Father-Son Bond: For One Night They Cheered the Yankees Together

ALEXANDRIA And that's the price . . . per ticket?" It was too late. I had already committed in mind, body, and wallet. On this day, I was divulging the details of my credit card not only for Yankee tickets, but Yankee playoff tickets -- and lower level.

I went to my first professional baseball game was when I was 5 years old. I had convinced my father to take me to a preseason game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Baltimore Orioles at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. In Virginia, where I grew up, nearly everyone was an Orioles fan. The New York Yankees were the Evil Empire -- and my father might as well have been Darth Vader.

Almost nightly when he was a boy, in Tidewater, Virginia, my father crouched next to the radio, listening to the play-by-play of Yankee games on the Mutual Radio's "Game of the Week." For many months of the year, those few hours of Yankee baseball provided a welcome break from the otherwise oppressive humidity that seems to drape over the body in summer.

When my father was 7, he lived in Brooklyn, as my grandfather, a naval officer, was stationed at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. It took me until I was 26 to learn this little-known fact, as my father lived in many cities before my grandparents eventually settled in Gloucester. It was at this young, impressionable age, in Brooklyn, that my father discovered Mickey Mantle and the New York Yankees. My grandfather gave him a wool navy blue Yankees hat, the kind that absorbs sweat at the brim and conforms to your head like leather flip-flops. My father cherished this hat, and while I have never asked what happened to it, something tells me that, even though his body outgrew that hat, his heart never did. Despite this gift, and my father's love of the team that was just a borough away, he never made it to an actual game.

I went to college in New York and stayed after graduation. I wanted to provide my father -- the man who had always provided for me without question -- with something that he would truly love and appreciate, something that transcended our relationship and reminded him of his father, of his youth, of that wool Yankees cap, and most important, something that would fulfill a dream he had harbored longer than twice as long as I had lived. There was no question -- we were going to Yankee Stadium.

While his was the body of a 60-year-old flying up to New York that weekend, his memories were those of that 7-year-old boy, wool cap propped up on unkempt hair, beaten leather glove in hand -- just as I must have looked when he took me to the Orioles game at about the same age.

That day my father met me at my office and we went to Mickey Mantle's restaurant. It was a Yankees spot, through and through, and we sat and drank beer, watching the Redskins play on TV. Neither of us had ever been to a playoff baseball game, and Jeffrey Mayer prevented the Orioles -- and more important, me -- from ever going to a World Series game.

That night, as we walked into the stadium, the electricity and aura were palpable. I was not sure what caused the sense of energy that ran through those old stairs, now long gone with the new Yankee Stadium supplanting them, but I was sure my father was adding serious fuel to that fire. He noted the organ music with the excitement of a child and made me call my mother at least three times before the game started to let her know what had happened so far.

As we made our way through the crowd to our lower-level third baseline tickets, the rush of the field hit us like a ton of bricks and I quickly realized why playing at Yankee Stadium was like nowhere else. It just oozed "Big Time." Our tickets were perfect. Sure, they were in the last row in the lower level, but they were the lower level.

The game turned out to be Roger Clemens' last professional (albeit short) start, and Joe Torre's last home win as a Yankee skipper, both points which only added to the special nature of the night for the two of us. It also turned out to be a great game and a Yankees victory -- a truly wonderful September evening shared with the man who introduced me to the game

In the bottom of the 6th inning, Alex Rodriguez hit an infield single and I caught myself cheering. I had actually just cheered for the Yankees -- what was wrong with me! I only had two beers all night, so it wasn't the alcohol cheering. It was the exhilaration I felt just being there -- in that old stadium, in its last playoff game, with my father -- that for the first time made me want Jeter to stretch that single into a double instead of walking to the dugout after a strikeout.

I realized how it was that my father had rooted all those years for the Orioles (as long as they were not playing the Yankees) when we went to games -- it was because he was cheering for me, for my hopes and dreams, not for his own. For that one night, and that one game, I was a proud Yankees fan.

Tyler Randolph Boyd works for Washington, D.C.-based Kearsarge Global Advisors. He spends his weekends in Gloucester County. Contact him at .