Bought a New Car

There’s something to be said about sticking with a team. Indeed, a lot has been said. I haven’t heard a lot of people make the counterargument: it’s OK to jump on a bandwagon.

I’m not just on it. I bought it. Brand new. Fully loaded.

Last fall, when my Los Angeles Dodgers defeated the Toronto Blue Jays to win the World Series, I watched more highlight clips from that battle than any I’d ever seen.

The New York Knicks vs. San Antonio Spurs showdown in this year’s NBA Finals may already be a close second.

In both cases, Chez Satyal was a house divided. My wife was born in Toronto and grew up in La Grange, Texas, halfway between Houston and Austin. She’s not a Dallas person, so her loyalties were to the Houston Rockets…and the Spurs. The reality is that the Rockets and Spurs don’t have much of a rivalry. They’re rarely both great at the same time. They’ve had their distinct eras. That said, you can see why we’re married: “dual loyalties” might be our thing.

My hometown of Cincinnati lost its NBA team in 1972, four years before I was born. Like many, I fell under Michael Jordan’s spell during the late 1980s Spike Lee ads. (Gotta be the shoes. And ya gotta love Spike Lee for doing a callback (literally) three decades later.) The first Saturday Night Live episode I watched was when MJ hosted it in September 1991, three months after his (my?) Chicago Bulls won the first of their six championships. Jordan Mania was so intense that it felt like everyone who didn’t have a rival team was a Bulls fan.

So even though I was decidedly against the Knicks in the 1990s, pulling for the Bulls and the geographically closer Indiana Pacers, my heart went out to this year’s team. They hadn’t seen a ring in over half a century. Unless you’re a Spurs fan like my wife, or you hate New York on principle, how do you pull against that?

I’ll always remember the first time I went to New York City. It instantly became my favorite place in the world. Corky St. Clair makes the point in Waiting for Guffman: “Going to the Big Apple for the first time, you know, is such an experience, you never forget it. It stays with you for your whole life. Me? Right out of the Navy, you know, fresh off a destroyer… uh… with a dance belt and a tube of chapstick.”

It’s why the line, “I want to be a part of it” hits so hard decades later, and why the Frank Sinatra song is still THE New York song, besting even “New York State of Mind”—and “Empire State of Mind.” Probably because Alicia Keys is often and ironically off-key and “concrete jungle where dreams are made of” actually makes no sense.

ANYway, I became a New York Yankees fan very early. In Times Square, my dad bargained and bought me a Yankees cap. Because the Reds aren’t in the American League, I didn’t know everyone hated the Yankees. I wasn’t a childhood Red Sox fan. By the time the Cleveland Indians were featured in Major League, and their nemesis was the Yankees, that ship had already sailed: Gordie (whom every scrawny/nerdy kid in America related to) accepted a Yankees hat from his big brother in Stand by Me. Later, Calogero wore one in A Bronx Tale. Eventually, George Costanza would become the Assistant to the Traveling Secretary for the Yankees. And then, in 1996, the Yankees came back from 0-2 down to defeat the Reds’ nemesis: the Atlanta Braves. I was locked in for life.

Here’s where it gets complicated: in 2024, the Yankees played the Dodgers in the World Series. I got so many texts asking what I was gonna do. I replied, “I’m not gonna know till they take the field.” By the first inning of Game 1, I knew I was all-in for the Dodgers. It surprised even me.

I can virtually guarantee that when the Reds are back in the Series someday, I’ll be bleeding red all over again. And I still cannot believe nobody told me the Reds were playing at Yankee Stadium while I was in NY. What is the purpose of social media if nobody’s gonna tell me stuff like this? Given that I went to Dodger Stadium last Wednesday, I could’ve seen the Dodgers, Yankees, and Reds play in the same week.

At my first game ever at Wrigley Field this year, I struck up a conversation with a middle-aged White man behind me in line for hot dogs and beers. I told him all about my mixed loyalties. He smiled, shrugged, and said, “You’re a baseball fan.” I scanned his face for sarcasm. He was being sincere.

That’s why I think it’s OK to root for teams, not franchises. Players change. Owners change. Ballparks change. But sometimes, a particular team simply captures your heart. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Once you separate the two, the bandwagon stops being a confession and starts being honest.

