So go the lyrics to a musical about some sailors who hit the island of Manhattan on one day of shore leave. Gene Kelley, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin run off a ship docked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and see the sights in a 1949 movie On the Town. There are of course females in the movie. Sailors without females wouldn't go. Ann Miller, Betty Garrett and Alice Pearce round out the principal cast members and dates.
(And there you have it. New York City is five boroughs, or counties, and Bronx is the only one with the definite article in front of it. You do not add 'the' to Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens or Staten Island. Bronx without The in front of is naked.
My wife was born in the Bronx; she is from the Bronx, but her address before marrying me was Bronx, New York. Her birth certificate says Bronx, New York..
You can't say Bronx without inserting the 'the' in front of it. I've always heard it as The Bronx, but never saw it as The Bronx until I saw a company's address on the side of a truck delivering goods to the Cherry Wood Shopping center here in Wantagh.
I always read the names on trucks, and note license plates. And here, clear as day, was some produce company's name, street address, and location painted on the cab door...The Bronx, New York 104--. Someone deliberately painted the sign how they always heard things. That's how powerful The is when it comes to the Bronx.)
Decades ago John Steinbeck wrote a novel titled The Winter of Our Discontent. It wasn't a sports book, but the title might imply what is in store for New York sport fans as the days dwindle down to a precious few.
We'll start with the football team the Jets, who haven't won a Super Bowl since Joe Willie's famous upset of the Baltimore Colts in 1969. Do you know how long ago 1969 is? It's prehistoric. There were no cell phones or computers.
Why there are still Jets fans who go to games is beyond my comprehension. It just shows you how many people want to get out of the house and eat bratwurst and drink Budweiser in a parking lot.
My theory is it's the color of the uniforms and the name that keeps them from winning. Jets. Think about it seriously as a team name. It's stupid.
Of course, once upon a time the A.F.L. franchise in New York was named The Titans and they played in the Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan. My father, who was hardly a football fan took me to a Titans game for some reason. I think they played at home on Friday nights.
I don't know what the admission price was, but I remember my father didn't seem to have enough money on him (no surprise there) to buy two tickets. I remember it took a lot of time before we got in with tickets. I don't know what deal was swung at the box office. There certainly weren't many people at the game.
By today's standards the Polo Grounds was a dump. At 155th Street in Manhattan it was dark and cavernous and was 480' to centerfield. It was a steel-girder, obstructed view venue, but it was where Bobby Thomson hit The Shot Heard Round the World and where a lot of people felt an affinity towards. My father probably one of them.
Hit a ball and if it didn't clear the fence it was probably going to be an inside-the-park-homer. When the Mets began their presence in New York they started playing at the Polo Grounds since of course The Giants and the Dodgers had moved to California after the 1957 season, creating what for anyone who remembers that a re-enactment of Original Sin.
The Polo Grounds also served duty as the home for the New York Mets before its disappearance under the wrecking ball to become a housing project.
We used to go to Met games at the Polo Grounds in those early years. If my father was any kind of sports fan he probably owed his allegiance to the baseball New York Giants. He grew up in Manhattan, so it was his home team.
Titans is a great name for a football team, but it's too late for the Jets to change their name to that. Tennessee has the Titans—but no Super Bowl, with only one appearance. I can't really think of a good replacement name. Maybe the New York Knights, the baseball team in Bernard Malamud's novel The Natural.
How the Jets came to called the Jets is not known to me. When they were christened with that name New York had the Mets, the Jets, the Sets (professional tennis) and the Nets. Eventually, in the early '70s there was the New York Bets, not a sports team but Off-Track Betting for horse racing wagers. Someone must have thought the "ets" sound was good to hear and loved rhymes.
The Titans became the Jets and started playing in Shea Stadium in the early '60s, as did the Mets. The Jets were of course an A.F.L. team then, playing second fiddle to the N.F.L. As such, they too played their home games on Friday nights at Shea.
I remember going to some of those games. Half-time was often a Black drum and bugle corps from Brooklyn, marching and twirling rifles. There was one memorable half-time where several women raced up and down on rubber matting and tried to succeed in emptying out refrigerator before their competition. You won't see that these days.
