New York fans worth emulating

Hideki Matsui had just slammed a line drive off the right-field wall for a bases-clearing double, and the 55,000-plus fans crammed into Yankee Stadium had the House that Ruth Built rocking.

Literally.

New York was pounding Curt Schilling - the man Boston had acquired in the offseason for the sole purpose of beating the Yankees in October and who had vowed that he was going to make 55,000 people shut up.

After Matsui's double ran the score to 5-0 in just the third inning, the stands in the upper deck started shaking up and down under the raucous crowd.

But it was two batters later that things got really rowdy. As Schilling was about to deal his first pitch to Jorge Posada, the fans exploded in a perfectly synched chant that moved across the stadium like a tidal wave of sound.

"WHO'S YOUR DA-DDY!"

The chant, inspired from Pedro Martinez's now infamous comment, "What can I say - just tip my hat and call the Yankees my daddy," made after a September defeat became the crowd's chant of choice, replacing the standard "Let's go Yankees!"

Then in the seventh inning, as if the game had been scripted by someone who watched a few too many North Carolina basketball games last season, the Sox starting hacking away at what seemed to be an insurmountable lead.

By the eighth inning, the 8-0 lead was now 8-7 with the tying run 90 feet away.

But just when it seemed New York would complete its disastrous choke job, the Yankee Stadium crowd approached the same decibel level it had reached after the Matsui double.

One note of Metallica's "Enter Sandman" had escaped the speakers, but from the second note on, the song was engulfed by the cheers of fans who knew exactly what the song meant.

The bullpen door opened and out walked Mariano Rivera - who had been in Panama mourning two dead relatives that day - striding calmly onto the field and then proceeding to put any hopes of a Boston comeback to sleep.

Although it took just two innings for the Yankee lead to disappear, the fans never removed themselves from the game.

During the Boston rally, the crowd still rose to its feet each time a New York pitcher got two strikes and again as the Yankees started to piece together a rally in the bottom of the eighth.

This type of fan effort is something that has been sorely missing from many North Carolina games the last couple of years - including a number of those late-game basketball collapses and just about every home football game.

Rivera acknowledged the importance of the fan support, and energy from the crowd almost always has a bigger impact in the college game than it does on the professional level.

It is the job of the student section to create that difference - particularly in a place like the Smith Center where old, stodgy alumni have all the seats in the prime heckling locations.

And it's easy to do that when the team is up by 20 or if the football team is holding a lead on N.C. State. But it is when the teams are trailing that they need the crowd to get vocal.

UNC fans hold their teams to the same high standards that New York fans hold to the Yankees - and just like few had left by Frank Sinatra's closing rendition of "New York, New York," there should be few empty seats for the Marching Tar Heels' rendition of "Hark the Sound."

Contact Daniel Blank at danblank@email.unc.edu..