Rudy: more time with the Yankees than at Ground Zero
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/08/18/rudy_yankees/?source=whitelist
After 9/11, Rudy wasn’t a rescue worker — he was a Yankee
Giuliani said he spent as much time at ground zero as many rescue
workers. Where was he really? Much of the time, at baseball games.
By Alex Koppelman
Aug. 18, 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 60 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.
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.