When
Jim Fassel, who was born and raised in California and had
coached primarily in the West, was hired to be the head coach of the New York
Giants, the
New York Daily News wondered whether someone who was
“accustomed to bikini weather and a pretty passing game would struggle with the
elements of player discipline in the He-Man’s land of the NFC East.”
Boston Celtic
Paul Pierce, an All-Star, by reputation one of the
grittiest players in the NBA, and a native Californian, said, “The hatred for
the West Coast player—it’s everywhere. Especially in high school. When you go
back East, it’s always, ‘the West is soft.’ I can’t tell you how many guys I
got into it with over that. That probably has something to do with why no one had
heard of me until the McDonald’s All-American game.”
Pierce’s then teammate,
Kenny Anderson, who was born and raised in
Queens, told him, “Because there’s no ballers on the West Coast like in New
York, the mecca of basketball. That’s why nobody heard of you.”
Kenny Anderson was a high school phenom and a college star but has been an
NBA journeyman; inevitably, it’s the middle- and lower-rung players who cling
to the badge of geographic superiority.
When
Larry Bird, longtime Boston Celtic star, was coaching the
Indiana Pacers, he said, “The East used to have the defensive powers. But with
the new rules, scoring is up, and it hurts us. It’s a softer game now, and the
West always has had soft teams.”
Jalen Rose, then of the Indiana Pacers, replied, “The West is about
scoring and putting three or four guys out there who can actually put the ball
in the basket. In the East, two guys might be robots.”
The West is about pretty skills; the East is a manly scrum.
Texas Tech defensive coordinator
Greg McMackin said, “The West Coast
offense is a finesse offense that’s built on rhythm. They dink and dunk in the
short, quick, passing game so they can have third-and-short situations.”
After the Sonics defeated the Knicks in New York several years ago,
Seattle’s
Sam Perkins said, “It’s no problem for us being physical.
We’re not as soft as people say we are. We just don’t have the reputation.
We’re not seen as much on the East Coast. People think we just run and shoot.
They don’t really see how we are, until today.”
Ex-New York Yankee and (current Houston Astro) pitcher
Roger Clemens
claims that he’s “seen a few times in Anaheim where a guy is throwing a cool
game and people get up in the fifth, sixth, or seventh inning and head for the
beach.”
The myth persists that West Coast fans always arrive late and leave early,
whereas East Coast fans supposedly arrive on time and stay until the bitter
end: they have true forbearance, persistence, stick-to-it-tiveness. In
actuality, at lopsided games at Yankee Stadium, fans leave in the fifth inning,
as they do anywhere else. When the Knicks are way behind, fans throng to the
exits midway through the fourth quarter, the same way people do in the rest of
the country. When the Yankees were bad during the 1980s, attendance fell dramatically;
so, too, at Madison Square Garden, attendance is way down now that the Knicks
are terrible.
Everybody needs someone to beat up, and the East Coast defines itself as the
East Coast by caricaturizing the West Coast, which I didn’t fully understand
until I moved back to the West after growing up in California and then living
in the East for fifteen years. It’s simple but true: power is a fulcrum.
East/west; north/south; white/black; male/female: Group X always needs Group Y
to buff its own sense of superiority. We are mind-haunted civilization; you are
the physical beauty we’ll contemplate.
In the
New York Review of Books,
Thomas Powers writes, “
Larry
McMurtry, a widely read and cosmopolitan man despite his reputation as a
Western writer….”
Jonathan Raban, a British writer who lives in Seattle, says, “Living
in the West, I find myself a victim of ‘Westism’—that mixture of condescension,
sentimentality, and naïve romanticism, which is strangely like old-fashioned
sexism. The assumptions of the East about the West-its politics, society,
open-air sports like fishing and skiing-are mighty annoying, if you happen to
live in a region conceived by New York to be a sort of rugged national park,
stretching from the Mississippi to the Pacific, inhabited by unlettered
rustics. In actuality, there are many more nerds than Marlboro Men in the West
I live in, from
Bill Gates to
Jeffrey Katzenberg.”
A box at the bottom of the front page of the
New York Times guides
readers to stories inside: “G.I. Killed in Afghanistan,” “Fujimori Seeks a
Comeback,” “US Airways Plans Cuts,” “Office Shopping Spree,” and “Bear Concerns
at Yosemite.” The West is forever the 22-second nature non-story at the end of
the network news.
Philadelphia Phillies manager
Larry Bowa, born and raised in
Philadelphia, says, “There’s more of a sense of urgency to excel on the East
Coast. They don’t have a lot of other things to do, whereas fans have a lot of
stuff to do out there on the West Coast. Going to the ballpark’s more laid-back.
