Norman Einstein's
ISSUE 01 (06/09)
"Fitted For the City"
by Cian O'Day
[Cian is a non-practicing sleep enthusiast. When not badgering great and overtaxed writers for articles, he can be found bothering random New Yorkers for their thoughts on sports they only occasionally care about. He would also really like it if you joined our email list.]
As I write this at my kitchen table on a Friday night, I glance up to the clock above the stove which reads exactly 7:05. In this moment, right-hander A.J. Burnett of the Yankees, formerly of the Blue Jays and Marlins, tosses out the opening pitch of interleague play for the 2009 MLB season in Yankee Stadium. In this moment, shortstop Jimmy Rollins of the Phillies, who has spent his entire pro career in Philadelphia, meets Burnett's fastball mere seconds after it releases from his hand and drives it deep over the right-field scoreboard for a lead-off home run.
The champs ended up winning the game... and by 'champs,' I mean, of course the World Champion Philadelphia Phillies. It's been awhile since we called the Yankees the 'champs.'
It's a fact that's far from obvious, certainly not discernable from the omniprecense of the New York Yankees. On the national level the Yankees often command center stage, to say nothing of the city New York. Whether it's Derek Jeter shilling razorblades for Gillette, or the swarm of reporters descending upon George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, Florida for spring training, or the universe of multi-colored Yankees caps fitted around the heads of people young and old around the country... no, no matter the standings the Yankees always matter in a way that's as irksome as it is true.
Credit: Don Hamerman via 20x200 (Flickr)
Speaking of truth, if there's one truth about New York City - though there are several, sometimes conflicting, but all equally true - it's that the city makes you come to terms with it, not the other way around.
I haven't lived in New York long, just over two and a half years. But as an avid sports fan I have yet to come to terms with the Yankees. The insanely high rents, public transportation vanishing in the outer boroughs, eight dollar whiskeys, indecipherable dating scene, all of it I've met New York City at least halfway.
But the Yankees remain another story.
The Yankees are easily loved and easily hated. Some see the bevy of superstars; others the bloated payroll. Some see the championship tradition; others the sordid history of petulant legends. Some see the epitome of dynasty; others the posterchild for a league that discourages competitive balance. There are no shortage of vantage points when it comes to the Yankees.
Love or Hate in context of the Yankees is too easy. While my quest to come to some greater understanding with New York's main sporting obsession is anything but. Much of it takes place in the five acts that follow.
1.
The cover of Sporting News magazine under my elbow as I type lists Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez as the second best player in baseball. The cover claims Rodriguez like every other MLB player is not even close to number one Albert Pujols. Yet it's no small matter to dominate an international sport. And considering that Rodriguez's teammates shortstop Derek Jeter and closer Mariano Rivera are listed eight and nine, respectively, on the same list, it's no small matter for a team to sport such a stacked roster.
Throw out the Sporting News list as an absolute. Plenty of criticisms of Rodriguez's persist, PED use and mirror kissing narcissism aside. Most center around this notion that he's a choker, that he doesn't show up in big games. As for Jeter and Rivera there's impending mortality, at least mortality as it applies to sports careers. Both are facing a future of diminishing skills, sooner rather than later. Jeter's defense continues to slip. Rivera somehow still near the top of his game turns 40 later this season.
It's August for the Yankees' biggest stars... if not later.
Credit: Jenn N. Tonic (Flickr)
Looking around the streets of New York, however, that dire warning isn't readily apparent. Everywhere you look the Yankees logo stares out at you, on t-shirts, on the front pages of dailies, on baseball caps.
It's the caps that intrigue me. A veritable universe of colors and styles consistent only in their use of the Yankees logo. I start a log of what I come across on the train to work, through the streets of the city, down the sidewalks of my hood. The first entry is a number done in royal blue, the black logo framed by a shocking electric yellow, the same shocking yellow on the underside of the brim. There's innummerable slouch fits in faded blue, bought specifically to appear worn for a decade or more. One is all white save trace outlines of gray framing the logo multipied dozens of time all over the cap, the logos like microscopic molecules once bounding freely suddenly frozen in time forever. Brims range from flat and wide to aggressively broken and narrow. Seemingly every style and shape made pass me in the three weeks I dutifully record my findings.
