Notes of a Fallen Fan

I am a thoroughly modern sports fan. That is to say, I am a relatively rootless middle-class, middle-aged American, almost totally without loyalty in my rooting habits, a citizen of the television age. I mention all of this by way of confession, for there may well be nothing in it to be proud of. But that is the way it is.

I may, if I have a favored football team and it falls too far behind in the third quarter, simply turn off the set rather than suffer through a painful fourth quarter. I begin most seasons without commitment; as the year develops, I judge which of the better teams has the most sympathetic cast of characters and root somewhat dispassionately for it. I root generally for older athletes against younger ones; several years ago, Arthur Ashe almost upset John McEnroe in an indoor tennis match, and I, for reasons too varied to list here, was passionately for Ashe. I often root against certain teams because I do not like the owner or the coach or the fans (it is hard for me to root for Los Angeles teams, because the fans seem more concerned with getting to the parking lot than with the game itself; in addition, I consistently root against the Minnesota Vikings, because I once worked for a man who was the principal newspaper publisher in Minneapolis and I deem him to be ungenerous and unkind). Sometimes I root against a team because a star player has been featured in a series of television commercials I hold objectionable; and although Roger Staubach is no longer active on the Cowboys' roster, it does not help their chances with me that he does the Rolaids commercials from which I demand relief.

It was not always this way. I was once the most passionate of fans, a lover of my home team, the New York Yankees, and this story of my fall from faith is, at once, it seems to me, the story of the age we live in and a personal memoir. Since I believed, in days past, that loyalty was an important part of a person's value system, my lack of loyalty, my flexibility of faith, bothered me for a time. Gradually, I realized (or rationalized) that it was a reaction on my part to the malaise in the sports world around me. It was the world of sports that was without loyalty, and this fact, which had probably always been true, was simply more evident now than ever before.

In the old days, loyalty, or the lack thereof, was an option only of owners, and they exercised it by getting rid of all but a few aging stars, by firing managers, trading favorite players and, if necessary, trading towns. Soon the rules of sports changed and modern players had a leverage that, in the past, belonged only to owners. Before long, they were trading teams and showing loyalty only to the highest bidder. I soon learned an important lesson: that there was in sports, as in real life, loyalty only as long as the stakes were relatively small. If another team offered a player who made $100,000 a year $15,000 more, he would often stay put. If It offered him $300,000, he was gone.

I thought that Simon and Garfunkel, in that lovely song, asked the wrong question. It should not have been ''Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?'' but, rather, in an age when players can make their own decisions, ''Where are you going ...?''

I think, now, I know.

Since. DiMaggio was a white superstar with exceptional right-handed power, and since the Yankees and the Red Sox have one of the last surviving true rivalries in sports, I believe Joltin' Joe, if he were still playing, would be going to the Red Sox for a cool $3,000,000 a year, plus a fat Fenway Franks endorsement deal. After all, it is clear that he and George Steinbrenner would have long since been estranged. DiMaggio's innate grace, his consummate talent and his unwillingness to indulge in petty publicity stunts soon would have offended his owner, and we would have seen, after Steinbrenner's instinctive need to be more important than any player, his equally instinctive need to punish. In the case of DiMaggio, it would have been not so much what he said as what he failed to say. One can see the tabloid headlines: ''Joe snubs George/refuses to show at boss's daughter's birth-day party.'' Followed, of course, by ''Steinbrenner blasts DiMag/only out for self/says n.y. owner.'' Followed by ''Joe's silence steams Steiny/'he's paid to talk/as well as hit.' '' I realize that this is a painful scenario for Yankee fans--the loss of the most treasured player of modern times--but Steinbrenner would have balanced it by signing Ted Williams a year later for $4,000,000. Again the headlines: ''George gets revenge/steals splendid splinter/for stadium seats.'' That particular melodrama, of Williams and Steinbrenner, given the immense egos of the two central characters, would not, we well know, have lasted very long, either. Once again, the headlines: ''George to ted: bunt or else''; followed by ''Kid: I'm not/paid to bunt.'' Followed by ''George benches kid/kid gives boss/$4m finger.'' Followed by ''George moves right-field fence back/75 feet to spite splinter.'' Followed, inevitably, by ''George fires billy again.''

