Transatlantic Brawls

“Welcome To Hell” –-banners fluttering from every corner of Sukru Saracoglu Stadium during yesterday's England-Turkey battle.

"When this series began, everyone knew it was going to be quite a battle. It was going to be very emotional, a lot of intensity. But I think we've upgraded it from a battle to a war." Red Sox manager Grady Little.

*****

You’d be hard-pressed to choose just which of the unrest-riddled matches yesterday, both of which nearly erupted into full-scale riots and the kind of anarchic chaos which occasionally makes a sporting event eerie, was the most fascinating. One was fought between the two predominate American cities and biggest rivals on the East Coast in a skirmish for the third game of a potential seven game series to decide the American League Baseball Championship, and the other was an international football battle with a Euro 2004 berth at stake.

After throwing at Karim Garcia’s skull and tossing the 72-year old ex-Red Sox manager Don Zimmer down to the ground like an disgruntled nursing home aide, and worst of all, losing to the Yankees in Fenway, it might be easy to piss on the icon that is the perpetually-wailing Pedro. You might well speculate that perhaps all of this hooliganism on the part of Pedro was meant to distract from the sad reality that he'd let his team down failing, yet again, to win a clutch game against the Yankees. I mean, isn't that what your "ace" is supposed to do, win games like this?

Worse still was that all this hyperbole and anger leaves people with a fetid taste in their mouths when all of the sudden they're supposed to soil themselves with admiration that Roger Clemens didn't try to do something desperate like decapitate anyone with a high and inside heater to the head or skewer them with the broken end of a baseball bat this time just because it was Pedro, not Roger, who lost his cool. To hear it from some people, Clemens is rolling his way on the righteous path to sainthood, a man who never lost his cool, a man who never threw a beanball in all the gloriful and beatific years of his illustrious career, just because he didn't turn around the next inning and try to kill Manny Ramirez in retaliation with his first pitch.

It's a high standard of audacity that these Yankees practice, ululating their indignation when Pedro threw at the head of a Yankee while their own ace is the most renowned head-hunter of his generation, the same guy who beaned Mike Piazza in the head. Pshaw. Let's have a hand for hypocrisy. "Just because you're being hit around doesn't mean you get to stick one behind somebody's head." Clemens was somehow able to preach with a straight face.

And while we're at it, how about a hand for that runny-nosed, plate-headed senior citizen running out onto the field, winding up a comical left hook only to be dumped on his head by Pedro. Why is anyone supposed to be appalled that Pedro shoved Don Zimmer to the ground? Because he's 72? Because the plate in his head is so obviously causing some sort of brain neuron degeneration and all sorts of synaptic misfiring that would cause someone his age and in his physical condition to think it was ok to charge out onto the field and try to attack a rival player? If Pedro hadn't been so busy trying to figure out how he was going to skew this episode into another "everyone is racist against Dominicans" harangue, he'd have laid Zimmer out cold. Then the Yankees really could have had something to whine about. Zimmer had no business in the world running out onto the field with assault in his eyes, even if he is too fat and too slow and too stupid to finish the job. If I have to hear another nauseating, treacly sermon about what a great guy Don Zimmer is, or how Don Zimmer is a grizzled veteran of the beanball wars and was thus understandably upset enough to interrupt the ball game with his zealotry and stupidity, I might just have to find myself a groundskeeper to kick around and take my frustrations out on.

But none of that is the tragedy. The tragedy is that following "the other" Dominican's Dramatic Display, when Manny Ramirez started waving his bat around and had to be held back by his teammates because Roger hummed a fastball over the strike zone instead of low and away, the needless little tirade that preceded Zimmer's comedic though ill-advised assault attempt on Pedro, the game was needlessly delayed for 10 minutes while order was restored. Who suffered for that? The fans. Perhaps frightened that Ben and Jen would become drunken voyous and start throwing beanballs of their own, the beer stands at Fenway Park were suddenly and irrevocably shut down for the remainder of the game. The biggest riot in the biggest rivalry of the year and no beer to fuel the passions. For shame. You'd think they were playing the match in Turkey.

*****

Meanwhile, by the Bosphorus, shortly after David Beckham slipped and missed what should have been a penultimate penalty kick in the first half of a 0-0 draw that saw England advance to the Euro 2004, quickly following his ballooning the ball over the bar and keeping the score knotted at zero, Turkish defender Alpay ran across to shout something in Beckham’s ear, to which the English captain responded by feigning to deliver a head butt. Beckham said he had been hit by Alpay. "He just went past me and clipped me round the ear and then he said f*** your mother."

Alpay wagged another admonishing finger as the halftime whistle went off, which appeared to enrage Beckham so much that he chased him up the tunnel as players left the field for their dressing rooms. Witnesses reported seeing up to 50 people, including players involved ina brawl in the tunnel and described the scene as a "mini-riot." Emre Bel?zoglu, arguably the best Turkish player in the world and Emile Heskey, the English striker, got involved too. After Turkish police sorted out the melee, the notorious Italian referee Pierluigi Colina ordered Beckham and Alpay into his dressing room and told the two to shake hands and cool things down.

It's a bit ironic that the players were the ones doing all the fighting when such stiff measures were taken to make sure no English fans made it in to Turkey to watch the match or cause any trouble. Not only were the Turkish borders sealed from English fans and tourists alike, but there were three separate cordons of Turkish police outside the stadium prior to the match and during the match. In addition, all fans attending the match had to produce a Turkish ID card along with their tickets or face being deported or detained as an English hooligan. Despite all these efforts, there were still a few stubborn Englishmen eager to support their team in person. Some of them were stopped at the airport and sent on the next flight home, some of them made it as far as the stadium but were nabbed due to their lack of appropriate Turkish identification and ended up spending the match in dank "holding cells" outside the stadium before being deported back to England. By all accounts, not a single Englishman was at the stadium, save for those involved in the match.

And even those Englishmen, the national squad, almost didn't make it to this match when earlier in the week they'd nearly decided to cause a national riot of their own by boycotting the match in protest of one of their teammates, Ferdinand Rios, getting suspended for the match for failing to take a drug test on the date and time assigned. It was a delicious display of self-serving self-righteousness for a team of underachieving, overpaid footballers to think of letting down an entire nation simply because a teammate was too stupid, too busy or too important to bother pissing in a cup for officials. Fortunately for them, Beckham is alleged to have pursuaded the most vocal strike advocates to settle down and fly off to Turkey where England was able to qualify and can now put their significant troubles, for the moment anyway, behind them.

*****

Before all the closet Cub supporters, hitherto unknown to the rest of the baseball world, start coming out of the woodwork to claim their prize for alleged long years of suffering, it should be pointed out that the Cubs have been in this position before of nearly going to the World Series. In 1984, they won the first two games of what was then a best-of-five NLCS, only to lose the next three games to the Padres in San Diego. At the time, Jack McKeon was the general manager of the Padres. He now is the manager of the Marlins, who won their last three games against the Giants in the division series after losing the opener. Bwaaahhaahahaha. The Curse of the Corked Bat shall be invoked...