There are times, as it pertains to sports, when those of us who inhabit this great metropolis could stand to heed the words of our sternest elementary school teachers.
“Mister (or Missy), do you ever listen to what comes out of your mouth?”
Yes, we aren’t shy about sharing our ever-widening melancholy over the fact that it is now 3,985 days since we last saw a team representing New York City win a championship in one of the four major sports, and that we have borne witness to a lot of disappointment and a lot of misery since Eli Manning dropped one out of the sky and into Mario Manningham’s breadbasket on Feb. 5, 2012.
We tend to think of this dormant decade-plus as our own personal purgatory.
It is hopeful to know we aren’t alone.
It is helpful to be able to dial up a native Minnesotan.
“My childhood,” Steve Rushin says, “is all about losing Super Bowls and losing presidential elections, and not coming particularly close in either.”
You know Rushin as a part of Sports Illustrated’s permanent pantheon of writers, and if you are fortunate you also know him as the author of two engaging memoirs about growing up in Bloomington, Minn., “Sting-Ray Afternoon” and “Nights in White Castle.”
Rushin’s credentials are impeccable: his native city was once home to Met Stadium and the Met Center. He sold concessions at Met Stadium, where it could get so cold you’d need an ice pick to down your beer (and that was at a Twins-Royals game in June).
“Oh, I know what people think about Minnesota,” he said. “They think ‘Minnesota, Michigan, Milwaukee, it’s all the same place.’”
And, yes: Rushin and other Minnesotans are well aware of the almost comical sway the Yankees have held over the Twins for damn near 20 years (just as a helpful reminder: the Yankees are 98-38 against the Twinkies since the start of the 2002 season, and have won 13 straight times in the postseason).
Of course, none of that will matter Sunday, when the Vikings host the Giants at U.S. Bank Stadium in an NFC wild-card game. Neither will the fact that the Islanders swept the North Stars in five games in the 1981 Stanley Cup Final, nor the old Minneapolis Lakers beating the Knicks in the NBA Finals back-to-back years in the early ’50s (narrowly avoiding ignominy in ’52 when the Knicks rallied from an 0-3 hole to force a Game 7).
And, really, the three times the Vikings and Giants have met in the playoffs won’t much matter, either … although it isn’t 90 seconds into a conversation Thursday that Rushin says, without prompting: “Forty-one to nothing.”
That was the score of the 2000 NFC Championship game at old Giants Stadium, which more than made up (in these parts, anyway) for the Vikings, three years before, beating the Giants in the same building 23-22 in one of the more haunting playoff losses in Giants’ history. If you’re a sports fan, you get it. Some losses just stick to your ribs.
“I like to think of myself,” Rushin says, “as cautiously pessimistic.”
He is hopeful that the Vikings will prevail Sunday, of course, because that was the team of his childhood, a team that lost four times in the Super Bowl between 1970 and 1977, allowing him to take in stride his home-state senator’s 49-2 blowout in the 1984 presidential election when Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale everywhere except Minnesota and the District of Columbia.
“You could say we have a slight inferiority complex,” Rushin says. “When I was growing up, so many shows I watched were set in New York City. I wanted to be Oscar Madison, a New York sportswriter. It was almost weird that we had this one very popular show, ‘Mary Tyler Moore,’ and it was set in Minneapolis.”
He laughs.
“Of course, as fast as she could, Mary’s best friend, Rhoda Morgenstern, moved back to New York for a spin-off, right?”
Rushin will be watching, and hoping, and knowing that there is sometimes peril in faith. A few years ago, watching the Vikings play the Eagles in the NFC title game, knowing a win would allow the Vikes to be the first team to host a Super Bowl, he opened his laptop, called up the Delta site, saw that as the game started seats were disappearing since so many of his fellow Minnesota ex-pats had the same idea.
“About halfway through the first quarter,” he says, “I closed my laptop.”
He doesn’t expect a Super Bowl trip this time around. But the playoffs do offer something for him, and for the others who believe in the sanctity of purple vestments.
“Minnesotans will take any chance to lord it over New York,” he says. “Even momentarily.”