And so it goes.

•

I have thought often of how I became so coldhearted about things that once meant as much to me as sports and the New York Yankees did. In my childhood, the Yankees were desperately important to me and my fantasies were connected with them. In the beginning, the myth of sports was tied up with baseball, for I grew up in the Forties, when professional football and basketball were either nonexistent or distant minor sports. To children growing up in those days, life seemed humdrum, the deeds of athletes seemed more real; theirs were the first feats of excellence that I could understand and calibrate, and from an early age, I was fascinated by them.

Thus, the journey of understanding must begin for me, as it does for so many others of my generation, with DiMaggio. In 1939, when I was five years old, my father took me for the first time to Yankee Stadium. We had talked about that trip often before we actually made it, and I was well prepared for the wonders of it. To this day, I can remember the excitement I felt as we approached the stadium itself--the feverish rush I felt outside as we went up to the ticket windows, the need to move more quickly lest the game start without us, the awe I felt looking down at the field and seeing the greenest grass I had ever seen. It was a weekday game, and I was also surprised that there were so many empty seats. I had assumed that they'd all be taken because everyone else in the city would be as eager as I was to go.

My father had been a good athlete, and he knew baseball and was careful in explaining what to look for in the game. ''There,'' he said, pointing to a tall figure standing by himself near the batting cage. ''That is DiMaggio.'' That was 44 years ago, and I can still remember him telling me to watch how DiMaggio rounded second base, to note that he had a particular grace for so tall a man. In addition, he told me to watch DiMaggio in center field when a ball was hit; he would, my father said, get a much earlier jump on a fly ball than almost any other outfielder. I listened dutifully, though in retrospect, I do not think a five-year-old boy has a very good sense of getting a jump on a fly ball.

The Yankees played Cleveland that day, and I rooted against the Indians with a passion that amused my father. The Yankees won and I was as happy as I had ever been. As we left, my father turned to me and said, ''Well, you're a Yankee fan now.'' And, indeed, I was; I was committed, ready to suffer through the war years with clinker teams until my heroes returned. Even now, I have a clear vision of DiMaggio rounding second, stretching a double into a triple. And my father was right--he was exceptionally graceful for so tall a man.

•

In subsequent years, as I wondered why I had taken sports so seriously for so long, it often seemed to me that much of it was the inevitable assimilation of an immigrant family: Sports were so American that by knowing them well and by playing well, one became more accepted and less alien. Surrounded by a world that was not always psychologically comfortable, I, like many youngsters, turned to the order apparent in sports. Moreover, sports seemed a safe place to invest my emotions and passions when I was young. But now, a father myself, I am apt to add a third reason: It was one of the few things that I could share at an early age with my father. I could not lightly share the old military uniforms and medals in our attic, nor the memories that went with them, nor any talk about his work, nor, when he went back into the Army during the war, very much about what he was doing there. But we could share the Yankees and DiMaggio, and it was part of our bond. In this urban age, I do not think young boys are easily bonded to their fathers--not as easily as they are supposed to be--yet there are now, more than 33 years after his death, still a few things that connect me to mine: the smell of cigarettes mixed with shaving cream in a bathroom; going fishing early in the morning; and entering Yankee Stadium and seeing again, every time I go, the miraculously green grass. I think now that part of the reason that I loved the Yankees and DiMaggio was that they were among the first things in my father's world that I could share. So the Yankees became my team and, soon, my father went off to war.

During the war, we lived in Winsted, Connecticut, and there my loyalty was confirmed. The Yankees were on WINS, 1010 on your dial, and my brother and I would take our old radio to whatever corner of the house provided the best reception on that day and listen to Mel Allen's honeyed voice describe the game. It was a world of Ballantine Blasts and White Owl Wallops. It was as if we knew Mel Allen and he knew the Yankees, and so we felt connected to them.