Green uniforms. The Jets nickname can be Gang Green. Now how good is that? Your nickname is a disease that leads to amputations; gangrene.
Of course all Jet frustrations were going to be solved by the arrival of Aaron Rodgers as their starting quarterback. All preseason, the media was drooling over Rodgers coming to New York. The contract signing was protracted, but was finally finalized, and became BIG news. The Jets were headed to this year's Super Bowl. Start spreading the news and printing the tickets.
Funny thing about that. You have to have a decent record over 17 games to get to the playoffs and a thicket of pairings before you get to the Promised Land. No worries, the Jets have Rodgers.
I'm not a great football fan but I recognized pending irony when I sensed Rodgers was going to get hurt and the Jets were once again going to disappoint.
Football, played on any surface, grass or artificial grass is not kind to the body. But here was Rodgers on 9/11 racing out from the tunnel carrying the American flag, much like the cavalry is all those westerns I saw as a kid. He was going to save the Jets.
Who knew that my sense of impending irony would take place after four plays when a Buffalo Bills player sacked Rodgers, and as he went down he sustained a torn Achilles tendon and was likely to miss the rest of the season. The season was leaving on a Jet plane.
But the Jets won the game, in overtime, with who was before the Rodgers injury, their backup quarterback, Zach Wilson, last year's starter. An exciting game. Not many games are won on long yardage runs, but this one was, a punt return to made it to the house. Their second game against the Dallas Cowboys didn't go so well, and Zach was blitzed and intercepted to death in defeat.
Rodgers going down like that reminded me of a horse The Music Man years ago. The owners, an old-time Broadway couple the Vances, who once raced Lemon Drop Kid who won a Belmont Stakes, had bought a yearling in a sale for somewhere near $900,000 and being Broadway people named him The Music Man. Even the name Lemon Drop Kid was a nod to a Damon Runyon story and a Bob Hope movie.
I was at Saratoga when the horse was entered for the first time in a 2-year-old maiden race. I went to the rail and trained my binocs on him the whole way around. I wanted to be close to what $900,000 was going to buy the owners. I think John Velasquez was on him. They hit the top of the stretch and Music Man look the rail and looked like he had a path to a first out victory That is until his leg snapped, and there went $900,000.
And if you think there could have been no one on earth who knew nothing of Aaron Rodgers coming to the Jets, you never met my wife. When he went down I sent into the other room where she was watching some show on MeTV (she's living in the '60s and '70s now, but that's another story) and told her Aaron Rodgers of the Jets got hurt on the fourth play of the game.
And from a woman who so well wall off sports, who turns television off as soon as the weather is finished and before a word about sports can be uttered, looks up, and says, "Who's Aaron Rodgers?" Fame is fleeting.
The New York Giants by getting shutout in their season opener to Dallas 44-0 and then not scoring for the first half against the Phoenix Cardinals, have probably caused more heart attacks than anything. But, they did recover in the second half of the Cardinals game, at Phoenix and won 31-28.
Games like that do not happen often. The last time they came back from such a shitty deficit was 1949, so this was hardly anything to get overly excited about. Their schedule is tough since they made the playoff last year. Football can be like steeplechase racing. After you win, you get to carry more weight. The great equalizer.
Has anyone absorbed where the Yankees and the Mets are in he standings these days? Well, certainly not if you were dependent on seeing standings in that other New York paper, the NYT. They've thrown their sports department overboard. Not that it wasn't already suffering from neglect and apathy. If you want to read about sports in New York get the New York Post. I am. If you want to know how they're playing soccer in Samoa, stay with the NYT.
Well, in case you do not know the standings, the Yankees are in 5th place in their division with a barely winning records, 18½ games out of first place. They're fighting the Red Sox of all teams for the cellar. Baseball should follow European soccer and shed the bad teams and put them in purgatory. When you don't measure up, you're out of the Premier League.
