Election Day Bedfellows

If you happen to be registered to vote in the city of New York, will be in said city at some point today before the polls close (most will shut down around nine, possibly earlier if they are in Ruth Messinger territory, but I won't get into that), have not been persuaded by the facts of the race as to who to vote for and are willing to base the performance of your civic duty on the rantings and ravings of a College sports writer, this column should be your Election Day Bible.

If any of the aforementioned conditions do not apply to you, read on any-way--you might learn something.

Today Rudolph W. Giuliani will likely be elected mayor of New York.

As much as the thought of four more years of my lovable mayor's militaristic rantings and subtly Gestapo-like public image contributes to further blockage of my bleeding heart, I'm not sure it's bad for the city.

I would, after all, rather bear those ills I have than fly to others I know not of.

But this is a sports column, you say. Cut to the meat and potatoes. Why the politics?

New York sports and New York politics have never been as closely wedded as perhaps they should be, because they really do have much to teach each other. Both deeply reflect the character of the city and its people.

New Yorkers tend to be very liberal, but eccentrically so.

Our last three mayors--the only three I remember--have been, a short, bald, conspicuously single Jewish man with an at-times painfully irritating voice who went on to bigger and better things as the judge on. "The People's Court"; a soft-spoken African-American liberal lawyer who is now a professor at Columbia; and a widely acknowledged big ole' meany, speculated draft-dodger and adulterer.

Only in a highly liberal city would any of those people ever see the inside of City Hall. Only in a highly eccentric city would the two of those people most like cartoon characters serve the longest terms.

The Big Apple is, not coincidentally, the site of Jackie Robinson's breaking of baseball's color barrier in 1947. Where else could Branch Rickey have pulled off integrating the national pastime during the Jim Crow era--very liberal.

The New York subway system--like the city itself, dirty, expensive, massive, confusing, yet a second (and at times first) home to so many--has a long association with the New York sports scene.

Walt "Clyde" Frazier got his nickname because he rode the New York subway to games and to local clubs afterwards dressed like Clyde from the "Bonnie and Clyde" television tandem--very eccentric.

Examples of a close association between sports and city abound--Broadway Joe Namath uses his big-city playboy image to this day; Mickey Mantle, the Oklahoma kid who made it big on America's biggest stage came straight out of a Horatio Alger novel; Hideki Irabu's introduction to New York was Derek Jeter giving him a tour of the Chinatown club scene; and let us not forget the New York Knicks, the lovable bullies of the NBA--the civic myth of New York lives a charmed life within its sports scene.

Our politics are similarly emblematic of the city--Al Sharpton, a man known more for greasy hair and groundless rhetoric than any kind of singular vision, almost captured the Democratic mayoral nomination straight out of the Harlem Renaissance. And Alfonse D'Amato, the Republican senator who seems so contrary to our liberal values in many respects, is our favorite son because he's so New York-centric; a belief that the Big Apple is the be-all and end-all heals all partisan wounds.

Giuliani, the tough-as-nails prosecutor who rose to prominence by busting mafiosos, fits right in. Messinger, with no personality that I am aware of, does not.

Giuliani is a Yankee fan, and makes the issue of whether the team moves to New Jersey central to his politics. He is symbolic of the link between sports and politics in New York much more so than someone like Ed Koch, for whom the extent of their mayoral duty vis-a-vis sports was a guest appearance in the first inning of the annual Yankees-Mets Mayor's Trophy game.

So for those of you for whom it matters, when you cast your vote in the election today and have weighed Messinger's apparent genuine compassion against Giuliani's penchant for unqualified results, if good versus evil does not influence your voting decisions at a level consistent with most systems of morality and you are at a loss for who to vote for, pick Giuliani if for no other reason than that he's so damn New York.