Detective Gerard Patrick Shevlin of the New York City Police Department stands on the first base line of Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, New York, alongside dozens of other men and women in uniform, staring at a somber flag waving in left field, hands over heart.

 

           One week earlier, Shevlin, a Korean War veteran and 43-year 1st-grade homicide detective with the Queens District Attorney, is reading the New York Daily News in “his” chair with coffee and a buttered everything bagel at his side when his wife, Kathleen, screams “Oh my god, Jerry, look,” from the kitchen of their Oceanside home. He jumps into his city-issued Lincoln Mercury and drives as far as the blockades will allow him, his city — the fellow New York Yankees, Giants and Rangers fans he dedicated his life protecting — aflame. With nothing but eye goggles for protection from the violent ash, he digs for a nephew-in-law, family, friends, friends of family and family of friends, anyone. He declines the protective facemask before it is made mandatory for all volunteers.

 

            Twelve years later, now 78 and still a part-time detective, Shevlin is diagnosed with multiple myeloma — cancer of the blood. Despite 60 years of smoking and countless encounters with a bullet, my grandfather is in perfect health besides the myeloma contracted during the days following September 11th 2001.  Don’t feel bad for him, he says, he’s not sick, he just has a little bit of New York City in his blood.

 

Oh say does that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave? Play ball.  

 

 

            On September 11, 2001, buildings, lives and a false sense of security — the idea that the United States was invincible in an increasingly dangerous world — collapsed into a cloud of ash. On September 20th, President George W. Bush spoke to the world, challenging, “either you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists” (Bush, 1). In doing so, Bush left no room for a grey area, no room for a tie game — you are either with “us” the winners or with the inevitable losers. Through a new, transnational war on terrorism, the government sought to remind the world of its superpower status, implanting itself into the Middle East in a fight that continues today. What happened on American soil in the days, weeks and years that followed was a slow, much less storied restoration of that impenetrable identity. Here, there was a similar repatriation of indomitable American spirit through something a tad more innocent — sport.

 

            When taken out of context, the New York Yankees played a baseball game on September 17, 2001, just as they had in the past, just as they would do in the future; but this game meant much more to the city that made them a baseball dynasty, more to the nation whose team it became in that night. The crowd held “Never Forget” signs and sported red, white and blue apparel. Together, they sang “God Bless America,” a would-be staple of New York baseball for years to follow — each a sign of patriotism. What’s more, the sellout crowd boiled in moments of suspense and erupted after each run scored, and the Yankees went on to win the game with relative ease. Without analysis, columnists called it ‘patriotism,’ chronicling the ways in which the Yankees became America’s team on that night. Calling the Yankees’ game patriotic, though, is too simplistic. Instead, New York Yankees’ game and the team’s subsequent World-Series run was much more than one of the many healing methods used to reunite a broken city; it became a microcosm and just one example of an all-conquering, winner-take-all patriotism that is characteristic of both American sport and battle-ready identity. Furthermore, an examination of the 2001 New York Yankees provides a lens through which we can understand a uniquely American patriotism, one that is inherently intertwined with winners and losers. Because when those Yankees won a baseball game, they won it for their city and their country. It was about restoring the type of patriotism that was challenged on 9/11, the one proclaimed by President Bush  — we will win the game, and we will win the war. This is not to say the patriotism of sports is the kind of patriotism should guide America. Perhaps we should have sought understanding and become a more globally aware America. But for better or worse, the victorious Yankees — who went on to win a World Series over the Arizona Diamondbacks — symbolically avenged the American that was attacked on 9/11, the repatriating a winner-take-all patriotism.

 

