Ya Gotta Believe

The Mets had a ceremony before tonight's game and honored the surviving members of their 1969 championship team: Tom Seaver and Jerry Grote and Ron Swoboda, even Nolan Ryan showed up. The announcers have been reminiscing and interviewing the old players throughout the game, they've been showing clips of Seaver pitching and Swoboda's catch, and you know what? I'm sure there are fans who are saying, "Enough already! We get it!" But you know what? If you weren't there, you're still not going to understand how really amazing that summer of '69 was.

I was raised in an Italian-American family of Yankee fans, and as a 10 year old, I worshipped Mickey Mantle and listened to family stories of DiMaggio and Berra and Rizzuto in their heyday. But by the time I was a teenager, the Yankees had slid into a long era of mediocrity and my interest in sports of any kind had completely evaporated. I played chess, read books, watched Star Trek, and dreaded the hours I had to spend in gym class every week. The last thing I cared about was baseball. I didn't even own a glove when I was in high school.

You have to remember, 1969 was - in almost any regard, financially or politically or socially - a horrible time to be alive. Nixon was president, two Kennedys and Martin Luther King had been assassinated, and the war in Vietnam was sucking the spirit out of the entire country and pitting generation against generation. NYC was falling apart, dirty and broke and rife with racial tension.

But the summer of '69 changed all that. First, in July, a man walked on the moon. That was big. Good ol' Walter Cronkite on TV pointing to a monitor and there was a fuzzy image of Neil Armstrong bouncing up and down on the surface of the moon. America was ready to believe that almost anything could happen.

And then the Mets started winning. Every so often, someone asks, "do you believe in miracles?" Well, I do, because I saw the Mets win the '69 World Series. It didn't matter if you followed sports, or read the newspapers, or rooted for another team. By September of 1969, everybody in New York City - and Long Island and New Jersey and probably most of Southern Connecticut - was a Mets fan. It literally became a matter of faith; you had to believe. They were our team, our lovable losers, our Amazin' Mets. And it became almost a daily ritual to watch the box scores and count down the magic number. This can't be happening, you'd think, only it is. And somewhere, somehow, you knew it was actually going to happen, even if everything you knew about the world said it couldn't.

The '86 Mets and the way they beat the Red Sox certainly ranks as another miracle; the 1996 Yankees revived the spirits of a flagging city and gave New York Pride a major shot in the arm. The 2000 Subway Series brought New York alive in a way I haven't seen since.

But 1969, man... You had to be there. And you had to believe.