Slow-burning epic in City That Never Smokes

Keith Duggan/Sideline Cut: Sometimes the narrative of sport outstrips the actual event. So it was in New York on Thursday evening, according to some friends who keep bar in Manhattan and have all week been regularly and merrily accosted by boisterous Yankee fans and interlopers from Boston feeling brash and happy enough to predict they would win it all.

The Yankees and Red Sox series had everything. A rivalry that seems as ancient as the Constitution, best read about on parchment paper and misty from a thousand sub-plots originating from probably the most famous sporting myth of all time, the Curse of the Bambino. America markets its sports with ingenuity and manages to portray even the young brat that is the NBA as steeped in hoary tales and legend.

Baseball, though, has genuine longevity and has been blessed with characters too rich for fiction and schemers and plots that capture the mood of the more majestic eras of the last century so that, alone among passages of American life, baseball commands understatement.

The old cities, the vast boroughs of Chicago and New York and Boston which still draw the Irish towards them like magnets, regard the fortunes, ailing or otherwise, of their baseball teams as being as representative of the city as the echoing museums, great iron bridges or accents.

New York was electric on Thursday afternoon, the fans caught up in the emotion and privilege of attending the culmination of a series that was writ into sporting lore even as it unfolded.

My friend managed to score tickets for game one in Yankee Stadium for about $70, but hadn't the faintest hope of attending the final game, where tickets were trading at around $5,000. So he decided to work that evening, engaging the cock-a-hoop fans from both teams in conversation about some or all of the epic dramas and petty bitching that have elevated this particular pennant series into the pantheon of classics.

Just when he had them warmed up enough, just when he had bought their confidence, he would casually denounce both teams and declare himself a Mets fan. His customers would begin frothing at the mouth and the atmosphere would build and build towards the denouement that occurred early Friday morning, Irish time.

It would have been fun to have been in that bar for that game, but strange also. Much of the time was spent talking about the lack of cigarette smoke. The other friend, contrary at the best of times, is rigorously against smoking except while he is at work tending bar, where he confesses to enjoying the odd puff. Business, he confided in a tone to end all carping on the subject, is down since Bloomberg ushered through the blanket ban on smoking. And New York has changed. Who wants to wake up in the City That Never Smokes?

The friend was worried about the impact a similar imposition would have on bars here in Ireland. Irish and American bars have common ground in that in most of them - in the real bars, that is, earthy, oblivious to fashion, with little natural light and with scarred counters made from quality wood - you will find smokers and conversations about sport. It is unvarying.

Being naturally entrepreneurial, New Yorkers have made a new sport out of being forced on to the streets in order to strike up. Pavement smoking is now, apparently, the best way to find a date in the city. You can imagine it too: a beautiful Fall evening with the buildings all lit up and the sky still pink, an eloquent young man, a damsel in search of a gold-tipped lighter. If you get "caught between the moon and New York City" and all of that.

But the friend was unable to predict such amorous footpath chemistry if, for instance, you were to get caught between the moon and Ballyhaunis. "Cos it rains too much at home," he explained sympathetically. You'd make a fool of yourself with the damp matchbox. The top of the smoke would get ruined by drizzle. It would all end in tears.

The fine thing about baseball is you could, if so inclined, slouch off your barstool, stroll outside and puff on one, or indeed an entire packet, of your favourite smokes happy you are missing nothing more than the manager stoically chewing tobacco or a pitcher fine-tuning his equipment. In every sense, the game is slow-burning.

It will be different over here, however. There is a definite co-relation between our native games and smoking. In the 1970s, it was not uncommon to see the Bainisteoir nervously puffing away in the shadows of the team dugout in Croke Park. And didn't certain men of that era, bulky and fast-walking and restless, seem to go around with a fag deposited in the corner of their mouths all day and every day? Men who could recite poetry, fix car engines and turn cartwheels without ever adjusting their cigarette.

We all know of players who got by rigorous training schedules by pausing for a smoke before going through the gates and two hours later, red-faced and devastated, supine on the dressing-room floor, being resuscitated by the aid of a companion dispersing smoke with a bellows. There are even players, granite corner backs who outsprinted everyone on the field with provincially famous left hooks, who would carry a restorative smoke or two onto the training field.

And nobody dared challenge them. As for the dressing-room following a particularly big win, that was the smoke to end all smokes for those so inclined. All around them stood athletes resolutely against the habit but they understood that there was no point in even trying to come between their friend and that indescribable pleasure of the first puff.

All of this is disappearing, of course, but it is not quite gone. Perhaps next January will change all that. As for the bars, it is hard to imagine watching a tense All-Ireland final alongside smokers denied their special craving. Pubs had best start installing revolving doors.

Watching sport that you even remotely care about is a stressful business. It makes fidgets out of people. They need things to do with their hands, their mouths, need to do anything to help them keep their eyes on the screen. Tensions will be keen among the puffing fraternity when the championship comes around again.

As for events across the pond, well the Yankees won with the last pitch of the game. The Curse prevailed and the residents of Beantown trundled back up the grimy coast more convinced than ever that the Red Sox are stuck with a negative destiny. Imagine the tension through the final inning in bars in the five boroughs and along the boulevards that enclose Fenway Park in Boston. All smoke-free zones, all filled with the afflicted cradling their packets with the glossy health warnings, one eye glued to the TV screen, the other fixed on the nearest exit. Caught between agony and ecstasy, living and dying for their next breath. The fun is coming our way, folks.