           The symbols present at Yankee Stadium on September 17, 2001 — the flags, the songs, the colors — were undoubtedly doused in patriotism, their healing power well documented in memory. First and foremost, the game served as a welcome distraction and a means by which the city and the nation could begin the healing process simply by resuming the uniquely American fall pastime. On some level, it acted as just that: a pastime. “I think we gave people something to cheer for three hours a day, which was good,” Yankees captain Derek Jeter told ESPN on the 10-year anniversary (Marchand, 1). Among others, Jeter visited local hospitals to bring a smile to victims and walked around Ground Zero to reflect. More literally, Yankee Stadium became a microcosm of the city itself; 55,000 people from all walks of life, from Mayor Rudy Giuliani in his box seats to the average Joe in the nosebleeds shared the same space. They cheered and heckled and chanted and waved fans in unison. Players wore NYPD and FDNY baseball caps and uniforms adorned in stars and stripes — not just in New York, but in ballparks around the country — honoring local law enforcement, firefighters and ambulance core members. Players sung the same healing tune. “Baseball is a fabric of this country. It can be a process of turning things around,” said Philadelphia Phillies’ outfielder Doug Glanville (Walker, 1). “Especially in the playoffs, I thought a lot of people were watching us and pulling for us. I was playing a game. It didn't change anything, but it had people's mind off of it for a couple of hours per day,” Jeter said (Marchand, 1). Derek Jeter and the entire New York Yankees’ roster was playing a game, doing what they get paid to do, this time with heavy hearts.

 

           Though sports columnists who told the stories of baseball games wrote of the patriotism displayed, they fail to characterize it as the American, winner-take-all patriotism sports offers that has been present in society at large — the two are irrevocably intertwined. The discourse that came from columnists and lay-folk alike echoed these sentiments of patriotism as they do when tragedy intervenes with sport. Titles alone tell a story of something bigger than a ball game: “Triumph and cheers greet Yanks in return: Yankees return to cheers and triumph,” “It’s back: Patriotism abounds as baseball resumed.”  This is significant because these stories are intended as game covers, stories that, without context, should be titled “Bats come alive as the Yanks oust Rays,” so as to chronicle the game. The story of this game, though, was not the runs scored or the incredible pitching. Within his game cover, New York Times beat writer Buster Olney writes, “The fans came together in heart and soul again. They groaned, in perfect harmony,” no doubt moved by the scenes below the press box (Olney, 1). These stories were about a kind of patriotism. The symbols — fags, colors and military figures — were patriotic in nature, but the win, oh the sweet taste of victory, that was impenetrable, all-conquering American patriotism at work.

 

           Let’s take a 30-second time out here. As a New Yorker whose move across the Hudson was largely the product of 9/11, my tendency is to tell you a story of my second-grade self and the uncle who was told to stay put in South Tower while his brother's life was destroyed along with the North. There are very few among us who cheer for terrorism and fewer still who cannot appreciate the efforts made by organizations around the country (Major League Baseball being only one example) and will not salute the acts of patriotism that followed that day. I use my afraid-of-flying-because-of-it self to attribute the Yankee Game as the single greatest display of patriotism the world has ever seen. And those of us who do remember with an extra twinge of emotion tend to address the memories of 9/11 with an overarching sense of empathy and defensive American pride, buying into the media discourse that was born of it. But that is hyperbole in its simplest form. Listen to those no-good, unfeeling, unpatriotic but very smart critics. They will tell you that American patriotism forced us further into jumping on the titanic that is a war on terrorism — forcing us away from true virtue and democratic ideals (Shapiro, 1). They are right. Indeed my intention is not to argue that the type of patriotism that dominated post-9/11 sports media was virtuous or even justified. Instead, the Yankee game provides a lens through which we can both define American patriotism and watch it played out in American sport.

 

         Patriotism, a love for or devotion to one’s country, is a seemingly simple concept but one left up for innumerable interpretations, especially when one attempts to place an adjective in front of the noun. Take, for example, a baseball game in which the umpire calls a close play at home in favor of the runner. If said runner is a team for which you root, the umpire made the right call and the cheers persist. If said runner is an opponent, tendency is to blame the umpire rather than, perhaps, faulting the runner himself for making a poor decision to run home. That is American patriotism, as much in sport as it is life.                