Those years, the late Forties and the early Fifties, were my great years as a baseball fan. I was loyal first to the Yankees, then to the American League. Soon after that, I began to lose the faith. And there were, I suspect, secret increments to that process. Perhaps the first was the retirement of DiMaggio. For my generation, he was the ultimate mythic figure--not just a great player but a man who had what we perceived as class. Above pettiness, revered by his teammates, he did not need to speak for himself, because his deeds spoke for him. As boys, we were taught by a generation of sportswriters to respect his stoic heroism, just as Hemingway's heroes were to be respected for their grace under pressure. Now, looking back at him and his career and knowing a good deal more about the egos of athletes and stars, I think he had an absolute sense of the theater of what he did. There is the story that Jimmy Cannon told about DiMaggio, at the end of his career, playing every day in considerable pain even though the Yankees had a comfortable lead. ''Joe,'' Cannon had asked him, ''why are you doing it--why are you putting out so much?''

''Because,'' he is supposed to have answered, ''there might be someone out there who's never seen me play before.''

In retrospect, what was critical about DiMaggio and the special quality of his myth was that he was probably the last great athletic star of the pretelevision era. By that I mean to say that while many of his big games were on television, he himself was not. We saw the action, but we did not see him talking afterward with Johnny or Merv or Howard. He remained as he played: elegant and aloof. We could make of him what we wanted and endow him with the qualities we chose.

No man is a hero to his valet, and what television gives us is a valet's-eye view of the mighty. It also, in the crushing hype of modern media, inevitably diminishes deed. I have a suspicion that Reggie Jackson not only is as good a hitter as DiMaggio (though nowhere near the complete baseball player he was) but shares one other quality with him, which is an instinct for the drama of an event and a capacity to rise to the great occasion. In the pretelevision era, though, the deeds were done and they stood by themselves, to be savored and replayed by the fans in memory; they were mythic, in many cases, precisely because they were not widely seen and so had to be passed on by word of mouth. That, unlike the instant replay, is the path to true legend. In Jackson's case, the deeds have become mixed with a thousand video images of Reggie himself, predicting and acknowledging and explaining why he likes to play in the big games, all detracting, inevitably, from those moments of action, diminishing both deed and self. There was no subtraction from DiMaggio's accomplishments. It was not that he lived a life, athletic or personal, of a higher order (indeed, the sense, from a distance, is that he was basically suspicious and almost surly with all but a few trusted insiders in those years); it was that he lived in a society that demanded, in return for its ticket, less of him. Perhaps there is some kind of lesson here, for when Di-Maggio played, the fan was still essentially in the seat and television was an ancillary force. The smaller crowd, which paid the player less money, got less of him in return.

•

When DiMaggio retired, in 1951, I was 17. The boy I had been was on his way to becoming a man, and the Yankees held less attraction for me. Mantle arrived to replace DiMaggio, and I was never able to accept him completely, for he had arrived with exorbitant predictions of his greatness, with too many comparisons, as yet unearned, with DiMaggio. I resented that and accepted him later, only in his declining years, when it became clear that (despite the amplification of his deeds by the New York media) he was, in fact, a player of great ability and decency.

But it was not just that DiMaggio had gone and a usurper had arrived; I had also changed. I was gradually going out into the real world, and I was gradually forced to view athletes as part of that world as well. By 1955, I was still a baseball fan, though perhaps a less passionate one, and that fall, I was working as a reporter in a small town in Mississippi. Each afternoon that October--for it was an afternoon paper and I was free by two p.m. and baseball was still played in the sunlight--I would join assorted local pols and businessmen around the set in the lobby of the Henry Clay Hotel. Those were tense and angry days in Mississippi; it was just a year after the Supreme Court had banned segregation in local schools, and it was the same year that two white men had lynched a young black boy named Emmett Till. The state was on fire with racial tension, and it showed in that group gathered around the old black-and-white set. They were all rooting vehemently for the Yankees, then a lily-white team.