I know New York is a baseball town, but they can't all belong to baseball fans. Something else is at work here.
2.
"Attention White People..."
So begins a post at the seminal hip hop blog the Smoking Section. Its author is musician Phontigallo (aka Phonte) of the groups Little Brother and the Foreign Exchange. He cuts right to the chase.
"My baseball cap is a statement of fashion, not affiliation."
Well, that's clear enough. But why make the declaration now?
"This was inspired by my encounter at the airport in Cleveland the other day," Phonte writes, "when, after peeping my Yanks fitted, the gate attendant felt the need to joke: 'Hey, man...only Cleveland Indian hats are allowed on this plane!' I played it off and gave him that good water cooler Office chuckle that you give white folks when they be corny as hell, but you just wanna keep the peace and get on with your day. No harm no foul."
I think we've all been there before. Actually I had to pull something similar in Philly after buying a Phillies cap at Lids. Races reversed in that situation, but, yeah, go on...
"Fast forward two days later and me and the boys are stuck at the airport in PORTLAND, MAINE fam......and the kid was NOT in the mood for jokes. The broad workin the security gate was lookin at me and Flash up and down in that 'silently judging you' sort of way. She asked if we were from New York cause we were wearing Yankees caps, and I just couldn't take it no mo. Something in me just snapped. I had no choice but to hit that ho with the GillieFace."
In case you aren't familiar with the facial nuances of Gillie Da Kid:
"Ain't no Black people rockin a Colorado Rockies cap cause they a fan of the 2nd baseman; they just trynna match that shit up with they Dunks. Nothin more, nothin less."
All kidding aside, I hear where Phonte is coming from, but I wonder to what extent anyone can really sidestep all ties. It's an affiliation that speaks volumes to black, white, brown, yellow, blue, red, mauve, etc, etc.
LeBron James has never made a secret of his Yankees fandom even after becoming the savior of Cleveland sports. James stirred up minor controversy a year and a half ago by sporting a Yankees cap when the hometown Indians hosted the Yankees. Teeth gnashed. Hurt transmuted into idiotic signage. In all, a mountain stood where a molehill should have been.
But I'm put in mind of a different moment featuring James and his Yankees cap. Earlier that same year, James led a Cavaliers team of suspect talent to the NBA Finals. They faced a still mighty San Antonio Spurs squad who swept them in four games. To the postgame press conference, James emerged stony faced, placing his Yankees cap at the table, taking care to ensure it was prominently displayed for the assembled media to see. He answered questions calmly but with a cool detachment.
James's message was clear. If the franchise was to rely solely on his considerable gifts, he was gone, likely New York bound, at the end of his contract. Management got the hint, dissappointing loss to the Magic in the conference finals two days ago notwithstanding.
Not everyone has the opportunity to wield a baseball cap like a blunt object. Sometimes, yes, it's about matching those Dunks. But these two extreme examples leads me to believe that there might be some worthwhile craziness in the middle.
3.
An intimate art opening at a West Village bar and I'm talking baseball with a wiry man named Jim. I have a vague sense that this isn't the time or place. Jim, for his part, is nearly apologetic when I ask him which team he follows...
The Yankees, of course. Legions of bandwagonners, media with an almost comically unrepentant East Coast bias, and seemingly unending controversy will all do that to a fan.
I ask Jim what he thinks of CC Sabathia thus far, the massive left-hander New York swiped from Milwaukee in the offseason. This is perhaps where the tone of apology gives way to resolution.
"Hey, I've already come to terms with the fact that we're spending $160 million dollars on someone," Jim says. "I just want it be on a good guy. Sabathia seems like a good guy."
