The New York Post has reported that our man Freddy Sez, subject of the immensely popular short documentary Bangin’ Pots, is being denied his customary gratis entrance into the new stadium. I spoke to him just before this past opening day, and Freddy was afraid the Yankees wouldn’t let him into the stadium. I thought he was just being paranoid. Twenty years into his run as the self-described “unofficial Yankees mascot”, the guy is an institution. I figured even if the Yankees didn’t really want his somewhat ramshackle vibe corrupting their gleaming monolith, they wouldn’t risk the avalanche of bad PR they’d be certain to get if they shut him out. Obviously, I thought wrong.

Come now, young Steinbrenners. Do we really have to tell you the right thing to do here? In his more volatile days, your pop played the mean-spirited bully better than anyone, but he’s also an intensely sentimental man who prizes loyalty above all else. Does anyone honestly believe that Freddy was allowed to roam the stadium for twenty years without the boss’s blessing? If George was healthy and at the new stadium every day, he would never allow shutting Freddy out. It’s profoundly ungenerous, it’s bad PR, and worst of all–just ask a Cubs fan–it’s just the sort of thing that pisses off the baseball gods.

LET FREDDY IN!

Further reading: The Freddy Sez Q&A

A lot of life hasn’t broken Fred Schuman’s way. As a nine year old in the Bronx, a stray bat in a stickball game destroyed his right eye. The injury relegated him to the sidelines in the schoolyard and for World War II when he was declared 4F,unsuited for military service. Freddy’s first marriage was a disaster. He started a jewelry business that went bust, followed by a bicycle business that went bust. He lost contact with his only son. He lost the building that his family owned in the Bronx. As Freddy will be the first to tell you, he was the quintessential loser, a failure at everything he tried. At his lowest point he was out on the street.

And yet in a highly improbable turn of events, Fred Schulman has become a highly recognizable symbol of the winningest franchise in American sports, the New York Yankees. Since 1988, Freddy has been a fixture at Yankee stadium during home games, inciting fans to cheer using decidedly old school, even weird school tools: hand lettered signs (‘FREDDY SEZ: YANKEES CAN IMPROVE!”), an old frying pan and a metal spoon.

That the Yankees answer to the San Diego chicken would turn out be a once homeless, one-eyed octagenarian stretches the limits of credulity, but Freddy’s association with the most recent Yankee dynasty (1996 , 2000) has conferred on him certified good luck charm status. Mayor Giuliani famously flew him to Phoenix for Game 7 of the 2001 World Series,a mission that was unsuccessful but only solidified Freddy’s celebrity.

I talked to Freddy a week before 2008 opening day as he prepared himself for another season in the Bronx, the last before the Yankees demolish the House That Ruth Built and set up shop in a billion dollar reinterpretation next door.

CI: What was the first reaction to you at the Stadium, when you started going in 1988.

FS: In the very beginning I couldn’t use the language of how they told me to, ‘Get the f–…Get lost”. They were interested in the ball game. Here is this guy coming up with a sign, with a spoon. And he wants me to hit the spoon and everything. It was pretty much, ‘Get lost.” Well fight, I can’t fight. I’m not a fighter. I’m a blind guy I don’t know karate, black belt and so forth. If I knew that I would probably have taken them on. Read the rest of this entry »

In a soccer mad summer, it’s important to remember that despite the current fancy, my generation of New Yorkers didn’t give a shit about “the beautiful game” before the Cosmos, and have only been vaguely interested since. “Once in a Lifetime”, a well-timed documentary history of the team and the men who made it, opens in theatres Friday and does justice not only to the relatively well-known Pele comes to New York story, but also finally gives my man Giorgio Chinaglia his just desserts.

I was four in 1977, too young unfortunately to appreciate the Cosmos first title run. The dawn of my soccer consciousness came in the fall of 1980 (year of the third Cosmos title), when as part of a Friday afternoon sports club called Cavaliers, I was taken to Randall’s Island to play baseball, floor hockey, touch football, bowling if it rained, and soccer. We knew very little about the game other than the sure facts that you wanted to kick the ball into the other team’s goal (between the orange cones) and that if you scored, you were supposed to do a little dance which began with fist-pumping, concluded with ass shaking, and could be occasionally embellished with finger pointing or sliding on your knees. We knew because we saw Giorgio Chinaglia do it when Warner Wolf went to the video tape.

I loved Chinaglia’s shtick. Being a mercurial little fucker myself, I have always been soft on sports brats, and in the early 80s, my brat pantheon was centered on a holy trinity: Gastineau, McEnroe, and Chinaglia. Seeing Giorgio in his shameless prime and his fantastically unrepentant middle age is by far the best part about ‘Once in a Lifetime”, which leans a little heavy on a suprisingly deep, disco soundtrack, but should have more than enough archival footage to satisfy the vintage soccer needs of my fellow retrosexuals.

‘Once in a Lifetime” handles the epic rise and fall of the Cosmos chronologically and comprehensively: their hardscrabble origins as a semi-pro team on Randalls Island, unlikely purchase by ur-media mogul Steve Ross, rapid transformation into a world class soccer powerhouse, and equally sudden implosion. Hungry to be soccer’s Steinbrenner, Warner Brothers’ honcho Ross paid a whopping 7 million for Pele (in the days when Hank Aaron was making a measly 200 hundred large), and when Ross realized the great one couldn’t win alone, he went out and bought Chinaglia, Franz Beckenbauer, and Brazilian defender Carlos Alberto.

During their epic ’77 title run, the Cosmos were media darlings, a box office smash (first team to sell out the Meadowlands), and legendary studio 54 swordsmen who knocked in booty hat-tricks like they were penalty kicks. The film stops short of presenting hidden camera videos of Chinaglia and Pele jamming New York City nubiles, but doesn’t play it too coy, relishing in juicy details like the ‘two sex acts” performed on the plane ride to the 1977 Championship Game. Apparently, even Cosmos hangers on got to ride on the groupie gravy train. NY Post sourpuss Phil Mushnick admits he turned down a plum job covering the Yankees to stay on the Cosmos beat because he was having ‘too much fun”. You know if that whiny, humorless, curmudgeon was getting action, they were days of wine and roses indeed.

(The other dude is Shep Messing, who famously posed nude for Viva magazine in the Cosmos lean years)

Besides the innuendo and the shot of Henry Kissinger wearing a Cosmos parka I would give my left pinky for, Once in a Lifetime is worth watching for the still seething rivalries between the surviving Cosmos protagonists. In the modern interviews there is a Roshomon-like disagreement between sources on all the key points of credit sharing and blame-laying. The one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that Chinaglia was an asshole of unusual dimensions. Ass-kisser, womanizer, conniver, showboat, ball hog, mug like an Italianate Joe Namath, Chinaglia manages to make Reggie Jackson look humble.

He openly criticized Pele (once reducing him to near tears), sucked up to Ross, undermined the Cosmos coaching staff and eventually got his personal manservant Pepe Pinto installed as the Team President. Many accuse Giorgio of hammering the nail in the coffin of the Cosmos, and his ‘Why can’t I just be judged by my play on the field” defense lends credence to everything nasty said about him. In short, he is a great one.

For restoring Chinaglia to his proper place near the top of the list of New York villainous sports heroes, Once in A Lifetime takes an early lead for the coveted title of No Mas’ Sportflick of the Year.

Rating: 8.5 of 10