This World Series can divide households
Can't we all just get along? Not if one of us is from Philly and the other's from New York, with the Phils and Yankees squaring off tonight. Jenice Armstrong talks about how her house has been divided, and Stu Bykofsky, a Philly institution who grew up in the Bronx, has practically become a house divided against itself. Do you have New York friends, or a Yankees fan at home?
OUR HOME is divided.
No, my husband and I aren't on the outs. It's just that for the first time in our 4-year marriage something has come between us.
The World Series.
A major sporting event has driven a wedge between us. I will be rooting hard for my favorite baseball team of all time, the World Series-winning Phillies. But my poor, misguided, still-thinks-he's-a-New Yorker-and-won't-give-it-up husband insists on supporting the Yankees.
I've been trying to let him know it's time to give up the Yankee ghost. It has been 20 long years since he lived in New York.
My guy grew up in Jamaica, Queens. That's Mets country. The Yankees, they're for the residents of the Bronx and Manhattan. Staten Island? Who cares? It's not even the real New York. But neither is Queens for that matter. (Oops, he's not going to like that.)
He can take it. New Yorkers are tough. You can take the New Yorker out of NYC but they never lose their NYC swagger. No matter how far New Yorkers stray from the Big Apple, they still think of their hometown as the center of the universe. Everything New York City is the best: the best pizza, the best museums, the best shopping, the best sports teams, yada, yada, yada.
"Pity Silly-delphia for thinking they can beat N.Y.," the New York Daily News blasted yesterday. One columnist has even stooped to picking on the Phanatic, calling him a "green, pig-nosed monster."
The nerve.
You know how Chicago is the city of the big shoulders? Well, New York is the city of big mouths - Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Bethenny Frankel, of the Bravo show "Real Housewives of New York."
I grew up in Washington, another truly great city. But after I moved to this area nearly 20 years ago, I put on Eagles green. "You dance with the guy who brung ya," as the saying goes.
Let's keep it real: It's partly about the Benjamins. After the Phillies won the World Series last year, the city raked in roughly $20 million in additional revenue. The Daily News was rocking and rolling, too. One day alone, after the Phillies won the World Series, the People Paper sold an extra 245,000 copies of the paper in 1 day. Our circulation department says we're on track to do even better this time around. Even if we weren't in bankruptcy, this would be huge for us.
Advertising, the lifeblood of newspapers, surges when the Phillies do well. We brought in an additional $200,000 last year - despite being in the midst of the most severe recession since the Great Depression. The Daily News needs the moola.
My friend Joni Bishop is in the midst of the same back-and-forth with her boyfriend, too. She's not making any headway, either.
"We talk major smack to each other," she told me yesterday. "He says, 'Don't talk that poison around me.' We have a lot of fun with it. He's was raised in Queens . . . [but] he's been living in Philadelphia for, like, 20 years on and off. He's just an adamant New Yorker.
"I happen to love the Phillies," continued Bishop, a freelance fund-raising and special-events consultant who'll be watching tonight's game at Vino in Northern Liberties. "It makes the sex a little better anyhow."
That's one consolation for couples who can't agree on which team to root for. *
Send e-mail to heyjen@phillynews.com. My blog: http://go.philly.com/heyjen.