It’s a little more casual. It’s really a form of entertainment for them. On the
East Coast, it’s, ‘Hey, we want you to win at all costs. It’s our summer; don’t
screw it up.’ If you’re not a mentally tough person and you’re traded to an
East Coast team, it might have an effect on you—fans calling you a bum. If that
bothers you, you might want to get into another line of work. Or try to get
traded back out West.”
The West is invariably referred to as “out West,” as a way to underscore
that the Northeast is the center of American civilization. China/Japan;
Japan/Korea; Athens/Rome; Christianity/the Roman Empire; London/New York; East
Coast/West Coast—every society has forever condescended to every society that
followed afterward.
Mo Vaughn was raised near Boston and had several good years with the
Red Sox before being traded to Anaheim, for whom he was an extremely expensive
disappointment. “Being on the West Coast, I learned how much I love the East
Coast,” he said. “The intensity of the will to succeed just wasn’t there. Every
place has got its issues. But for me, as a ballplayer, I need to be in the
fire. I can’t be out there on Mars.” Out there. “I’ve got to be in the mix,
man.”
Upon being traded to the New York Mets, Vaughn said, “You’re in the
limelight here and you’re going to be seen. If you’re not intimidated by it, it
can help you as a player. For me, to have that on an everyday basis can only
bring your game up, because you can’t hide. There’s nowhere to go.” This
relentless scrutiny was the very thing that drove Vaughan out of Boston—he said
he felt suffocated playing in the same place where he had grown up—and in New
York he was an even bigger bust than he was in Anaheim.
“I was brought up in a pressure-packed situation in Boston,” he said.
“Overall, the East Coast is a get-it-done-yesterday type situation, and I seem
to thrive on that.” In 2002, his first season with New York, he batted .259—his
worst average in ten years—while Anaheim won the World Series.
Geographic snobbery is the last refuge of the fallen. One of the least
motivated players ever to play in the NBA,
Benoit Benjamin, shortly
after being traded from Seattle to New Jersey, said, “As far as I’m concerned,
the real basketball games are on the East Coast.”
In a letter to the editor in the December 2002 issue of
Harper’s,
Joe
Ferullo, of Studio City, CA, said, “
Mark Slouka rightly argues that
September 11 generated an apocalyptic response because Americans considered
themselves immune to, and protected by God from, such acts. Let me take his
argument further. The attacks of 9/11 generated such a response because they
took place in New York City. Many of the people Slouka quotes, and nearly all
the media reports he mentions, are from New York. The attacks hit them where
they live, and the commentators, although they purport to speak for the nation,
have for quite some time spoken for a small world confined by the Hudson, East,
and Harlem rivers. I strongly suspect that if those horrible events had
occurred instead in Los Angeles, the national (that is to say, New York-based)
media reaction would have been different. After an appropriate period of
respectful silence, the talking heads and newsweeklies would have trotted out
timeworn homilies about how Los Angeles had brought this on itself, thinking it
could be isolated from the real world in a bubble of sand, sunshine, and
mass-produced make-believe. If Seattle had been the target, I imagine national
commentators would have ruminated on how this was one more, though
extraordinarily painful, step in that city’s decline since the irrationally
exuberant dot-com days. An attack on, say, Miami would not have been expanded
into evidence that evil had returned to the planet, that the entire world had
been irrevocably altered, that nothing would ever be the same anywhere.”
New York native
Gordon Edelstein, for many years the artistic
director of the Seattle Repertory Theater, said, upon becoming artistic
director of the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, “In Seattle, when the curtain
rises on a play, the audience is open, but their tacit agreement is that life
is pretty good, it’s important to be comfortable, and human beings actually can
be healthy. The curtain rises on a New York audience, and everybody agrees
we’re basically sick and we want redemption and we want a good time, but we’re
not made uncomfortable by deeply disturbing news about our psyche. In fact,
that feels like the truth to us.” Of course this feels like the truth to you:
you get to control what’s agreed upon as truth. The issue isn’t that this E/W
dichotomy isn’t indicative of real regional differences; it’s that the
dichotomy gets completely cartoonized and the “greater than” arrow always
points to one side of the equation.
Larry King once said, “Bums in New York could run a grocery chain in
Des Moines.” In my experience, people in the West (or, for that matter, the
Midwest) are at least as intelligent and driven as people in the East; they
just cloak these qualities in a more understated cultural style.
In
Thomas Pynchon’s
Mason & Dixon, Reverend Cherrycoke
says, “As to journey west, in the same sense of the Sun, is to live, raise
children, grow older, and die, carried along by the stream of the day, whilst
to turn Eastward is somehow to resist time and age, to work against the Wind, seek
ever the dawn, even, as who can say, defy death.” “Eastward” here is
capitalized; “west” is lower-case.
