"Imagine having to take the 7 train to the ballpark, next to some queer…" -John Rocker, to Sports Illustrated, 12/23/99

I really don't know why I still watch baseball or any other sport; most of the guys who are considered to be in their prime are about my age, which means they were old enough to be the very jocks who stuffed me into lockers in high school, knocked my books out of my six-megaton bookbag, and assumed I was gay.  If only they hadn't caught me ass-fucking the point guard from the basketball team… but that's another story. 

In any case, when you're an office temp by day and a stand-up comic who just about has to hand out free blowjobs to get stage time in half-empty basements on Sunday, you need something to provide you with joy in your life.  Believing that wearing the same lucky shirt during every game of a six-game winning streak and screaming obscenities at a television actually helped a team from your native city win a game that doesn't affect the universe in any significant way can do just that.  So it was vicarious yet satisfying excitement I felt when the Mets, the team I had foolishly grown up rooting for, pulled off a major trade for Mike Hampton, a desperately-needed left-handed ace for the starting rotation.

More importantly, John Rocker had just made a complete asshole of himself.

Even non-baseball fans (you know, people with lives) know who John Rocker is now.  The ace reliever for the Atlanta Braves had launched into a hate-filled diatribe so venomous I actually looked for it at this site first.  Turns out that in an act of genius only a hunter from Macon, Georgia like Rocker could pull off, he rambled into the ear of a Sports Illustrated reporter who promptly published the drivel.  The details of Rocker's little manifesto are practically legend now, but to quickly review: he rattled off a laundry list of why he hates New York and New Yorkers, citing that it is filled with "purple-haired kids," "queers with AIDS," and single mothers; he claimed he was "not a very big fan of foreigners" in New York and wondered "how the hell did they get into this country?" About the only thing Rocker didn't do was ask the reporter what branch of the Jewish-controlled media he was from, and refer to his strikeouts as "final solutions."

Needless to state, this worthy-of-Ted-Nugent hate-a-palooza sent the baseball world into a tizzy as the Braves organization and Major League Baseball quickly condemned Rocker's comments.   The assumption among most in the media was that Rocker would now be a marked man across the country, certain to be booed in every stadium the Braves visited, including their own.

About the only thing Rocker didn't do was ask the reporter what branch of the Jewish-controlled media he was from, and refer to his strikeouts as "final solutions."

Now wait just a minute…

First off, when exactly has it been unpopular to bash gay people and foreigners in Atlanta and the South as a whole?  The Atlanta media and the Braves organization moved quickly to distance themselves from Rocker, saying that he in no way represented the views and opinions of most Southerners.  Of course not--that's why Jesse Helms has been re-elected Senator 612,000 times in North Carolina; that's why a former Grand Poo-Bah or whatever of the Ku Klux Klan like David Duke can even daydream of being Governor of Louisiana; that's why you can still make an Atlanta native cry like a slapped child at the sight of a lit match.

This man is a HERO in his own land.  A Web site (created by a Mets fan) dedicated to his ridicule has been flooded lately with postings from people with handles like "The Rebel" complaining about the "bellyaching from fags" about how "America is letting in any piece of human garbage."  Actually, I kind of agree with that last one, and it's a problem I can solve.  Just give me a saw, access to the Mason Dixon line, and enough time…

Second, since when has it been unpopular to bash New York in any part of the country?   I'm from New York, but moved to Boston a bunch of years ago.  If there's one lesson I've learned from living here, it's that if you want to get a cab in this town, do not under any circumstances wear a Knicks' jacket.  It also doesn't hurt to be white and visibly heterosexual, but the Knicks' jacket thing is what I've experienced.  In this past year alone, the Boston Herald ran a front-page headline that read "WE HATE NY" and later on ran an article that proudly described a drunken schmuck wearing a Celtics shirt beating up a drunken schmuck wearing a Knicks' shirt at a Knicks-Celtics game.

The "Curse of the Bambino" leads New York's pissed-off "Sister City" to rash action.

This town has had a New York-inspired inferiority complex for the past thousand years or so, and it shows no signs of letting up.  For some twisted reason, sports have become the focal point of the whole idiotic neurosis.  So let me get one thing straight with my adopted fellow citizens in the modern-day Athens:  IF THE RED SOX BEAT THE YANKEES FOUR OUT OF SEVEN TIMES IN OCTOBER, IT WILL NOT SOMEHOW FREE BOSTON FROM SOME FICTIONAL MYSTICAL CURSE.  IT WILL NOT CAUSE NEW YORKERS TO MARCH DOWN COMMONWEALTH AVENUE IN CHAINS BEARING PIZZA AND PORNOGRAPHY AS TRIBUTE. 

Do you honestly think that one of your teams beating one of our teams is going to make stop and say "well, I guess they sure fixed our little red wagon; turned out it was US living in the lame city all this time!"  And if you must focus all your angst on sports, at least don’t focus it on New Yorkers like me who are just here idiotically trying to jump-start a comedy career and wondering why they can't get a beer past dusk on a Sunday.

And this phenomenon is hardly unique to Boston.  John Rocker's own Atlanta must look up at New York and go nuts; "all these years we thought a cable company and a Coke factory were all you needed for a real city, but now look at them Yanks!"  Chicago, same story:  "Look at us, we have wind and Oprah Winfrey!  Let's revise that a little…wind not CAUSED by Oprah Winfrey…very often.”

The worst of it all is, New Yorkers don't really hate any of these places.  We actually kind of like them; but until any of you can prove you have a city that is at all superior to New York in any important way (economics, the arts, availability of nudie booths), you will always feel inferior to us, and thus need to make yourselves feel better by claiming we're bringing about the doom of civilization with our all our weirdoes, filth and criminals. Would it be asking too much for everyone to relax?  To realize that games are just games, that John Rocker is just a small-minded fuck like most of the jocks you remember from high school? And once and for all, please realize that if you're not New York, it just makes you a less cool city, not the village of the damned.

Unless, of course, you live in L.A. We are not barbarians.