There's No Such Thing As a "New York Sports Fan"

New York City is incredible. The city’s breadth and scope are spurred by its humongous geographic, demographic, and historic implications. It owns the country's best food, most diverse sources of entertainment, and unlimited possibilities to re-invent one’s own identity. 

Amidst all these amenities and opportunities, New Yorkers continue to crave more and more. Once they get used to something, they want something newer, nicer, and more abundant. Part of being a New Yorker is having options and when you have too many, it can turn people divisive. 

Unfortunately, as a sports fan from New York, this division is amplified.  

Let’s get one thing straight - the phrase “New York sports fan” is an illusion. If not an illusion, then certainly a paradox - like saying “I am dead” or “This sentence is false.” Each of the four major sports in New York City carries two teams. Baseball has Yankees-Mets, football Giants-Jets, basketball Knicks-Nets, and hockey Rangers-Islanders (you could argue the New Jersey Devils gives hockey three). Therefore if you pledge allegiance to one team from each of the four sports, there are sixteen possible combinations to choose from. It’s not uncommon for two separate fans to root for the same football team, but despise each other’s hockey team. Yankee fans mock Mets fans’ propensity to choke and Knicks fans revel in the Nets’ purgatory. 

In the spirit of tribalism or the feeling of “one of us”, it’s harder for New York sports fans to get too intimate with one other, because one’s treasured team might be another’s trash. 

There are those special spectators who act diplomatically, rooting for both Mets and Yankees or both Rangers and Islanders. Yet wanting both teams to succeed seems at odds with the spirit of rooting for one team - a hedged bet at the expense of the team that ultimately “loses”. As a Mets fan, I felt a deep hurt when the 2022 Mets were abruptly eliminated in the postseason. But while I witnessed the Yankees advancing in that postseason, I couldn’t possibly cheer for the Yankees. The Mets fan’s immersion in Metsness involves envy of the Yankees’ historic success. It’s ill-advised for a Mets fan to gleefully will the Yankees’ championship tally to become more robust. Plus why would you want to incur more wrath from Yankee fans? 

Your identity is nothing in itself without being relative to your shadow. The Jets, having long played their home games in Giants Stadium, felt the same way. There’s an incongruity that persists in New York (or, as long as we’re referencing Giants Stadium, New Jersey) that other American cities don’t face. 

San Francisco and Oakland are two separate cities anyway, but the rivalry has become one-sided with the demise of Oakland as a sports town. Chicago has two baseball teams, but at least every Chicago fan can gleefully share fondness for the 90s Bulls and early 10s Blackhawks. Don’t get me started with Los Angeles sports with their bush league football scene and marketing Anaheim as LA. At least I respect the Dodgers and Lakers. 

If there was any benefit to rooting for two local teams within a sport, it would be for the wrong reasons. If your team isn’t playing well or tickets are too expensive, you can receive an easy out by switching allegiances. My uncle had Knicks season tickets and frequenting games with him in the late 90s is why I’m a Knicks fan. But after getting fed up with James Dolan’s ownership, he bought Nets season tickets and raised his children as Nets fans. For the rest of the country’s sports fans, if your owner sucks - you’re stuck. In New York, if your owner doesn’t sell, you can sell out. 

Although they’re only a few hours away, Boston and Philadelphia live in a different sports milieu. If someone tells me they're a Boston or Philly sports fan, I can make a pretty accurate judgment of how much joy, anguish, or hope they face. Their respective fan bases each root for the same teams and I don’t have to wildly guess which permutation of regional teams they root for. In other words, they have a shared identity - something that helps a city move in one direction and create an ethos…. Even if that ethos is obnoxiousness. 

This desire for consistent identity is based in evolutionary psychology. If you lived in our village, I’d assume you had similar values (unlike those suspect villagers across the river). I wouldn’t have to fear that you’d backstab me and I had clarity as to who my enemies were. In that sense, someone from Boston can make a fair assessment of their compatriot, but a New Yorker facing another New Yorker is skeptical. Maybe that’s why we’re so nosy. Is this a tortured Mets-Jets fan or the rarer Mets-Giants fan who, despite experiencing baseball heartbreak, saw Eli Manning deliver two monumental titles?