In truth, they were not so much for the Yankees as they were against the Dodgers, who had Robinson, Campanella, Gilliam and Newcombe. That Dodger team seems, in retrospect, infinitely more exciting and sympathetic than the Yankees. They were not just black ballplayers but exciting ones, players with speed and daring. The hotel room simply seethed with hatred; this was no longer a baseball game, this was a kind of war.

Robinson was the focus of it, not because he had been the first--there were too many of them now and that was forgotten--but because he was so fierce and so provocative. It was as if he knew those people were there and, by his body language alone, taunted not just the Yankees but those white fans who would not accept him for the consummate athlete he was. This they could not do. Men who loved a sport, who would have thrilled to his style had he been white, had to cut themselves off from something they held dear. That was no small victory for Robinson. Taunted by him, they responded bitterly. He was not Jackie Robinson to them that day, he was ''Nigger Jackie.'' If he got on first, it was ''Emmett Till leading off first,'' in honor of the lynched little boy.

It was a room filled with rancor and anger; I did not know then--nor, most assuredly, did they--that it was part of a death gasp of a dying order, that very soon, their children and grandchildren would be playing with and rooting for great black athletes at West Point High and Ole Miss and Mississippi State. They were bitter because in some primal way that I did not yet understand, it had already happened: They were playing in the world series, and it (the television box) was bringing it home to West Point; and though no black could yet play at West Point High or Ole Miss, it no longer mattered.

In the lobby of the Henry Clay that day, the real world and the fantasy world became irretrievably mixed. Sport would never again be a place in which to escape, pure and immune from the real world, filled with only the heroic deeds of men who were different from the rest of us. My life now demanded that I cover issues that were filled with moral resonance; if in that part of my life the moral questions were so important, how could I, in the other part of my life, the sports part, so completely suspend the values against which I now began to judge men and events?

In that room, part of a childhood forever ended. It would be nice for the purpose of this article to report that I changed my loyalty and rooted for the Dodgers--but that is not true. What happened that day stilled something in me, and I remained almost mute, rooting silently for the Yankees but curiously ambivalent about it, pleased when Robinson defied them with his play, though not wanting them to lose. It was a joyless series for me.

In the years that followed, my loyalty began to diminish and I cared less about sports. I was busy covering civil rights in the South, and Martin King was more important than Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays.

Then, in 1961, as Maris and Mantle chased Ruth's record, I (unlike most Yankee fans) rooted for Maris over Mantle--a sign of how alienated I had already become. But I paid little real attention. I was on my way to the Congo to become a war correspondent. That fall, the Yankees were in the world series and I was in Katanga trying to stay alive. Two years later, the Yankees again were in the series, where Koufax destroyed them completely, and I was in Vietnam. (''The Jews won the world series,'' my brother wrote to me, clearly delighted by this news.)

While I was back in the country briefly in 1964, to cover Robert Kennedy's race for the Senate, I returned to the New York Times office one afternoon and found out that the Yankees had fired Mel Allen. For the boy who still existed in me, Allen was a treasured link to the pleasures of the past, of epic feats and grand moments. (The boy remembered that in 1948, when his father and his brother had visited an Eastern prep school, trying to get his brother registered as a student, they had gone in for an interview and the boy had remained in the car. Bored by the real events going on around him, he listened as Mel Allen described Henrich's assault on a home-run record. He had hit four home runs with the bases loaded, which tied the existing season record. Now Henrich, up again with the bases full, swung on a pitch, and the boy thrilled as Mel Allen described with mounting excitement the mighty course of the ball, going, going ... and then the excitement died as he described the ball hooking foul. The boy, who later could not remember the birthdays of close friends, would still remember, courtesy of Mel Allen, that Henrich was from Massillon, Ohio.) The day of his firing, I walked into the Times city room and turned to Stan Levey, a fine labor reporter who sat next to me.

''Gee, that's sad news about Mel Allen,'' I said.

