On sports

It was a long time ago that my cousin taught me a lesson on desperation. Our beloved soccer team was losing in front of our eyes, and the time left on the game to conclude didn’t offer much hope. Nonetheless, he reassured me in an almost calm and cynical, below-the-radar kind of tone that there was still hope for things to change. Doubtful, I argued against his logic and surely a few minutes later, he would reaffirm his initial outlook: “We can still pull this off.” It’s not so much his hope that was getting to me, it was his calm disposition that was driving me nuts. Once the game concluded and it was all but obvious that no amount of hope would ever reverse the result, as we had lost the game, he threw his arms in the air without losing his cool and gave his last verdict: “Oh, well, it’ll be next time. I asked him how he could remain so undisturbed about the whole ordeal. I was repulsed by his lack of emotion response.
Now, the thing about the Yankees started back in the days when I was still living under the parental wing of my aunt, in Maspeth, a predominantly white neighborhood in Queens. Not caring much for baseball, I once asked which teams represented New York. “There’re the Mets and the Yankees” I was told. “And we’re all Mets around here” my source explained. I was intrigued by his answer and right there and then, just to go against the current, I proclaimed myself a Yankee fan. Everyone held their breath as I made my announcement. A glorifying silence filled the room. Almost everywhere you go in the globe, men are discussing either politics (power) or sports (competition). What sealed the deal about being a Yankee fan, of course, was when I asked my uncle, Ruben, a true baseball lover, which team he liked. "The Yankees, of course" he said. "Life is difficult enough for me to choose the Mets as my team."