What also frustrates me about this New York bifurcation is that it’s inescapable, even when you visit other cities. If you travel to most big cities, you’ll find sports bars for Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Dallas, and Green Bay; Yet you’ll seldom find a sports bar for New York. Sports bars with ample square footage may have a designated “area” for Jets fans to congregate, but it doesn’t instill the same camaraderie as does an entire bar packed like a bunch of green and white sardines.   

Even within sports bars that claim to cater to New York sports, there is no collective New York pride. You can’t have Yankee and Mets flags hung up next to each other; that’s too disingenuous to the spirit of competition - like saying you’re both a Steelers and Browns bar. What fun is a bar where your patrons hate one another?

If there was ever a period I felt less irked towards these intra-New York rivalries, it was 2008. From 1983 up until then, the NFL ensured that the Jets and Giants didn’t kick off at the same time. One team got the early slot and the other got the late slot, unless either was on Prime Time. 

Anecdotally, I vividly remember this separation of Jets and Giants fans while living in Jerusalem during the 2008 NFL season. I frequented an American sports bar, which had several monitors in their overarching main room for the smaller US market games and a special VIP room for New Yorkers. This being Jerusalem, there was no shortage of visitors with New York ties - mostly expats or students studying abroad. Come game time, about 50 other Jets fans and I would walk down a narrow, dark staircase to our own private VIP room to watch the Jets. When the Jets game ended, we’d walk up the stairs, greeted by the wave of 50 or so Giants fans ready to head down for their game. This amicable New York “handoff” happened like clockwork every week.  

The irony of experiencing this civil sharing of resources between enemies in Jerusalem, of all cities, wasn’t lost on me. But I understand how it can be difficult to coexist if bragging rights and owning a city’s footprint is at stake. The team that wins more will gain more followers, have more economic opportunities, and dictate a culture more within that city. If the team wins a championship, the city shuts down to celebrate in their honor. 

The following season, the NFL decided to give the late slate games to west coast teams and rivalry matchups. Considering the Jets and Giants recent putridity, eschewing most opportunities for the aforementioned flexed rivalry and Prime Time games, the teams have been consistently kicking off at the same 1 pm EST time slot. The Jerusalem sports bar with only one private room would have endured conflict with Jets and Giants playing at the same time. 

To quench my thirst for civic tribalism, I enjoy going to other team’s bars. I’ll usually tag along with a friend, so I’m not a total voyeur - but I love the energy. Bars decked out in the team's memorabilia and history, framed pictures of famous players, decor hanging not just for aesthetic purposes but superstitious ones. The bar is under one heartbeat - as it's not just the fans in unison, but also the waitstaff - donning jerseys or at least the colors of the team. The more competitive the team, the more asses in seats, the more money spent. 

I yearn for this camaraderie and would love to know what it’s like to be in harmony with your brethren. Sure two teams in one city means more sports to watch, but we sacrifice our unity for entertainment. If New Yorkers strived for oneness, the answer isn’t in our sports teams. 

I’m not at a crossroads in my fandom. I’ve never wavered from being a Mets-Jets-Knicks-Islanders fan, but when meeting a New Yorker who also moved to Denver, I caution my excitement. We can reminisce about our favorite Brooklyn neighborhoods, dive bars, and food bazaars, but in terms of something that should bring a diaspora together, i.e. sports, the kinship usually ends when they say they're a Yankees fan. Our bond will be limited as we won’t be watching games together or texting about team news. 

If I want that unity with that person, it’s best to connect about the Denver teams - a point of civic unity, not division. I cherish my teams and I love New York City, but after the recent local championship parades for the Avalanche and Nuggets, I was overcome by a novel energy - the kind whose positivity encapsulated an entire city without infuriating half its population.

It was a refreshing feeling.