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Giuliani Spent Twice As Much
Time At Yankees Games Than Ground Zero In '01
Alex
Koppelman
Salon
Monday Aug 20, 2007
On Friday, a New York Times story examined Rudy Giuliani's
schedule in the months after 9/11 to verify his controversial
claim that, like rescue workers, he'd spent long hours at ground
zero, and so was "in that sense ... one of them." In
fact, the Times found, he only spent 29 hours at the terror site
between Sept. 17 and Dec. 16.
What was he doing instead? Giuliani's beloved New York Yankees
made it to the World Series in 2001. We decided to compare the
time he spent on baseball to the time he spent at the ruins of
the World Trade Center.
The results were, considering the mayor's long-standing devotion
to the Bronx Bombers, unsurprising. By our count, Giuliani spent
about 58 hours at Yankees games or flying to them in the 40 days
between Sept. 25 and Nov. 4, roughly twice as long as he spent
at ground zero in the 90 days between Sept. 17 and Dec. 16. By
his own standard, Giuliani was one of the Yankees more than he
was one of the rescue workers.
(Article continues below)
During three postseason playoff series that began Oct. 10, 2001,
and ended Nov. 4, 2001, Giuliani attended every one of the team's
home games, with the possible exception of the third game of the
American League Championship Series, for which Salon could not
confirm his attendance. According to Salon's arithmetic, Giuliani
spent about 33 hours in stadiums -- this includes two World Series
games he watched in Phoenix -- during the Yankees' 2001 postseason
run, four hours more than he spent at ground zero. (We do not
know if he stayed for every pitch, but famed baseball writer Roger
Angell described Giuliani in the the New Yorker as a "devout
Yankee fan, a guy who stays on until the end of the game.")
Giuliani also attended the first regular season game the Yankees
played in New York after the attacks; that game lasted almost
three hours. (We do not know if he was present for any of the
Yankees' other seven post-9/11 home games.) And he spent one of
the away World Series games in a specially reserved box with his
son at the ESPN Zone in Times Square, London's Daily Mail reported.
The Daily Mail said he did that, in fact, for every away game
of the American League Championship Series and the Yankees' first-round
Division Series against the Oakland A's, but Salon could not independently
verify that report. (Giuliani watched the first game of the World
Series from his City Hall office.)
Then there's the whirlwind tour Giuliani made traveling back
and forth to Arizona for games six and seven of the World Series.
Granted, he and his now-estranged children were traveling with
a small entourage composed of the families of some of 9/11's victims;
Major League Baseball had chipped in free tickets, Continental
Airlines had donated a charter jet, and hotel rooms were comped
as well. Still, once those families were in Arizona, Giuliani
-- who had been predicting that game six would bring a Yankees
victory and an end to the series -- made an extraordinary effort
to ensure that he could attend to his responsibilities in New
York and still make it back for game seven.
Giuliani left game six midway through, the Associated Press reported
at the time, so that he could make his 12:30 a.m. flight back
to New York, where he needed to spend some time discussing the
U.S. anthrax attacks, which by then had touched New York's City
Hall. The mayor was in Staten Island by 9:30 a.m. to kick off
the New York City Marathon. Then it was back to the airport a
few hours later, and on to Arizona for game seven. That, in total,
meant 22 hours in the air.
But Giuliani's involvement with the team went far beyond a time
commitment. He was, in fact, a visible, constant presence at the
postseason games and, more than once, a participant in the team's
victory celebrations. Dave Johnson, executive sports editor of
the Evansville Courier & Press, even wrote a column at the
time bemoaning Giuliani's omnipresence and saying, "If I
didn't already dislike the New York Yankees, I'd root against
them just because of Rudolph Giuliani ... Who anointed Rudy baseball's
new Super Fan?" The mayor was pulled on the field after the
Yankees clinched both the American League Division Series and
Championship Series, and spent time in the clubhouse after those
victories as well.
Nor did Giuliani's involvement start as some attempt to boost
the city's spirits after the tragedy it experienced. As the Village
Voice's Wayne Barrett has previously reported, Giuliani has four
Yankees World Series rings from the time he was mayor; by contrast,
Barrett reported, no mayor in any other city that's won a championship
since 1995 has any Series ring at all. Barrett also reported that
Giuliani attended at least 20 of the Yankees regular season games
each year he was mayor.
Giuliani also found time during the period studied by the Times
to, for example, make a call to slugger Jason Giambi exhorting
him to leave the A's and sign with the Yankees. Giambi did, on
Dec. 13. A day later, Giuliani introduced Giambi at City Hall,
where, according to the Associated Press, Giambi said, "[Giuliani]
was going to help me find somewhere to live, so I'm going to take
him up on it."
And though the final budget he submitted as mayor called for
serious belt-tightening around the city -- cuts as high as 15
percent for most agencies -- in the wake of the attacks and the
$40 billion debt New York faced, Giuliani wasn't quite prepared
to subject the Yankees or their counterpart Mets to the same penny-pinching.
In fact, though nearly everyone expected 9/11 to cause the city
to abandon the plans for new stadiums for the teams -- Long Island's
Newsday reported that "since Sept. 11, several city officials,
including [then-Mayor-elect Michael] Bloomberg, have said the
projects were on the back burner because of the city's other pressing
needs" -- Giuliani wanted to push forward. The stadiums were
projected to have cost $1.6 billion in city, state and private
funds.
Giuliani did need a place to play, after all. Though rumors were
swirling at the time about what his future held after the end
of his final term as mayor, Giuliani was generally unwilling to
give specifics. He was willing, however, to jokingly suggest one
possibility -- "right field for the Yankees," the Associated
Press quoted him as saying while swinging an imaginary bat.
A spokeswoman for Giuliani did not return a voice-mail message
left seeking comment.
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