''Mel Allen!'' he said. ''Sad news? You're crazy, Halberstam. He's the worst homer in baseball. He never says anything critical about the Yankees. Look at you, back from Vietnam; you win all those prizes for going against the grain, against the Government, and you're rooting for Mel Allen.''

(continued on page 124)notes of a fallen fan(continued from page 118)

He was astonished. But I was mourning the loss of Mel Allen somewhat as one mourns the loss of a childhood friend. And with that, the boy finally connected his two worlds and became a man.

•

The man, it turned out, was now more liberated from the past. He still followed the sports pages closely but began to make judgments about athletes based on qualifications other than regional loyalty. What kind of men were they? Was there a value system that connected them to the best of sport and to their teammates? Was there something about them that went even beyond sport? Were they about something? Rusty Staub, slow of foot, was not necessarily a ballplayer I admired or found exciting. But I remembered how, in June 1968, after Robert Kennedy was assassinated, he had been one of the very few players who thought it an event of importance, and although he had not refused to play in succeeding games, he had worn a black arm band for a time. So I came to root for Staub. I also came to admire Bill Russell for his high intelligence and his fierce pride; I fancied that I could understand why, shunned socially in Boston, underappreciated by the fans and the media, he had, as a policy, refused to sign autographs. I had been touched in the early Sixties by the innocence and the joy-ousness of the young Cassius Clay and came to respect the unshakable political integrity of Ali (whom I viewed as being the only holder of high public office to resign his position in protest over the Vietnam war).

As a man, I came to respect Johnny Unitas despite the fact that he had beaten the Giants and because he had endured. He said little but managed again and again to confound the odds. No one did the two-minute drill like Unitas, and I found nothing wrong with rooting for a man from a place as arcane as Baltimore. Very early on, I also came to like Vince Lombardi, in the days before his macho cult began to rank alongside that of John Wayne. I sensed in Lombardi the Italian immigrant's rage to be accepted; he had been denied a rightful chance to coach the Giants, and that particular fire, more than anything else, seemed to burn in him. I admired, as well, the play of Carl Yastrzemski and the way he led the young Red Sox into a pennant fight in 1967. That team was exciting, and I gradually found it easy to forgive the descendants of my old nemeses, Pesky, Doerr, York and Parnell.

That September, I found myself back in Vietnam. It was not a happy time. The war was at its height and Saigon had become a base for an immense American Army. A city I had loved in the past was now filled with too many soldiers and too many hookers. The war was not going well, and it had made me feel alienated not just from Saigon but from America itself. But in those days when the Red Sox were making their run, I took pleasure in getting up a little earlier every morning and walking over to the A.P. office to check on the ticker what had happened in that pennant race. There was a 13-hour time difference, and the results sometimes would come in during the morning and I would go over and sit by myself and look at the box score that contained Yaz's heroic deeds (yaz, it seemed to say each day: Three for four, two ribis, two home runs) and I would take sweet solace. I tried to see him as he was in Fenway Park--a place I had come to love, the huge wall looming over it all--with his cocky stance, as exaggerated as that of my beloved DiMaggio. It was an oddly comforting moment, a reminder of an America I still felt connected to when I felt so disconnected from everything else. Then I would rejoin the war. I have always felt I owed Yaz something.

•

What was happening in those years, the Sixties, was that the world of sports was changing, almost under our noses, becoming more brazenly commercial. It had always been commercial, but now it was becoming married to television, and the commercialism was about to be unchecked. The nature of the game was about to change, and the impulse for the athletes, for the owners and, finally, for the fans, was to change, too. Hype had always been a part of the game; there had, after all, been hype about a Giants rookie named Clint Hartung, who not only would be the greatest hitter in history but every fourth day would pitch as well. But it was now a dominating factor. In the past, it had been limited--the chance to place a message on an outfield sign or to get an athlete to pose for a magazine ad touting the cigarette he smoked. But now Madison Avenue was about to find a new arena for its skills.

