October 25, 2007
Bronx Jeers for Giuliani, Now Rooting for the Red Sox
By ALAN FEUER
As he moves about the country campaigning for the White House, Rudolph W. Giuliani is not always kind in describing where he comes from. New York City, he will say, is a tough town, hard to govern. It’s liberal to a fault and unruly as a child.
Now, however, there has come what is for many the true unpardonable insult: Mr. Giuliani has declared he will be rooting for the dreaded Boston Red Sox against the Colorado Rockies in the World Series, which began last night. From the Bronx to his childhood haunts in Brooklyn, there was a baffled anger bordering on rage.
“They should burn his seat that he sat in at Yankee Stadium — how’s that?” said George Patsin, a Brooklyn restaurateur. “They should burn it on TV so I can watch.”
It would seem that the timing is particularly galling to the faithful in New York. Bad enough that Joe Torre, the manager, is gone. Bad enough that half the team might follow. But Rudy cheering for Pedroia and Ortiz? It was, in short, too much.
“The word I’d use is ‘stunned,’” said Freddy Schuman, who for nearly 20 years has been showing up at Yankee games and banging on a frying pan with spoons. “I tell ya, I just can’t understand how a Yankee fan like him would all the sudden go for the Red Sox. It must be politics. I don’t get it. How do you do a thing like that?”
The betrayal hurts the more because if one were forced to pick the premiere New York fan, Mr. Giuliani would top the list.
He is a fan’s fan — a man whose very organs are likely etched with pinstripes. As mayor of New York, he used to wear his cap to City Hall. He is known to schedule political events so as not to miss a ballgame in the Bronx.
He once told Diane Sawyer he was fairly certain that God himself was rooting for the team.
By way of explanation, Mr. Giuliani couched his shift in loyalty as support for the American League. (“I’m an American League fan and I go with the American League team,” he told reporters — not coincidentally — in the primary state and Boston neighbor of New Hampshire.) “I thought he was loyal to New York,” said Kebrae H. Scott, 30, a maintenance worker who wore a Yankees cap as he was heading to his home in the Ebbets Fields Apartments in Brooklyn near where Mr. Giuliani grew up.
While it’s clear that fans develop an allegiance not just to a ball club, but a league, the Yankee-Red Sox rivalry is so embittered it’s hard to imagine any situation in which a fan of Mr. Giuliani’s stature could root for the sworn enemy of a beloved hometown team.
“It’s what you do when you run for president, I guess,” said Mike Francesa of “Mike and the Mad Dog,” a program on WFAN radio. “When in Rome, act like a Roman. I’m sure if he was stumping in Colorado next week, he’d be rooting for the Rockies.”
To be sure, politicizing baseball is neither something new nor a partisan problem, as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has found out. She tried to split the difference between the Yankees, her adopted team, and her favored Chicago Cubs — a case of double loyalty for which Mr. Giuliani gave her grief.
Perhaps because the moment seemed so ripe for turnaround, the anger was decidedly unsubtle when The Daily News and The New York Post both ran doctored photographs of Mr. Giuliani on Wednesday in a navy ball cap with a bright red Boston ‘‘B.” “Traitor!” claimed The News. The Post, on its own cover, was equally damning: “Red Coat,” it declared.
Some politicos suggested that Mr. Giuliani may have confused the Red Sox with a red state.
“This is a major story,” said Maurice Carroll, director the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “Rudy Giuliani endorses a team from Ted Kennedy’s state? A state that was once headed by Mitt Romney? Rudy Giuliani is a great American in many ways, but he must have simply lost track in this case. He’s got to win red states like Colorado and he comes out in favor of Massachusetts?”
To the former mayor’s credit, there are some who think it’s fine for a Yankee fan, in a time of need, to cheer the Sox. “It’s not that big of a deal,” said George Manesis, who runs a sports bar, Billy’s, near Yankee Stadium. “He’s going for votes now, plain and simple. But I don’t think he’s a traitor for doing that.”
None of this would have merited a mention had the former mayor not been so expressive of his passion for the Yankees (and his hatred for Red Sox). He once told reporters at a City Hall briefing: “What can I tell you? This is me. I’m a Yankee fan. I love the Yankees.” And he confessed to Glamour magazine last year, “The only tattoo I would ever consider getting would be a Yankee tattoo.”
Of course, his most revealing comment on the subject was perhaps the answer he provided to The Providence Journal in Rhode Island when asked, this June, if he would agree to be president if it hinged on his becoming a Red Sox fan.
“I have great respect for people who really are fans of the team they say they are fans of,” Mr. Giuliani said. “But probably that’s a deal I could not make.”