 

         American patriotism is based, in its most basic form, in confirmation bias. If, as philosophers like Simon Keller, patriotism hinges on the idea that the values of one’s country are virtuous, American ideals like freedom of speech or religion, education for all, and upward mobility — all of the components of the American Dream — are both true and are part of a moral compass that guides the nation in each of its decisions (Keller, 564). In the context of the United States, that moral compass is deeply engrained in Manifest Destiny, borrowing from the Protestant concept of a “City on a Hill” — America must be both a model and a heroine in the world, to shape the world in its own image through the practice of democracy, a concept deemed virtuous by its patriots, thus producing a love for the nation. “This love, which pulls toward amnesia, wishful thinking and inattention to urgent foreign interests” prevents us from embracing critical thought, argue those who advocate for education and social critique (Miller 12). Bush’s version of patriotism, the one displayed in sports in the face of tragedy, aligns itself as a direct opponent to a more “moral” patriotism put forth by current president Barack Obama. In his “The America We Love” speech given in 2008 in Independence, Missouri, Obama outlines his ideal of American patriotism, a patriotism that holds true to American ideals in terms of acceptance and unity through cooperation that allows us to overcome our differences. He admits that he too fell into George Bush’s patriotism, “that gut instinct – that America is the greatest country on earth – would survive (his) growing awareness of our nation's imperfections” (Obama, 1). This patriotism is one that has forced America, arguably more than any other nation, into its role as a policeman around the world — we want to speak softly and carry Theodore Roosevelt’s big stick. In sport, our chants are rarely quiet:

 

 

“U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A!”

 

 

             Moments like the chanting of U-S-A were the kind of militaristic patriotism that guides America in wars. In fact, that very chant originated in the context of war: the Cold War. Though it’s been said that the original “U-S-A” chant echoed at a soccer match between the United States and Hungary in 1979, it took off in an appropriately icy battle between the United States hockey team and the world’s best team, the Soviet Union, in the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid, New York. Under head coach Herb Brooks, the Americans completed what came to be known as the “miracle on ice,” which was made all the more special in the context of the Cold War. In an appearance at the 1984 Olympics, President Ronald Reagan “associated himself with the athletes to communicate that he had restored America's prestige on the international stage,” after which he used his Olympic connections at campaign rallies and was often interrupted by breakouts of the USA chant (Fromson, 3). And one decade after the September 11th terrorist attacks, Americans gathered outside of the White House, chanting “U-S-A” after hearing of the death of Osama Bin Laden — when America finally beat the enemy after a 10-year long game (Fromson, 5.) These moments illustrate the exceptional role sports play in the United States and the dichotomy between sports and society: sports culture makes itself known in wartime and battle-like patriotism penetrates sports, even in America-versus-America context. When one considers the New York Yankees’ post-9/11 game, the war on terrorism manifested itself on the diamond in the sense that the Yankees represented New York City, and after 9/11, New York City was the face of an America attacked. Thus, the opponent of the Yankees, though 100 percent American, was that foreign enemy, much in the same was the Bin Laden and the Soviets were the enemy. Still, there remains the argument that militaristic patriotism, both in foreign relations and in sports, is little more than bad faith.

 

              In the context of a New York Yankees game that took place on September 17, 2001, it is perhaps best to look at patriotism as Keller’s-argued “bad faith” during the seventh-inning stretch. The debate about the virtue of this type of patriotism will continue. That night, the Yankees replaced “take me out to the ball game,” for something a little more sustentative: “God Bless America” (Olney, 1). The New York Yankees sit among the most hated sports franchises in the country for its fiscal ability to buy wins with its enormous payroll. But in that moment, when God was blessing America, the Yankees were not just winning a game for the city, but for America, collectively affirming, “we are not afraid. Terrorists will not force us to cower at home in front of our television sets,” (Shapiro, 1).  On its face, the Yankees being adopted as “America’s team” for a season was a resurgence of the glorious, unifying, indomitable patriotism that dwelled at the heart of America before 9/11. Take a step back and you see that all-too familiar “bad faith” patriotism. It can be argued that this game was nothing more than empty symbolism. “Does anyone at the bargaining table care that soldiers on patrol in Afghanistan or poised for a new mission in the Persian Gulf region will be deprived of their baseball fix,” asks USA Today columnist Walter Shapiro (1). When Toronto Blue Jays first baseman answered this question by sitting in the dugout during the singing of “God Bless America,” he wasn’t heralded for protesting against war. He was ridiculed for questioning this patriotism (Florez-Rodriguez, 1). For better or for worse, that is the patriotism that is present in American sports today, the patriotism that is on display when sports meet national crisis. Perhaps that’s just because we have more Little League parents than any other nation in the world.  Perhaps sports and the cheers it gives us are the only things we have to hold onto during times of tragedy.

