A monument to American power and glory will close its doors forever this week, and will soon be reduced to nothing more than a pile of rubble and dust.
No, I'm not talking about Wall Street.
The most famous sports venue our country has to offer, Yankee Stadium, is being torn down. The Bronx, NY, landmark is being replaced by a bigger, better version next door, but in the hearts and minds of baseball fans, historians and sentimentalists, it's being treated like the passing of the family dog: inevitable, but sad anyway.
Which is surprising, considering that most people hate the Yankees.
That should tell you just how beloved The House That Ruth Built truly is: even though the sight of pinstripes is enough to make most baseball fans seethe with, well, seething, fans from all over have treated this final season as a yearlong Jazz Funeral for the stadium.
By most bandwagon standards, I should have been a Yankee fan. There are no pro baseball teams in Louisiana where I grew up (whether there was a pro football team there when I grew up, is also debatable). Most of my friends just picked whichever team was popular at the time, which led to my brother and I rooting for the Oakland A's. They had a pair of squeaky-clean ballplayers named Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire whose natural hitting feats would no doubt stand the test of time and urinalysis. But the Yankees once boasted a legendary left-hander by the name of Ron Guidry, whose nickname was "Louisiana Lightning" and who just happens to be a relative of mine once-or-twice-removed.
As fate would not have it, even with the Other Famous Guidry enshrined in Monument Park, I never really cared much for the Yankees. More specifically, I never cared much for the IDEA of the Yankees: the big city team with endless resources buying credibility and glory. But then I realized: isn't that what America is all about?
So I decided that I wouldn't let the wrecking ball swing without making my own pilgrimage to the House That Steinbrenner Refinanced And Remodeled. That's how I found myself sitting in Yankee Stadium box seats with my brother-in-law (a Mets fan from Florida) and surrounded by fellow baseball pilgrims from Cleveland, Boston and Vancouver (yeah, apparently they've heard of baseball in Canada... crazy, huh?). After watching so many famous and epic baseball games from the Stadium on television, I noticed so many more fascinating little details in person.
Like, for example, it's kind of a dump.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed soaking in the legendary historical details like the famous "Bank of America" sign in right-center field. If I closed my eyes I could just picture Babe Ruth crushing a home run over the "Wiz" sign in shallow right field. Or Don Larsen taking the mound to close out his World Series perfect game to the strains of L'il Wayne blasting through the stadium PA. Or Joltin' Joe DiMaggio keeping his 56-game hitting streak alive by popping a line drive off the "Verizon Wireless" video billboard.
But the fact is, the Yankee Stadium that lives on in our hearts died a long time ago. When Reggie Jackson lit up the Dodgers in the 1977 World Series, he basically did in a giant garbage bag: the stadium was undergoing one of its many face-lifts to become more amenable for "modern" baseball viewing. And by "modern" I mean a 1981 definition of "modern," like "Atari" and "saving money instead of spending it faster than you earn it."
So few of the stadium's original details remained that when pinstripe fanatic Billy Crystal directed the Yank-themed film 61*, he used Detroit's Tiger Stadium as a stand-in for the "old" Yankee Stadium. When anything in Detroit is a more attractive stand-in for anything in New York, you know things have changed for the crappier.
Even with the abuses of history, though, the place still has a certain feel that you won't find anywhere else. It's hard to Jumbotron over decades of history, icons and 26 World Series championships. The place is like our country in microcosm: loud, dirty, rough around the edges... and yet still big, tough and larger than life (George Will and Ken Burns, feel free to plagiarize that). It's played host to more Hall of famers and 9/11 heroes and Popes and rock stars and regular folks than you can count. Okay, you can count the Popes, but you see my point.
I believe you can tell a lot about a place and a people by its sporting venues. The Colosseum in Rome is epic, brutal and permanent, built to withstand the rigors of time... just like the grandiose, over-the-top civilization that (forced slaves to) construct it. The bullrings of Spain are flamboyant and dripping with machismo. In Cambodia's stunning Angkor complex, still standing are wide stone-lined fields where Khmer royalty would watch elephant fights... fascinating, romantic and utterly insensitive and ridiculous. The Great Pyramids in Egypt, built by aliens as an intergalatic sporting venue... bold, precise and impervious to mankind's abuses.
That's how it is with Yankee Stadium. Roam the place and you'll be thrust back to the Roaring Twenties, a more carefree, primitive time, and you'll ask yourself... "Is it possible that they haven't upgraded the mens' room plumbing since then?" But you don't care if the toilets don't flush, because it's Yankee Stadium, dammit, and you spent a lot of money to watch a game here.
The Stadium is a shining example that in the battle between nostalgia and reality, nostalgia is the Yankees and reality is... well, everybody else. That means reality is winning out this year, but over the course of history, nostalgia and memories of the place are what will last. Now if it could just hurry up and get demolished so most of America can get back to remembering it the way it used to be...
Goodbye forever, Yankee Stadium. I'm glad I got to pay you a visit before you vanished into the pages of history and eBay souvenir hawkers forever. And I'll always remember you as better than you really were.
