They Didn’t Play Polo at the Polo Grounds

They Didn’t Play Polo at the Polo Grounds

Robert Eugene Rubino

Illustration by Jeff Brain

If he had gone to Yankee Stadium when he was a kid in the 1930s
he would’ve become a Yankees fan idolizing the Babe and the Iron Horse and Joltin’ Joe 
and if he’d taken his six-year-old son to the Stadium in ’54 his son would’ve become
a Yankees fan who idolized Mickey and Yogi. But when he was a kid in the 30s he’d gone
to the Polo Grounds to root for McGraw’s Giants with Hubbell and Terry and Ott and he became
a Giants fan and he took his loyalty crazy serious as serious as loyalty to family church country.
 
So in 1954 he took his six-year-old son to the Polo Grounds where polo wasn’t ever played
and the boy would idolize the Say Hey Kid and if the father possessed
a more flexible version of loyalty he would’ve turned his back on the Giants
when they and the Dodgers gave New York a middle-finger farewell after the ’57 season
maybe become a Yankees fan or bide his time and eventually become a Mets fan.
But his loyalty to the Giants was made of stronger sterner certainly more stubborn stuff
 
and so through the next five and a half decades of the rest of his life he remained a Giants fan
insisting they were merely on the longest road trip in the history of road trips
insisting they’d return to their birthplace not merely occasionally as a visitor but for good
also eventually insisting his grown-up son would return one day to that same birthplace
the son who through the years regarded his father’s loyalties as ludicrous laughable embarrassing 
but finally laudable … even noble … in an uncomplicated straight-from-the-heart sort of way.

Robert Eugene Rubino was born and raised in New York City. He’s an Air Force veteran and graduate of San Francisco State University. After a career in newspapers as a copy editor and columnist, he was an adult literacy tutor for six years. He’s published prose and poetry in various online and print journals, including a collection, “Douglas Knocks Out Tyson” (UnCollected Press). He’s lived in California since 1972, now in Palo Alto with his wife, Terry.

Jeff Brain is a San Francisco-based baseball artist and poet. He was a featured poet at the first two National Baseball Poetry Festivals, and now serves on the Poets Committee of the NBPF held each May in Worcester, MA.

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