Soon, athletes became salesmen. Madison Avenue had married television, which had, in turn, bought sport. I watched the process with mounting apprehension. I soon tended to root against athletes who were among the favored representatives of the advertising business or who in a particular season had received hype beyond the call of duty. In 1968, the year in which Denny McLain won 31 games, I rooted for him to reach that high plateau but was also appalled by the media fever that it created. I watched the world series that fall with special pleasure, for Bob Gibson had become a favorite of mine; he was so good, so tough, so unyielding of his personal and professional integrity that I had come to see him as someone special, a man not yet corrupted by the age. In the world series, he pitched that October day against McLain, and I had never seen the television camera report with such fidelity. It was the game in which he struck out 17 Tigers, and the camera shot Gibson tight in image after image, showing only the ferocity of pride in his face--a tribal prince on the mound, I thought that day. The picture did not need any voice-overs nor ''supers'' imposed while he was pitching. The camera told all; it was as if he were flouting the world of media, of hype, of commercial endorsements (of which he had done, great pitcher though he was, precious few). All that mattered in the end, his face seemed to be saying, was this: me with my best against you with your best; all else is wind and blather. It was a moment as true as anything I have seen in sport in the past 20 years. It was the moment not of the hype but of the athlete.

I did not even know what I was responding to at the time, but now I can see that a wariness of spirit and commitment had begun even before I realized it. For better or worse, I think I would now mark its full flowering with the coming of the first Super Bowl, an event that symbolized the domination of sport by television. The immense hype and amplification of deed was now mandatory; for if high quality of event was now not necessarily a part of the ritual, then the pregame hype certainly was. Inevitably, the game itself, after a couple of weeks of Rozellian promotion, was almost always an anticlimax. (The two league-championship games that preceded it, in which only football was at stake, were almost always excellent--much more about sport than about destiny and history.) So the coming of the Super Bowl was a critical moment in the new face of sport, marking a lack of essential harmony between event and amplification of event, a disharmony that leads inevitably to disappointment.

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But the problem of the Super Bowl was, even more, that it reflected the coming of the great new American Sports Glut. Now there would be more games, more titles, more brilliant moments, but each brilliant moment meant less and less. For it was soon followed by other moments, equally brilliant and equally memorable, that in the diminishing space allotted for memory, became less meaningful than ever. In sports, as in politics, television so relentlessly pushed the new at us that it would, in the process, obliterate the past. Thus did each event, no matter how heroic, recede ever more quickly. Yes, there were more sports now and more teams and longer seasons that overlapped. The end impression upon the brain of the fan was finally not unlike that of a gluttonous movie fan who has chosen to see two or three great films on a given afternoon and cannot later separate one from the other. There was so much sport now that nothing could be remembered or cherished; there was more but there was less.

•

If DiMaggio was a hero of one generation--his fame cumulative, the memory clearly focused of his deeds, a star only as he produced--then Joe Namath was the prototype of the new media athlete, for he became a star simply by signing. Sonny Werblin--he of show business--signed Namath instead of other seemingly equally skilled quarterbacks because, watching him walk into the room, Werblin judged him to have star quality. The very nature of his salary, $450,000 a year--the first big salary in the then-escalating football wars (wars that were not just between two football leagues but, more significant, between two television networks)--guaranteed that, given even a minimum level of competence on the field, he would be a celebrity. For the hype, as many another owner was to find later, was in the salary.

Very quickly, starting with his signing, Namath became not so much a great player as a great media event. He was an instant celebrity. He was said to be exciting; indeed, like John F. Kennedy, he was said to have charisma--the charming, boyish athlete of great prowess, Unitas crossed with Huck Finn. I watched carefully in those years, and his charm always eluded me; I remember him in various interviews as being basically suspicious--the eyes heavy-lidded, at once shrewd and surly, as if wary of all the fuss going on around him yet aware that there might in the long run be some benefit in all of this. Not surprisingly, his persona for a long time obscured his football ability.