 

            The defiant patriotism outlined by Bush’s “you’re either with us or with the terrorists” speech was more literally put into action in late October of that same year, when the President threw out the first pitch of the 2001 World Series. The highlight reel of the subsequent Yankees’ World Series against the Arizona Diamondbacks focuses on those moments before Game 1, when the city was brought back to the Bronx. Prior to entering the stadium, 55,000 fans walked through metal detectors and were patted down by October-cold hands. They rode the escalators and climbed stairs while soldiers carrying automatic weapons looked on. But there was no fear; there was only the task. “I remember thinking to myself ‘this is now my America,’” said one fan (Scott Gutterson qtd. in Townhall.com). Before they could put on their uniforms, players witnessed bomb dogs searching through the locker rooms. The national anthem played over the speakers and president George W. Bush who — to the likely dismay of his Secret Service — put on his bulletproof vest and trotted out to the pitcher’s mound (Townhall.com). And before the announcer could yell, “play ball,” the crowd broke into “U-S-A” — each a declaration that life would go on, and that this city would win. Nearly two months after the attacks, this game, perhaps more than the first, functioned as a repatriation of that military-like, battle-ready patriotism. Bush was there to prove it.

 

             President Bush’s throwing out of the first pitch in Game I of the 2001 World Series at Yankee Stadium was emotional and culturally significant, but it was in no way unique to that season. There was William Howard Taft, who became the first president to throw out that first pitch in 1910, Woodrow Wilson, the first president to attend a World Series, and Calvin Coolidge, who promoted, in baseball, “there is a place, both present and future, in America, in for a true clean sport” (Rable, 365). During Coolidge’s tenure in the 1920’s, baseball had truly become America’s pastime — a sport based in Protestant work ethic that enveloped fans the drama of bases-loaded-two-outs situations but practiced the diplomacy and courtesy exchanged between the victor and the loser, something not seen in brutal football. In 1939, on baseball’s ceremonial 100th anniversary, then-president Franklin Delano Roosevelt characterized the sport (even before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947) as “a symbol of America as a melting pot. The players embrace all nationals and national origins and the fans, equally cosmopolitan, making only one demand on them: Can they play the game” (Rable, 368). So important was this game, then, that after the attacks on Pearl Harbor, which forced the United States into World War II, Roosevelt urged that baseball should continue despite the military draft to give people a welcome diversion in wartime. Sports, especially baseball, became a healthy outlet for the American people. For fans, sports were a level playing field (no pun) upon which they could witness the American Dream at work: players who worked hard out on the field fighting for a victory. For presidents, baseball became as much a way to look like ordinary folk as to further the founding precepts of the nation they governed.

 

             Though the United States founded itself on the separation of church and state, its constitution mentions no such thing about the separation of state and sport. In fact, military flyovers and presidential first pitches that are staples of American sports today can be traced back to both militaristic and ironically humbler origins. During the thick of the American Civil War in 1862, then-President Abraham Lincoln took his son, Tad, to a baseball game to clear his head of the turmoil facing his government (Rable, 363). He was the first in a long line of presidential sports enthusiasts and the man who set sports up as a part of national agenda. Having witnessed the tragedy that was the Great Famine in Ireland, Lincoln devised a plan that would keep the United States from falling into similar turmoil: the Land Grant Schools. Out of the Land Grant Act — which was put into law in 1862 — were born agricultural colleges including Michigan State (then-Michigan Agricultural College) and Pennsylvania State University, each of which were granted acres of land with directions to specialize in farming (Bacon, 201). Without it, college athletics in the United States are not the important institutions they are today. When college presidents after the turn of century realized that academic integrity was born from football, they hired the best coaches around — Amus Alonzo Stagg, Biggie Munn, and Fielding Yost — to expand their enrollment. And thus, the Big Ten was formed (Bacon, 207). Though several presidents hailed for sport its base in Protestant work ethic and muscular Christianity, core values of the United States at the time, Teddy Roosevelt became sport’s biggest cheerleader. Is it any coincidence that the man who “carried a big stick,” and declared the United States the sole world power by flaunting his white fleet around the globe would be the man to save sport altogether? In 1905, following the deaths of 19 college athletes on the gridiron, when football was on the verge of an execution, Roosevelt wrote to colleges urging them to “curb excessive violence and set an example of fair play for the rest of the country,” a move the would foreshadow the creation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (Klein, 1). It was Roosevelt’s firm belief that sports build character, that sports make winning men out of average Americans. It is a matter of national pride.