And the Mets? The Metropolitans. A great name, but doing worse than the Yankees. They are 27 games out of first place, with decimated relief pitching and the disposal of ace pitcher (not so ace this year) Justin Verlander who was another ballyhooed signing that was going to bring the Mets to the World Series. Along with pitcher Max Scherzer the Mets were headed for a 100+ game winning reason and a Subway Series with the Yankees. Right? The sports media was wet with speculation. Max was sent packing as well.
Now the Mets are 70-81. Verlander and his wife Kate Upton didn't even last long enough to be at the Christmas party. The press photographers are disappointed there. What couldn't have been better to photograph Kate at a party?
Rangers, Devils and Islanders? New season is nearly underway. The Rangers of course won the first two games against the Devils at the start of last season's playoffs, beating them at home, then quickly folding like a cheap suit, lost the next four and saw the Stanley Cup go elsewhere—again. 1940 and 1994 the are the last two Stanley Cup championships. A 54 year interval is only 25 years away now. We're more than half way there. It's like a journey to Mars. Nets and Knicks? Please.
New York is even losing its marquee Triple Crown race for a few seasons. Belmont race track is being torn down and rebuilt, going from 1.25 million square feet to 250,000 square feet. They are building a tunnel to allow infield viewing of the Belmont Stakes, which is expected to return to its namesake venue in 2025, or 2026. They are also adding an all-weather mile track inside the inner turf course. The place is expected to be winterized.
When Belmont reopened in 1968 after a fire it was built to accommodate what then would be sizable crowds to view racing. 30,000+ on average weekends; up to 90,000 for the Belmont Stakes. I was there for some of those HUGE crowds.
Live attendance at racing venues is nowhere near what it was over 50 years ago. My first day at the races was seeing the Belmont Stakes in 1968 when Stage Door Johnny kept Forward Pass from gaining Triple Crown recognition, which would have been with an asterisk.
The Kentucky Derby was won by Dancer's Image, but later disqualified for having Bute in their system, then prohibited. Forward Pass was awarded first place and the first place prize money. Lawsuits dragged on for years, but eventually, Forward Pass was considered he official winner. Forward Pass won the Preakness, so the 1968 Belmont Stakes presented a chance for an asterisk-type Triple Crown if Forward Pass could win the Belmont Stakes.
I went to the track with the Piermont brothers, Dave (later known as Fourstar Dave) and Dennis. We left from Penn Station on the Belmont Special in the company of their family barber, an Irish-American barber named James Kelly, a confirmed gambler.
I hit the Daily Double cold, having handicapped from The Morning Telegraph the night before in the Piermont apartment on 55th Street. The Daily Double then was the only exotic bet offered, and you had to make the bet by 10 minutes before the first race. The computers were much slower then. I got $22 back for my $2 and fell in love with handicapping, as much as I knew about handicapping from my first time looking at The Morning Telegraph, then 75¢.
Over the years the Belmont infrastructure became very dated. There were no luxury boxes, or sports bars. The Breeders' Cup was last there in 2005 or so. The plan is now to hold the Belmont Stakes at Saratoga during a three day festival in June, running the race at a 1¼ miles rather than Belmont's 1½ miles. During the Covid era the Belmont was run before the Derby at a mile and an eighth at Aqueduct.
The town of Saratoga Springs is salivating over the Belmont Stakes coming to town for a special three-day meet in June. Hotels have already posted $500 a night stays. I won't be there.
We used to go to every Belmont Stakes, but stopped in 1999. They couldn't handle the crowd and getting out of the parking lot was a nightmare. NYRA didn't protect its marquee event.
Hopefully the new Belmont will be built with better sightlines. Aqueduct's are far superior. At Belmont, when the horses hit the top of the stretch you can't see the race unless you stand up. It's as bad as having a front row seat at Carnegie Hall.
Now at 74 years old I hope to still be around when Belmont reopens. I never thought I might live long enough to see two Belmont race tracks.
And I never thought it would be a woman's professional basketball team that would hold up the honor of New York sports, but the Lady Liberties in the W.N.B.A. are advancing to the second round of the playoffs.
Let's go ladies. You've got a lot of weight on your shoulders.
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