The explosion of money and free agents that began with the signing of Namath changed sport in many ways. It did not necessarily make it worse, but it made it different. It changed, in many instances, the way the athletes perceived what they did and, equally important, it changed the way they were perceived by the fans. I do not doubt that there are thousands of young boys and girls out there today who love and admire Dave Winfield as purely as I loved and admired DiMaggio; but I also suspect that there are even greater numbers of young people who, instead of thinking that modern athletes do something wonderful, admire them because they've got a good deal. I do not know that this is even a bad thing; it is perhaps a more realistic assessment of the athlete on the part of the fan (and certainly on the part of the athlete himself, who in the old days was quite likely to be suddenly disillusioned upon the end of so brief a career), but it marks an end of a special kind of innocence for the fan at a remarkably precocious age. It leaves an altered relationship and it changes forever the sense of loyalty. When I was 12 years old, the Yankees traded Joe Gordon to the Cleveland Indians for Allie Reynolds. I was shocked and wounded: Gordon was my second baseman and I had rooted for him; Reynolds was the enemy. I did not lightly accept him; it took a great deal of effort on the part of Mel Allen, talking in warm and friendly terms about the Big Chief and what a good man and a tough competitor he was, before I reluctantly bid farewell to Gordon and accepted the Chief. I do not know what it is like for a young boy to follow baseball today, but in some way, conscious or unconscious, there must be a sense of the dominant role of money and an awareness that any player, no matter how wonderful his deeds, might pack his suitcase at the end of the season and depart for greener terrain.

Oddly enough--given Namath's role in all this--I rooted for his Jets when they met Baltimore in Super Bowl III. Not because of Namath but because his team and, even more, his league, were underdogs; and in my new incarnation as a fan, I tilted toward underdogs. I also favored older athletes when they were matched against those who were younger (the old Connors against the young McEnroe). Age was the nemesis of the athlete; so, too, it was the nemesis of the fan. I rooted, as well, against certain cities: Dallas, for a time, because a President had been shot there (then, after those wounds had healed, because the Cowboys had decided to call themselves America's Team), and Los Angeles because, like New York City, it was a citadel of hype and, even worse, of Hollywood hype--athletes mixed with stars. I rooted, moreover, for athletes who comported themselves with a personal dignity comparable to their athletic skill: Julius Erving, given his great individual talents, could have exploited his ability selfishly. Instead, he systematically sacrificed rare personal artistry for the betterment of his team and still managed to do things on the court that no mortal had ever done before.

To my surprise, I came, in the midst of adjusting my preferences, to a reluctant respect for Steve Garvey. In the beginning, he had been the epitome of the athlete I did not like, the Los Angeles athlete who was not just an all-American boy himself but even had an all-American wife. (Not since Tom Seaver and his wife had offered themselves in an advertising-trade journal to do joint commercials some ten years earlier had I been so suspicious.) He had a good bat, a good glove, good looks and would eventually run for the Senate. I thought he was packaged goods--perhaps the most damning charge of all. But that began to change in the 1977 series. After all the hype about Dodger Blue that year and what a fine team of morally superior young men these were, they came apart at Yankee Stadium and only Garvey behaved with grace. In defeat, the others criticized the ball park, the city or the fans, or they ducked the press altogether. Only Garvey remained accessible. When Reggie Jackson hit his third home run, I saw, to my amazement, Garvey quietly clapping into his glove. It was an epiphany: I had thought he was a young man who was entirely about himself, but this showed he had a sense of sport and of the occasion that need not be restricted by his ego. I watched that--more moved by Garvey, oddly enough, than by Jackson--and I thought, Well, Garvey, maybe you're OK after all. And then I looked more carefully.

The year I converted completely was 1981. That was the year Garvey's wife criticized him for being too plastic (perhaps the first time in history that a local talk-show person had accused someone else of being plastic). Worse, she soon ran off with Marvin Hamlisch. Shortly after that, Garvey was playing in the world series again. During the series, he ducked no question, though he had to know that every time he went to bat, some television director in the booth was saying, ''There's Garvey--cut tight to his face. Tighter than that!'' And, of course, while they did not add ''supers'' to the image, it was, in fact, on most people's mind: Steve Garvey ... B.A. . . 29 H.R.S. . . Wife ran off with M. Hamlisch. . . . It must have been a terrible time, yet he comported himself again with exceptional dignity. I rooted for Garvey and was pleased when he signed last spring with San Diego, because now I could root for him and not for the Dodgers.

