sports in this new century. The Celtics, the Bruins, and the Red Sox have won 4 world championships this decade, while the Patriots are looking to sew up Super Bowl #4 this Sunday.

It began in the Second World Series in 1904

The Boston Americans finishing 1st in the American League with a record of 95 wins and 59 losses.
   They were set to play the New York Giants in the World Series but the Giants refused toYou can trace the Hate back to the second World Series, when the Boston Americans beat the New York Giants. They soon stole Babe Ruth from us, affixing us with an 86 year curse while the Yankees became the flagship franchise of the Show. We paid them back somewhat by coming to dominate professional basketball, and we even knocked the Rangers out of the Stanley Cup finals one wonderful year. They won the first Super Bowl one of us could claim, but even two New York football teams can't win more Super Bowls than one Boston team since that game. The Giants ruined our perfect season, while we used the Yankees to eventually break our curse over.

The one constant is that they hate us, we hate them, and the rest of the country sort of sits back and watches. Football is played from Alabama to Oregon to San Diego to Canada, but all of them are just watching New York and Boston this weekend.

This Sunday, we meet again on the field of battle. The Patriots and the Giants will write a new chapter in this Masterpiece of Hate. No one knows for sure how it is going to go down (well, this guy does), but I can guaran-damn-tee that it will be ugly and long-lasting.

Thanks to Jake Moore for the stadium pic.