For years, this is how the Yankees have done it, scooped off the top regardless of expense. Sabathia, A.J. Burnett, Mark Texeira are merely newly added names to a long list. In a salary cap era of sports, the Yankees are good old capitalist throwbacks of themselves.
Jeter may be the captain, the crowned prince of the town, but his presence underscores by way of comparison how so many of the remaining bats and arms of the Yankees belong to mercenaries, hired guns.
Altogether that's not an unfair reflection of the city the Yankees represent. New York is in constant flux, people forever streaming in, coming for the idea of the city, but transforming it by their mere presence.
So it is that I'm taken aback talking to a bouncer at a bar, gathering his thoughts on why the Yankees are such a symbol for the city when he drops a considerable twist to this tale.
"You know Looney Tunes?"
Uh, yeah.
"It's like that one where Bugs is trying to get into the South and Yosemite Sam is a rebel heading him off at the Mason-Dixon Line."
An explanation is definitely in order.
The bouncer - a man who doesn't give his name but instead hands me a business card bearing the name "Galactic Mack" - is referencing "Southern Fried Rabbit." In it, Bugs Bunny is headed to Alabama for a record carrot crop but encounters a confederate Yosemite Sam unaware that the Civil War is over. The cartoon stirred controversy for Bugs's impersonation of a slave, a scene often cut or truncated in later viewings.
But the Galactic Mack is specifically referring to the cartoon's end when Bugs finally rids himself of Yosemite Sam. Dressed as a confederate messenger, Bugs tells Sam that the Yankees are in Chatanooga. Sam charges off. Cut to the exterior of a baseball park with a sign reading "Exhibition game - Yankees vs Chatanooga." Inside, Sam wields a shotgun at the dugout while the terrified Yankees players cower in the darkness.
Is rocking a Yankees cap all about acknowledging that the world is against the city and the need to stick up for it? Doesn't that clash with the idea that the world comes to the New York, to the Yankees? I don't know. I just know the questions are coming faster than the answers.
4.
Sigurjon Gudjonsson is a photographer. More specifically, he is a photography student at the School of Visual Arts here in New York. The traits that make Sigurjon's photography engaging, if not yet fully realized, come across in his voice, one patient and assured.
In some ways, Sigurjon is a typical student. He is nearing graduation and he is optimistic about the future, what he calls in understandably vague terms "the challenges ahead."
But, in other ways, Sigurjon is far from typical.
He hails from the tiny European island of Iceland where his interest and aptitude in photography allowed him work in photojournalism at the Morning News by the age of nineteen. He has a background most students entering photography school would kill for. Yet as experienced as he is and self-assured as he comes across, Sigurjon understands that his photography is a work in progress.
"I have a certain kind of style," Sigurjon says. "I'm not trying to change it, I'm trying to get some more meat on the bones."
Sigurjon's style revolves around the documentary. His concerns can be found in the street, the hope to slow people down long enough to snap a moment in their life. Street photography is not without its perils and hardships.
"People are extremely paranoid of cameras... it's extremely tricky."
Tricky, how?
"I have been chased by a construction worker with a shovel."
Really?!
"Yes," Sigurjon says laughing.
I contacted Sigurjon in the first place because I stumbled upon a photo series on his website. The series is twelve different portraits on the streets of New York. The subjects are all wearing Yankees caps.
Here are three photos from the series (though I recommend spending time with all twelve at Sigurjon's site):
Each different face, each different stance reveals different things. Someone's declaring allegiance. Someone a war on a bad hair day. Someone's rocking the cap to match those Dunks. And someone's intentionally vague, unconcerned what anyone might see.
Sigurjon cautions: "I think it's a misunderstanding that is has so much to do with baseball."
So what is the cap about?
"There's no question that this cap is about New York for me."
Sigurjon's concerns, the camera's perspective, are clear. Whether it's the broad diversity of his subjects in race, age, and gender, or the more subtle components like the shifting backgrounds, New York looms large in the camera's eye.
But where did this obsession with New York come from for a young man growing up on a remote island?
"My brother went to New York when I was twelve years old and brought home one of those caps and it was immediately the best constructed cap I put on my head.
