Grew up in Brooklyn when the Dodgers played there.
Everyone, OK almost everyone, loved our Bums (the Dodgers).
We tolerated NY Giants fans, considered them as nothing more than amiable dolts, more to be pitied than anything else.
Then there were the upstart Yankee fans. They always had an attitude and were usually engaged in fights during recess or after school. No Brooklyn Dodger fan kid ever would have anything to do with a Yankee fan kid other than trying to knock his block off.
But the Yankee fans were right, their team was usually the best. I remember watching the world series on our diminutive GE TV (six inch screen) with my mom and day and seeing the the Yankees clean our clocks.
And so we would say there was always next year, always hoping the next year would let us beat the stuffing out of the hated Yankees. And we did so until 1955.
And then, in the seventh game of the world series, us versus them, Johnny Podres threw a shutout, and the Bums won their first championship.
The town erupted. There may have been no joy in Mudville, but Brooklyn went crazy.
Had we a mountain like they do in South Dakota, the faces of Johnny Podres, Sandy Amoros, Roy Campanella, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, et al, would have been carved into it. It would be a shrine to this day. (Course it would have had to been a very big mountain.)
But then the owner of the team decided it could make more moolah by extracting it from Brooklyn and moving it to LA, leaving many small Brooklynites with broken hearts.
I am sure there are many departed Brooklynites who have shunned Heaven and decided to spend eternity elsewhere, just so long as they could make the demonic torture of fat old Walter O'Mally, the guy who moved the Bums to LA, all the more miserable.
Sorry about the blog, but now I am a baseball fan with no allegiance.
So excuse me if I don't embrace the idea of opening day.
In school I had to read a story called 'A Man Without a Country", and I felt sad.
Well I have a country, and God bless it, but a baseball team, no.
Sigh.