New Yorker Jerry Seinfeld said you’re rooting for the clothes. Funny stuff, but not entirely true. We root because of roots. There’s so much rooted in our team that it becomes part of our identity.

It’s the logical versus the emotional that makes this so fun. Till you get there, you just don’t know what’s going to happen on the field, on the court, on the ice, in the ring, or in your own heart.

I watched the first half of Game 2 of the Finals in Burbank with my family (despite our divided house). My mom enjoys the playoffs and my son Naveen is getting into basketball, both watching and playing. I watched the second half with my friend Charlie, who was born and raised on the Upper West Side. After the Knicks eked out that win, he was so pumped to get back home to NYC. He already had tickets to Game 6, so I helped him strategize.

“Charlie, it’s Friday. Wait till Sunday. Book two flights. You get till midnight the next day for free cancellations. One for Wednesday, when Game 4 is scheduled. One for Friday, so you can get to New York in time for Game 5 in San Antonio and stay for Game 6. If the Knicks win Monday, cancel the Friday flight and go Wednesday. If they lose, cancel Wednesday and go Friday. Stay till Game 6.”

He was so happy. “Rajiv, you’re a genius! I love this plan!”

I saw Charlie on Sunday. I asked him what he was gonna do.

“I booked a flight and I’m going tonight.”

That is love. He threw the whole plan out the window. He couldn’t take it anymore. He had to get home to watch the Finals with his boys.

So did my dear friend Cho, who planned my entire 50th birthday party in Vegas in March. (He also went to San Antonio to watch the Knicks win it all.) The difference is Cho and his wife don’t have kids. Charlie has two boys. When I asked his wife Lara about it, she told me what Charlie had already told me. “I knew this day was coming. It was in his wedding vows.”

I spent four days in New York and arrived the night of the Knicks parade. If you know nothing else about parades, you probably at least know they aren’t at night, so I was sad to miss the height of the euphoria. No city hits peaks like New York does. My brother Rakesh, a New Yorker for 20-plus years, told me he’d never seen the City like this. Yes, close when Obama and Biden won, but this surpassed even those.

I believe I’ve made my case for my ties to New York. And if I haven’t, then when I do, I start to sound like Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny. “My father was a mechanic. His father was a mechanic. My mother's father was a mechanic. My three brothers are mechanics. Four uncles on my father's side are mechanics.”

“I stayed in New York for two months, my two brothers live in New York, I had four cousins in New York, I’ve been to New York a hundred times, I got into New York University for business school…”

When I worked at P&G, they had a policy called a Saturday Night Stay (not to be confused with Saturday Night Live). If you were traveling for work, you could save the company money by not flying back to Cincinnati till Sunday. So, every chance I got, I routed my travel through NY before returning home. So, no, I’ve never claimed to be a New Yorker, but as a resident once said to me, “You go out in New York more than I do.” I mean, Rakesh said the song “Brooklyn We Go Hard” reminds him of me. And he lives in Brooklyn.

I also love being wrong. It happens so rarely. [Sigh.] I was not a believer in Jalen Brunson. So when a fellow short man scores nearly half the winning team’s points in the deciding game, you know I gotta be on board. Knicks in Paanch.

Just a decade ago, I was jumping up and down for the Cavaliers when they came back from 1-3 down to beat a Golden State team with the best regular season record ever. That’s the kind of inconsistency that should disqualify me as a fan of anything. I’d argue it’s the opposite. It’s the only genuine way to watch sports once you’ve lived in more than one place and loved more than one team’s worth of people.

I used to think loyalty meant picking one team and dying on that hill. Now I think it means being real about who you actually are, even when that contradicts who you were.

Cincinnati kid. Yankees fan. Bulls fan. Dodgers fan. Knicks fan. At least this year.

None of that feels like a betrayal anymore. Cincinnati is where I was born. Cleveland is where I went to college. Los Angeles is where I live. And New York is my favorite place to visit. Over the course of a half-century, every place has left a mark.

When people asked me whether I’d root for the Yankees or the Dodgers, I told them I wouldn’t know until they took the field. Turns out that’s true of a lot more than baseball.

Loyalty is more complicated than we admit.

Rajiv Satyal is a comedian. He resides in LA but is in a New York State of Mind.