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Rivalry

"I had a New York fan six rows back tell me to 'Sit my punk @$$ down'"

By Mike Oseroff

Mike Oseroff is Youth Radio’s resident sports commentator and columnist. Keep checking this space for his weekly updates! You can email him at sports@youthradio.org.

We always hear about the classic rivalries, the great matchups of two teams with storied histories with each other and the dramatic games between them. But what does it really mean to have a rivalry in sports? And how and why do they come to pass?

A week ago the Oakland A’s set their top three records for attendance this year, all in one three-game series. Why? The New York Yankees were in town. Crowds of 40,000 plus poured into the Net on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, to witness two heavyweights going at it pound for pound. The huge outcomes were well over the A’s average single game attendance record of only about 13,000. Only a few thousand of the bunch were Yankee fans, and the weather wasn’t anything special.

So what gives? How did the Bronx Bombers pull 25,000 extra fans off their butts and into the Coliseum? Hint hint: it’s the rivalry, and the A’s and Yankees definitely have a big one going. When they get together, “a state of competition” is an understatement. They hate each other. Their fans hate each other. I had a New York fan six rows back tell me to “Sit my punk @$$ down,” while cheering at Saturday’s game. People threw stuff at players and at each other. Chants of “Yankees Suck!” emanated throughout the stadium. Fainter cries of “A’s Blow!” did as well. It was madness. It was rivalry.

How did this rivalry come about? Why do they hate each other? Simple. The A’s have played small market underdog to the mighty Yanks for four years now. Twice the A’s have had their World Series dreams crushed in two straight years by the Yankees in the playoffs. New York represents everything that is wrong with baseball. They are like a little rich kid in a candy store buying everything, like the A’s best player a year ago, Jason Giambi, who the Yankees lured with a fatter and tastier contract then the A’s could muster. It’s a rivalry based on hatred, a mutual loathing between the two teams. And while it is one of the most exciting rivalries you will find, there are many other types of rivalries that stir up just as much electricity and excitement.

From the ridiculous to the infamous, it’s time to take a walk down rivalry lane.

Turf Rivals
We start with the “territorial” rivalries, two teams within a short radius of each other, who vie for the bragging rights in their geographic area. This rivalry is exemplified by classics such as the NFL’s Packers and Bears, two Midwest powerhouses who over the years tried to tame the other while attempting to stay warm in the frigid temperatures that define Chicago and Green Bay in the wintertime. Then you’ve got your inner city rivalries, such as in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, where baseball teams from opposite sides of town try to prove whose section is tops. Perhaps the most notorious territorial rivalry is between NCAA Basketball’s North Carolina Tar Heels and Duke Blue Devils. Not only have these two teams maintained a consistent level of success for decades, the two schools are a mere eight miles apart.

Of course not every territorial rivalry brings surefire enmity. Through inter-league play, Major League Baseball has tried to make rivals out of ridiculous combos such as Florida and Tampa Bay, and Minnesota and Milwaukee. And even though territorial rivalries can be a blast for the fans, bad blood doesn’t always stir up just because two teams are in the same time zone. But lets move on.

Who Is Number One?
Next are the “who is number one” rivalries, which form when two very successful teams realize only one can be the best, and do whatever it takes to push their team to that level. An example is the rivalry between the NBA’s Lakers and Celtics. The teams are the two winningest franchises in the history of basketball, with Boston owning the most championships, and Los Angeles owning the second most.

In the 1980s Larry Bird and Magic Johnson staged so many unbelievable battles between their respective teams that they alone essentially propelled basketball to a whole new level of popularity, and their rivalries made the game what it is today. Similar rivalries such as the NHL’s Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadians, and the NFL’s Washington Redskins and Dallas Cowboys also fit this category. The teams play each other so competitively so often, that a victory over the other is sometimes just as special as a playoff victory.

Bad Blood
Then you’ve got your “incident rivalries,” rivalries where something, at some point in time, triggered a letting loose of the floodgates of bad blood. The A’s and Yankees fit into this category, but the hate these two teams share for each other is nothing compared to some of the other infamous rivalries, such as the Heat and the Knicks in the NBA. Some say it all began when legendary coach Pat Riley left the Knicks to lead the expansion Heat in the early 90s. Tempers flared again in the playoffs when countless fights between players would break out. Some of the finer memories were when PJ Brown of the Heat flipped point guard Charlie Ward onto his head while battling for a rebound. Or when Knicks Coach Jeff Van Gundy grabbed Heat center Alonzo Mourning’s legs to prevent him from kicking his players in a notorious brawl.

But one of the best is undoubtedly the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. In 1918 when Boston sold their top prospect, Babe Ruth, to the Yanks for mere cash (which some regard as the dumbest mistake in sports history), the rivalry was on. The Babe went on to become the greatest home run hitter of his time, and the Sox became supposedly “cursed” for their ignorance. Curse or not, the Yankees went on to win a world best 26 championships after that point, and the Red Sox haven’t won one since. Today the fiercest of rivalries rages on, as the Yanks continue to dominate, and the Red Sox desperately try to shake the curse and the monkey from their back.

Plain Hate
Finally, there is the “hate ‘em because they’re there” rivalries, mostly divisional feuds that start small, but can escalate if the teams play competitively against each other for a long enough time. The Kansas City Chiefs and Oakland Raiders rivalry doesn’t fall into any of the other three categories, yet they share one of the best in pro sports, simply because the two teams started playing tough every time they played, and it just got more and more heated. Kings-Lakers, Warriors-Lakers, Dodgers-Giants, Eagles-Buccaneers, Red Sox-Devil Rays. Nothing triggered the bad blood. They aren’t really territorial rivals, and they aren’t the “best” in their games either. Even if their season means nothing, and they lose almost all of their games, they play to beat the other, just to say they did. In a sense this type is the purest of rivalries.

So there you have it, rivalries explored and defined in a nutshell. And while from the outside the word seems to do nothing except fill a few extra seats at the stadium, the rivalry is one of the single greatest elements in the world of sports because no matter how dismal and how hopeless your season may be, you can forget all of it by beating your rival. And even if it is only for a fleeting moment, you’re a champion.

Check out more of Mike's columns!