America At Large:As they looked forward to it a month ago, New Yorkers had expectantly circled the first weekend in October on their calendars. With both the Mets and Yankees in the baseball play-offs, a heavyweight championship fight at Madison Square Garden on Saturday night, and the hometown Jets and Giants squaring off against one another in American football on Sunday, the armchair sports fan in the City that Never Sleeps figured to be like a kid in a candy store, bedazzled and wondering which way to direct the remote. It couldn't get much better than this, could it?
Somewhere along the line things went badly wrong.
The Mets, who as late as mid-September enjoyed a seven-game cushion atop the National League East, experienced a horrifying meltdown, losing 12 of their last 17 games to be knocked out of the playoffs altogether. The shine went off the Garden fight two weeks ago the when WBC champion, Oleg Maskaev, withdrew with a herniated disc. Although the show will go on - the Nigerian challenger Samuel Peter was subsequently elevated to "interim champion" and will fight the journeyman Jameel McCline in the main event.
The Jets and Giants, playoff teams last season, both lost their first two games this year and will bring respective records of 1-3 and 2-2 to Sunday's encounter at the Meadowlands.
And while the Yankees open their divisional playoffs in Cleveland tonight, the Bronx Bombers are there as the wild-card team, having failed to win the American League Eastern Division for the first time in a decade.
The funereal atmosphere already gripping the Big Apple was further exacerbated on Wednesday. On literally the day the basketball Knicks opened their preseason camp down in Charleston, a federal jury in New York found coach (and president) Isiah Thomas and Madison Square Garden CEO James Dolan guilty of sexual harassment charges and awarded former team executive Anucha Brown Sanders $11.6 million (€8.14 million) in punitive damages for having created (Thomas) and sustained (Dolan) "a hostile work environment".
In the first week of September the Mets had giddily dispatched a mass email to season-ticket holders, providing the details of a lottery system through which they could purchase playoff tickets. Special field-level boxes for seating post-season dignitaries had already been erected at Shea Stadium last week before the team played its final home stand.
Even after what by any standard had been a monumental collapse, the Mets went into the final game of the season last Sunday needing only a win to keep their postseason hopes alive. They gave up seven runs in the top of the first inning, en route to an 8-1 loss to the Florida Marlins that consigned their season to oblivion.
Two days later the team took the extraordinary step of sending out another mass email, this one an apology to fans conceding "we did not meet our expectations - or yours," and concluding with "you deserve better".
It was clear enough at Don King's press conference yesterday that the wind had been sucked out of the atmosphere one usually associates with a big fight at the Mecca of Boxing. Billing Peter-McCline as a title fight - even an "interim" title fight doesn't make it one, and the result won't have much more significance than the one between Kevin McBride and Andrew Golota preceding it.
James Dolan and the other Garden honchos were conspicuously absent from King's lunchtime reception, and the unseemly harassment suit seems to have cast a pall over the "world's most famous arena". Not only was the jury told of a leering Thomas's repeated innuendos to Mrs Brown Sanders, but testimony included sordid details like (married) Knicks guard Stephon Marbury engaging in sex with a team intern in the back seat of a limo parked outside a Manhattan strip club.
Although Thomas retains his job this morning, the Daily News columnist Mike Lupica wrote after the verdict that the team president "should have headed straight uptown to the Garden to clear out his office, not been put on a private plane that would take him to training camp in South Carolina".
The respective starts of the Jets and Giants have already ensured that Sunday's game will have little significance other than to the bragging-rights partisans of the teams.
Which leaves only the team known to the rest of the baseball world as "the evil empire".
Despite a run of 10 straight divisional titles, the Yanks haven't played in the World Series since 2003, or won one since 2000, and were beaten out by the archrival Red Sox for the first time since 1996.
It might appear on the surface that the Yanks represent the Big Apple's last best hope, but the truth of the matter is that there are probably more New Yorkers who despise the Bronx Bombers than openly root for them.
This number includes not only Mets fans, but also old-timers retaining an allegiance to the Dodgers and Giants, who both fled to California half a century ago, those who despise the team's megalomaniac owner George Steinbrenner, and those who simply harbour a congenital aversion to lining up behind the overdog. (As the New York publisher and bon vivant Bennett Cerf put it many years ago, "rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for US Steel").
In short, what New Yorkers had anticipated as the best of times has become for many the worst of times. And for some of them it's only going to get worse.
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