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But the final story I want to tell here is about something harder than picking a winning team or rooting for a sympathetic athlete against an unsympathetic one; it is about how I liberated myself from my past and how I kicked the habit. For now, I am pleased to report, I am no longer a Yankee fan.

It was not easy. The past is powerful, and when it is cloaked in myth--the myth of my father, the myth of a great athlete like DiMaggio--the past is more powerful still. It took nothing less than the worst owner in sports to do the trick. It is painful even to write about George Steinbrenner, for, in a sense, the greatest aim of his tenure as head of the Yankees has been self-serving publicity.

Steinbrenner is the embodiment of the new modern owner at his worst, the rich man drawn to sport as a public exercise of ego, the chance to bask in the reflected glory of others' deeds. He brings the word owner to its essential definition, for he is not just president, chairman of the board and chief executive officer but owner--and, no matter how high their price, these are not ships; these are human beings.

No wonder he bought into the Yankees; he wanted, after all, to be famous when before he was only rich (in a society where neither has anything to do with true accomplishment--unless, of course, the making of vast sums of money is considered an art form). The team he acquired consists of genuinely accomplished men. He bought them, and now he praises them, chides them, feuds with them, discusses before assembled press groups their levels of personal courage. He does this all the time. It is far more exciting than the life of a shipbuilder, which is boring. In the end, it becomes more his team than that of the fan. There is no time for the accrued loyalty to individual players that is necessary for a real relationship between fan and team. The players come and go too quickly. In the end, his morality triumphs, because the new fans will now be loyal only if the team wins; even then, it is a new, colder kind of loyalty, as abiding and deep-rooted as the modern culture itself. But for Steinbrenner, it is a victory, because his personality dominates; the fan cannot think of the team without thinking of him. One thought of the Yankees of old and thought of DiMaggio hitting with men on base and Whitey Ford cuffing a ball. Now one thinks of them and thinks, inevitably, of George. Perhaps there will be a plaque for him in center field alongside those of the other greats, for he gives the fans victory after victory, as promised. But there is a price: He has taken the team away from them.

The last time I rooted for the Yankees was in 1978. That was partly a Steinbrenner team but even more a Gabe Paul creation. Paul had put it together with shrewd trades, and Steinbrenner had added just enough free agents to make it a fine club, tough and gritty. It had come from far behind to force the Red Sox into a special play-off that turned out to be a truly magnificent baseball game. That team went on to crush the Royals, then beat the Dodgers. Those Yankees were still a wonderful baseball team; they seemed to have their own special, almost cynical character.

The end, for me, came in 1980. The Royals were going to win it that year; they were a good baseball club and they had lost too often by too little in the past. But in spite of it all, there was Steinbrenner screaming at Willie Randolph and at a third-base coach, shouting expletives at the field. The camera, which had done so much to inflate him, now stripped him naked. He was sitting there at the end, petulant, graceless, learning what all the rest of us have always known: that there are some things that money can't buy. The camera showed the Yankees' owner as a sad, foolish man--McEnroe's manners without McEnroe's talent.

I, once a lover of the Yankees, true son of the stadium, watched my television set that day with absolute pleasure. I was astonished that Steinbrenner could have the best seat in the house and see so little, that he could be so close to the game and so far from understanding it. I thought how much he could learn from Bob Gibson about what baseball is really about--the best playing the best, the outcome, thus, always uncertain. The sport was too fine for him; it could not be bought, as if at auction, before the season began. It would still have to be played on the field. I rooted for the Royals that day, and I have rooted for other teams since. I have shed the past. Free at last, Martin Luther King said, free at last. Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last.

''All that mattered was this: me with my best against you with your best; all else is wind and blather.''

''Television so relentlessly pushed the new at us that it would, in the process, obliterate the past.''