 

             Penalty flag. After that heartwarming moment of unity, life as we know it went back to normal: Boston went back to hating pinstripes. The New York Yankees were “America’s team” only for that season, granted. If they even paused to put rivalry aside to remember those who died, students at Michigan State could put their “DIRECTIONS TO ANN ARBOR: SOUTH UNTIL YOU SMELL IT. EAST UNTIL YOU STEP IN IT” signs back on the wall while we “University of” kids continue to bash State’s intelligence, because that’s what we do best (Bacon, 204). Rivalries do a wonderful job of drawing a Mason-Dixon-type line down the middle of states and even in between cities, something that is unique about American sport — where opponents are rarely rival nations. Wins and losses are projected onto American fans, not to an entirely different culture. If anything, this is where a battle-ready patriotism runs the deepest, in interstate and intrastate rivalries that seemingly tear Americans apart. So how, then, can American sports be associated with an American patriotism? Again, it is American in its spirit, even if Americans of different team affiliations don’t embrace one another during the game. The logic applies in the same way it did to the Yankees: the team represents a school or city, that city is intertwined. A win over a rival is a validation of the virtues of that identity-based patriotism, as outlines by Keller. Where this spirit shows its more flattering, polite patriotism (but still a winner-take-all one) is in the face of national tragedy, when the victims become the underdogs and the victors have conquered the foreign threat — even when that threat is local. Don’t believe me, Ohio State fans? The Yankees’ game was just one example of this patriotism in action.

 

             On April 15, 2013, it was like 9/11 all over again. The cheers of those finishing the Boston Marathon had been interrupted by pipe bombs set off near the finish line, sending the city into complete chaos. We wondered why, again. The same logic that dominated post-9/11 sentiments of sport prevailed: the Bruins and the Red Sox represented the city of Boston qne Boston represented an America attacked. Soon after, #BostonStrong became a national trend on social media, much like the “Never Forget” slogan that attached itself to the attacks of September 11th. Then sports took over. In a similar fashion to the New York Yankees’ game, the city banded together at a Boston Bruins hockey game. The man at the microphone back away from the stand, and crowd sung the national anthem for themselves. Like Jeter and the athletes, Boston Red Sox players went to visit victims like Marc Fucrile in the hospital. And its archrival in the Bronx displayed signs on the video boards in and outside of Yankee Stadium that read, “New York stands with Boston.” United, in spirit, in patriotism, in a war against whoever did this to fellow Americans. It was indomitable patriotism at work once again. Like the Yankees of 2001, the Boston Red Sox went onto win the 2013 World Series over the St. Louis Cardinals. After the game, instead of celebrating in the bars, the fans “ran to Boylston Street, where the finish line of the Boston Marathon is still painted on the street. The April bombings occurred near this line — which still says, "Finish" — and fans kneeled and kissed it” (Martinez, 1). Thus, the opponent of both Boston teams, though 100 percent American, was that foreign enemy, much in the same way that the Devil Rays and the Diamondbacks became the warlike enemies after September 11th. The Red Sox had done for the city of Boston what so many runners that day could not do — they finished what they had started from the first day of training camp.

 

               In any other context, and perhaps in any other country, the feats of the Yankees and sports teams like it were not so heroic. In another country, who knows if it even makes the morning paper. In the United States, in the context of the tragedy that preceded it, these moments are all-too fitting. A World Series title, or even one win, is the best gift a city can be given, the way that an organization, a fan base, a city and a country proves that it will not be conquered. Why? Because the opponent they faced was real and right in front of them. Because “we” the loyal fans of America were victorious, as we would be in battle. The Devil Rays, the Diamondbacks and the Cardinals didn’t throw their respective games because it was the “right” or patriotic thing to do. In winning with bats and pucks and sticks and balls, the Yankees, the Red Sox, the Bruins — America’s adopted team at the time — beat their respective opponents in the swiftest, most definitive way possible. And it is on those fields, the seeds laid by Americans for Americans, that we can see American patriotism, for all of its die-hard, winner-take-all flaws, and for its occasional home run.