My family spent last week in New York, the cultural capital of our nation, a place renowned for its symphony, ballet and theater -- so we visited the Cake Boss bakery across the Hudson in Hoboken, N.J., rode the Cyclone at Coney Island and listened to a lot of radio sports talk as I drove around Brooklyn making wrong turns.
Somewhere there's a photo of me and my teenage daughters rattling down that old wooden roller coaster at Coney. The evidence is clear, your honor, that the most frightened look belongs to the old guy.
As far as that Cake Boss goes, the cable TV star probably wasn't even awake when we found ourselves 85th in line outside his bakery at 7:30 on a Saturday morning, my 13-year-old's idea. (Save your car fare, cake fans: A bakery is just a bakery, even with a pastry celebrity's imprimatur.)
It's the New York sports jabber I want to talk about. Pittsburgh, of course, has its own stations devoted to testosterone-laden conversations about bats, balls and the athletic felony of the moment. But our renowned sports town was late to the party, going into 24/7 sports talk only in the late 1990s. WFAN in New York launched about a decade before and, even after being cloned from coast to coast, there's no other station quite like it.
That's because of the voices, those Noo Yawk, Joisey and Lawn Guyland voices. Before WFAN, radio people talked like, well, radio people. Even in "New York, New York, the town so nice they named it twice," as the Top 40 deejays used to say, radio voices had that could-be-from-anywhere sound, as antiseptic as the plastic strip that used to be placed across a hotel room toilet.
WFAN, in contrast, was more like walking into the men's room to find two clowns screaming at each other from adjoining stalls.
I was immediately enchanted.
I was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island, in a place kind of like Shaler without the hills. In my youth -- or rather, yoot -- I had an accent so thick people on Long Island made fun of it. But after more than 35 years on the mainland of the U.S., my old accent comes back only when I get mad, watch Joe Pesci movies or listen to WFAN.
My daughters have no interest in sports, but even they were entertained. Or at least they were kind enough not to ask to change the station. I listened long enough to fix on some of the differences between New York and Pittsburgh fans.
In New York, where one can be a Mets fan or Yankees fan but not both, it hasn't been a great baseball summer. The Yankees have about $100 million in payroll injured (heh, heh). The Mets, not expected to go anywhere this season, aren't.
Still, one thing hasn't changed. Just as the default position of the Pirates fan is panic after any loss, the default position of the Yankees fan is smugness after any win. Yankees fans are like Steelers fans in this sense: They expect to win just because of the symbol on the jersey. So after beating the Minnesota Twins 2-zip on a rainy Friday night, the Saturday morning host was penciling in a weekend of wins against the Midwestern patsies.
"If they played the Twins all 162 games,'' he opined, "they'd win 130 at least, am I right?''
(This just in: The Yankees lost the next two games to the Twins in "The Stadium.'' Heh.)
Mets fans are more like Pirates fans because they've known more pain. The Mets lost to the Pirates, 3-2, in extra innings Friday night at PNC Park, which meant the traditional Saturday morning pummeling of the scapegoat. In this case it was 26-year-old Mets first baseman Ike Davis, who is currently hitting like Bette Davis. Mets fans did everything but suggest Davis be driven to Staten Island to re-enact that scene from "The Godfather'' where Clemenza says to leave the gun and take the cannoli.
I recognize that frustration. It's the same one Pirates fans shared as recently as April when their young slugger, Pedro Alvarez, could hit nothing but air. Now Alvarez is an All-Star.
As I drove across New Jersey for Pennsylvania and, finally, out of WFAN's range, I smiled as I thought of the Pirates in a pennant race after 20 consecutive losing seasons. Then I went to the game Sunday and watched them lose to the Mets.
I knew just what to do: panic.
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