"I was always known [in Iceland] as the guy with the Yankees cap."
Sigurjon pauses a second then deadpans: "That's something that could never happen in New York."
It's a long way between Iceland and New York, not simply in miles, but in life and culture. While New York is no secret destination, as the population of eight million attests, it's not always an obvious one despite what books, movies, and television say. Unwittingly, unintentionally, the Yankees provided Sigurjon an artifact, a gateway of sorts.
"I developed a huge interest in New York and that interest was tied to that cap."
So where did the inspiration for this photo series come from?
"The original idea came about because I'm a foreigner and I was looking for something on the streets that I could relate to.
"I never had to wait more than five minutes for someone to walk past me with a Yankees cap."
How was dealing with all the No's?
"I was actually surprised at how many people said 'Yes.'
"I could tell you in advance who the No's were because the No's were walking at New York pace. I think two or three people said 'No' because they didn't like the Yankees."
But Sigurjon takes the cap literally. For him there is only an 'N' and a 'Y' and that means 'New York.'
Yet the camera does funny things. With a portrait there is always a person on either side of the lens. A conversation takes place. And like all conversations, some are smoother than others, some are arguments, some are successful, and some are not.
After speaking with Sigurjon and rewinding the interview tape again and again, I return to his twelve portraits, scanning them languidly. It's clear what the photographer is saying in the conversation. But what the subjects are saying is less clear. Or perhaps more diverse.
No, not every person photographed is thinking baseball. But baseball is unmistakeably a part of the conversation, lingering in a curled sports page of the newspaper in hand or the prescription lenses required from a lifetime of Saturday afternoon baseball on television.
So what is the story behind these caps?
5.
New Era's flagship store is on 4th Street and Broadway in Manhattan. Proclaimed on banners sporadically throughout the store, New Era makes the official on-field hat for MLB. The quality is indistinguishable between the caps made for MLB, the NBA, or purely fashion.
As the streets of the cities - New York, LA, Atlanta, Miami - ran through mainstream culture, the New Era cap tagged along for the ride. New Era's specific line of baseball caps, 59Fifty, is a standalone entity in culture. The sticker often left on the cap is a badge, a certificate of authenticity.
New Era kicked off the cap craze. Or, more correctly, with a request from Spike Lee, New Era capitalized on the cap craze. In 1996, Lee asked for a Yankees cap from New Era, but in bold red as opposed to navy. Shortly, the red Yankees fitteds were a certifiable hit to the audiences that Lee played off of, those in or looking to the center of cities, to an urban reality. Lee was certainly proclaiming two things at once: New York and the Yankees, in that order. As with any fad, 59Fifty took on a life of its own. Jay-Z. 50 Cent. Any dopey MTV veejay covering Spring Break.
But unlike other fads, 59Fifty hasn't really faded with time. For all the lightning speed change in popular culture, the 59Fifty caps have persisted. Part of that has to do with the enduring form, baseball caps are widely accepted dress down in our society. Part of that has to do with the central place baseball occupies in the American sporting consciousness. And, yes, part of that has to do with how those colors match those Dunks.
Credit: Cian O'Day
Yet, the Yankees symbol endures above all others. Certainly, at New Era's flagship store, most of the caps, most of the colors are spent on the Yankees. Yes, we're in New York. But check the New Era site and you notice that by far and away, a margin of almost two to one over any other popular team (Boston, LA, Atlanta) that the greatest diversity in style and color is given over to the Yankees.
The Yankees are our great sports empire, reflecting so much of what we love and hate about ourselves as Americans. Maybe that's where the strong reactions to the Yankees come from. I don't want to stretch it too far. The Yankees just play baseball. They don't sell arms to rebels in Latin America. They don't bust down doors in Middle Eastern villages. They don't broker international peace treaties. But I'm put in mind of George C. Scott's opening monologue from the movie Patton. Stalking the stage, rallying the troops for battle, Scott as Patton dispels the underdog ideal in America.
