What was NY’s Best Sports Moment?

This is a blog not just about my two favorite teams: the Yanks and Giants, but all NY sports and sports at large. 

 

So what was a better NY Sports moment: the Yanks winning it all in 1996 or this year’s Giants superbowl victory over the previously undefeated NE Patriots?

 

First off, even though this all went down over a month ago, what a superbowl?! That was one for the ages. I still haven’t gotten over it. Honestly, any Giants fan out there who says that they fully expected the Giants to win that game is lying. It was an incredible upset. Check out some cool Giants NFL jerseys here.

 

But the greatest NY Sports memory I have is from 1996, which was my senior year in college. I was living in NYC, where I was born. (FYI: I grew in upper Manhattan where you just wound up routing for the Yanks, even in the dark days of the ‘80s). While the Yanks did win in ’77 & ’78, I was too young to remember any of that, least of all the Bucky Dent moment. So my whole life up until 1996, I had to endure the fact that my favorite team’s best days were way behind it. The Red Sox were fielding much better teams in the late ‘80’s, winning two divisions from 1986-1989, while the Yanks seemed destined for perennial mismanagement and dysfunctionalality.

 

But things did turn around towards the middle of the ‘90s, and the Yanks became true contenders thanks to packing a good farm system while King George was temporarily banned from the game. They clinched their first playoff birth in 14 years in 1995. But while they were a good team, they were not the dominant team of the era, which was the Atlanta Braves. The Braves had arguably the best starting staff in the modern baseball era: Smoltz, Glavine and Maddux. The Braves also had an intimidating offense led by a much younger Andruw (and Chipper) Jones. They were the defending champs in 1996 and heavily favored to repeat World Series victories. Frankly speaking, the yanks weren’t given much of a chance in ‘96, and many people don’t realize that Yanks played the scrappy underdog role quite well that year. Put another way: they weren’t the ‘evil empire’ (yet). Click here for yankees hats.

 

The Yanks dropped games 1 and 2 AT HOME. (I was actually at Game 1, which was my first and still only World Series trip. It all felt like Christmas Day, until the game started. The Yanks were shellacked 12-1.) They then had the very daunting task of having to beat that great staff in Atlanta for at least two games. They did win a rather unexciting Game 3. But it was games 4 and 5 that I will always remember, especially the comeback from a 6-1 deficit in game 4 via that Jim Leyritz homerun. But few people seem to remember Game 5, which was a rare pitchers duel that resulted in a 1-0 Yanks win. That game showcased Andy Pettite as a true big-game pitcher. I was more on the edge of my seat for that game than for any other game in any sport in my life. When people say baseball is boring, they never watched this sports masterpiece.

 

So the bottom line is that the Yanks win in ’96 was more exciting than this year’s Giants win for two reasons: 1) the Yanks hadn’t won any kind of title in a generation—remember the Giants had been to the playoffs several times over the years and were in Superbowl XXXV and 2) the edge-of-your-seat excitement in fall ’96 went on for a week: imagine 2-3 Superbowl XLIIs in as many days. What’s also interesting is that the Giants victory was so unthinkable that there was really little expectation of a championship, and this somehow blunts the experience. You need some level of expectation of winning to make a championship run more intense and sweeter for the fan. There were people who predicted in ’96 that the Yanks could go pretty far, and there was thus some expectation, which the Yanks validated in ’96.

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