The East is part of the history of art; the West is the mere muck of life.
The New Yorker sponsored a cruise ship going around the world from
Los Angeles to Greece; different New Yorker contributors entertained passengers
on different legs of the journey. On the L.A. to Australia run, all of the New
Yorker artists on board ship were cartoonists.
S. Bass, of San Francisco, in a recent letter to the New Yorker,
wrote: “In lauding Manhattan’s street grid plan in his review of
Gotham: A
History of New York City to 1898, Paul Goldberger fails to comment on one
invidious urban effect that was unforeseeable when the plan was adopted in
1811: the grid plan’s ‘equalization’ permits motor vehicle traffic to
universally intrude on and interfere with pedestrianism, making New York unlike
other great cities in the world, where it’s relatively easy when walking to
find a quiet side street. In deeming the plan brilliant urban planning,
Goldberger seems to be confusing New York’s ‘determined rambunctiousness’ with
the stress caused by the grid’s constant, omnipresent crush of traffic.” New
York’s much vaunted “energy,” in other words, is just gridlock. New Jersey Nets’
(famously fragile) forward
Donny Marshall said several years ago, “I
feel more comfortable with the East Coast style of basketball. You go to
southern California and you see palm trees and beautiful people.” Marshall
himself is model-handsome. “I remember our trip to New York to play St. John’s
when I was at UConn. The people weren’t beautiful; they were jittery.
Everything was so fast. I loved it.”
Mark Twain wrote about New York, “There is something about this
ceaseless buzz and hurry and bustle that keeps a stranger in a state of
unwholesome excitement all the time, and makes him restless and uneasy.”
Even Japanese baseball star
Hideki Matsui, when he was being courted
by several American baseball teams, told Japanese reporters, “I want to go to
an East Coast team where there’s some pressure to perform.” Or, alternatively
and interestingly, a “West Coast team if that team can help me develop further
as a player.” Skills vs. scrum.
Coming from Philadelphia to Phoenix for his first season,
Charles Barkley
said, “Guys thought I was too mean in [training] camp, but they don’t get it.
You can’t just show up on opening night and say, ‘O.K., now we’re going to be
mean.’ I think living in the sun makes these guys soft.
John Havlicek
[of the Boston Celtics] told me that. In the East, you wake up, you look out,
and there’s snow on the ground. You start the day pissed off. Out here”-out
here-“you wake up, it’s beautiful out. You put on the Bermudas and have
breakfast on the porch.”
During the 2002 season, Washington State University quarterback
Jason
Gesser played on a severe ankle strain to lead his team to a victory over
UCLA and into the Rose Bowl. It was about as courageous an athletic performance
as one could hope to see; if he’d been from Pittsburgh, there would have been
be much discussion of how both his grandfather and father had worked in the
coal mines, but Gesser is from Hawaii, so no one knew what to say to
mythologize the moment.
A
New York Times interviewer didn’t understand why
Albert Brooks
didn’t find it a compliment to be called the “West Coast
Woody Allen.”
When she asked him what he’d rather be called, he said, “Why do I have to be
called something?” She still didn’t get it, so he said, “How about ‘the living
Stanley
Kubrick’?”
In the 2001 NBA Finals, the Los Angeles Lakers were expected to defeat the
Philadelphia 76ers easily, but Philadelphia won the first game. Afterward,
sportscaster
Marv Albert said, “Philly was down, 18-5. If this were a
series in the West, you’d feel like Philly didn’t believe in themselves. But
Philly came back.” Only people in the East believe in themselves. Only people
in the East have heart. Everyone else is a scarecrow or, perhaps, the Cowardly
Lion. Los Angeles won the next four games, but it had nothing to do with heart or
character. They were just, boringly, the better team.
When Arizona beat the Yankees in the 2001 World Series, it wasn’t perceived
to be a fable; the Diamondbacks got lucky in Game 7. When Anaheim beat the
Yankees in the 2002 American League Division Series, New York only happened to
be in a batting slump at the wrong time. When Seattle came back from a 2-0
deficit to beat New York in the American League Championship Series in 1995,
the Mariners weren’t displaying superior fortitude; the Yankees ran out of steam.
When an East Coast team, or especially a New York team wins, it’s a morality
tale about the little engine that could or, contrariwise, the unstoppable
forces of capitalism. When a team from somewhere else wins, it’s just, shrug, a
game. It’s not shrouded in mythology. Whoever owns the story tells its meaning.
David Shields is the author of eight books of fiction and
nonfiction, including Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season
(a
finalist for the National Book Critics Circle A
ward) and Remote:
Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity
(winner of the PEN/Revson
Award). His most recent book is Body Politic: The Great American Sports
Machine
.