"When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big league ball player, the toughest boxer. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time," Scott says.
Scott's speech was intended to set up a moment of irony in the film. But its premises are based in truth and observation. I watch the casuals fans I know around the office, among friends, out at the bar. When a team starts to pull away from the pack, most gravitate toward the winners. And even though it's been a long time since the Yankees have won in the big sense of the word, they are the sport's winners, a maniacal obsession from ownership to the fans.
If there's something that hip hop culture embraces specifically, loudly, it's winning the game. The rap game, the drug game, the money game, the get-the-fuck-out-of-the-hood game. Hip hop culture is more often than not predicated on toughness and hardship, toil and trouble, wealth and dominance. Hip hop isn't bounded by those concerns, but it often comes back to them.
You might not be able to get a kid rocking a fitted white-on-white 59Fifty Yankees number on the street to admit that his or her hat choice has anything to do with Yankees. But it's a marriage about more than simple convenience, there's a connection there that's flourished for more than sixteen years.
The marriage hasn't always be copacetic. Two years ago, New Era rolled out a line of gang centric caps: Bloods, Crips, and Latin Kings. Bandana styled around the Bloods and Crips colors, a Latin Kings crown cocked on top the Yankees logo. The outcry was predictably loud. New Era pulled the line under pressure and reverted to their generally subtle service of their base, the gang color controversy a serious but brief flirtation in a long relationship.
As I finish writing this piece the Yankees, the beloved Bronx Bombers, are climbing back into first place in the American League's East division. The headlines of the New York dailies delight in the team's triumphunt return, fetting their ascendancy with horrible puns and celebratory photos.
Sabathia is rolling. Rodriguez's return from injury is credited with sparking the team despite his inconsistent play at the plate. Mark Texeira finds his misplaced swing.
Yes, the city, that undulating percentage of fans at least, is in love with the Yankees again. The streets as always are overrun with caps, something a fan in blissful ignorance can run his eye over and feel he or she is surrounded by denizens of the same house of sports worship.
It's the simple persistance of the symbol, the interlocking 'N' and 'Y' that is at once enduring and a trifle devoid of meaning.
A little like these Yankees... Rodriguez can kiss a mirror and cheat to please every person he has met. Texeira can play in a field all by his lonesome whether surrounded by teammates or not. Jeter can smirk his way into the Hall as a two sport athlete, a legend in the city's nightlife as well.
But, no matter the controversy stirred up, the team will always be bigger than its players. That's not something you can say about the crosstown Mets or many other ball clubs in the majors. Perhaps even the Yankees' great rivals, the Boston Red Sox, now that the great underdog tag has vanished, have become a team of its time apart from the lone history of heartbreak.
Not so with the Yankees.
It's now that I realize it's not a matter of loving or hating the Yankees, they simply are a fact like eight dollar whiskeys and a roof with a view. Ignore them and they don't go away. Embrace them and they barely notice your presence. Like everything else in this city, they exist completely for you and completely apart from you.
Sigurjon tried to convince me his photos of the Yankees cap had no relation to baseball. The Galactic Mack was torn between the Yankees cap as fashion and as identity. The caps I stopped on the street were either "doing it for the Yankees" or some vague sense that they should be representing for their city or their culture.
And in this everyone is right and everyone is wrong.
The New Era store and its scores of Yankees caps in all manner of styles and colors sell you not a stake in the team but a share of an idea. The colors, the multi-colored pallete that unnerves the diehard fan, look ridiculous when applied to the Brewers logo past or present. But the assumption of the Yankees, that infectious arrogance, to bleed every color fits as well as an unbroken brim on nineteen year old's head.
As I leave the New Era store, a young man in an oversized white polo, eyes shielded behind gaudy gold-rimmed glasses, lets go an elongated 'ooh' as he spies one of the latest releases. It's a white and neon green number as indestructable in its construction as it is disposable in its fashion worth. He sidles up to the glass counter for a closer look, the glare of the track lighting reflecting whatever he wants to see between two interlocking letters.
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