I figured I’d give the speech, measure the applause in my head, sit down, look around the theater to see who’d liked it, examine the kids’ faces to see if they’d liked it, look at all the ornate detail of the astoundingly restored Warner Theater to pass the time, replay the speech in my head, decide it was brilliant and post it on my website as soon as I got home – after somehow making it through the awarding of diplomas to 200 kids I didn’t know. Man, I hope they speed this thing up…

But then a weird thing happened. With the awarding of the first few sheepskins – including the salutatorian who’d given the brilliant speech about how leaving high school was like jumping off a cliff holding a cartoon umbrella — I remembered that the evening was about the kids. And I began to get caught up in each and every one of them, as they crossed the stage.

From where I was sitting, I could see the ones who were next in line, standing off in the wings of the stage, and each one had a different way of getting ready for the big moment: laughing, nervously straightening hair, screaming approval of the student in front of them, accepting backslaps from the ones behind them. Then, with the calling of their names, they summoned their courage – the A student, the D student, the science gees, the skateboarder, the oboist, the quarterback, the guy with every Killers song on his iPod – and walked to center stage, and every time, a smile blossomed, sometimes all the way to a grin of disbelief and joy,

Soon, I was thinking it was a drag that there were only going to be 200, because each one was a short story in her/himself: the girl with the Lisa Loeb glasses and the black Fred Taylor high-tops beneath her red gown, instead of heels: interning at Wallpaper Mag this summer?.

The girl with “Semper Fi” written on the top of her mortar-board: joining the corps? A brother in Afghanistan?

The kid who pumped his arms into the air, twice: someone who’d grown tired of saying he’d never make anything of himself? Someone who, deep down, wondered if he’d ever make it to this night? And now knows that e’s capable of more than he thought?

And the cheers for each and every one: each had a different tone, tenor, volume, degree of hysteria, but every one was a celebration – of a commencement.

Glad I remembered the meaning of the word in time.

I knew I’d really quit smoking when I stopped counting the days at 100, by which time everyone’s eyes were starting to glaze over as I kept blathering about my triumphal coup, the way my own eyes always start looking for a way out when people start telling me about their babies. Besides: it was so easy I started to feel ashamed about it, like I was some kind of fraud for not having to go to support groups or buy electric cigarettes or take up weed instead. Somehow I’d gone from lighting up first thing in the morning and last thing at night to not even remembering what it felt like to want a cigarette — in the space of four months.

Today, the only time I even think of cigarettes is when I’m near someone smoking one, and then I edge away from the smoke, like all those people who used to edge away from me, flashing looks-to-kill. Me, I just smile at the smokers: It’s cool. Been there, done that. Will likely do it again some day. Just not now.

I really wish I could tell you how I did it. If I knew how I did it, I could offer some sort of lesson plan to share with others, and give seminars and charge lots of money: “You, too, can take power over your life!!! Listen to my five-step plan to clean lungs and a clean heart! A four-hour seminar for the life-saving price of $150 a ticket! Plus free copies of all my remaindered books!” But that would be a snake-oil deal. Because – from where I stand, happily free of ashes on the laptop keyboard and coats that smell like furnaces — only two steps are required: 1) You circle a date on the calendar: Quitting Day. 2) Then when you reach it, you quit. Seriously.

That’s what I did. And to be honest, I haven’t the slightest clue how I could smoke like a madman for eight years (two packs at the end) and then give them up without so much as a second thought. I guess my lungs said, “Enough,” and apparently my brain obeyed.

Yes, I chewed the gum for three weeks, until the supply ran out, at which point I wondered if I really _needed_ the very expensive gum, which I didn’t. After having no smoking withdrawal, I had no gum withdrawal. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that the gum was psychological, because the smoking was psychological, too – for me, anyway.

But now I think that this might be the case for…well…everyone. I truly suspect that the only thing that keeps us addicted to smoking is our belief in how hard it is to quit. We’re completely convinced that the drug has us in its vice-like grip – when, in fact, we’re applying the shackles ourselves. It’s we who are gripping the cigarette, and we who can simply drop it and walk away. You just gotta want it bad enough. On top of which, if you live where I do, two packs a day costs $18, which means I’ve saved $2700, which is more than I’ve paid for most of my cars.

Listen: if I can do it, trust me: anyone can do it. I am nothing if not a man of addictions. If I’m not within a ten-minute drive to a coffee shop – a caffeine emporium, not a Dunkin whatever — I can’t function. Can’t write a word. Can’t even converse in the morning with the chickens. Must have the coffee. (For a book I was writing, I once spent two weeks on a remote South Pacific island whose water was dangerous to drink; hence, no coffee. I mainlined Coke from dawn til dusk for the caffeine rush.)

And don’t even think of asking me to give up potato chips, the New York Giants or the Mirth chardonnay from my wife’s wine store in Millerton. Which leads to the two most often-asked questions. 1) “Isn’t it really hard when you’re drinking?” For some reason, no — not at all. In fact, wine is one of the many things that tastes better. And, 2) “Isn’t it hard when your wife still smokes?” Not at all – it gives me a valuable superiority points in a marriage where I’m way behind in the daily score.

Yes, I know: nicotine, like crystal meth and Facebook, is apparently physically addictive. The science says so. And yes, the nicotine of my Marlboros had increased by more than ten percent since I’d started up again eight years ago. But the only after-effect of quitting for me was the appearance of a few extra pounds (which sort of feel, oddly, good – symbols of a return to health). No withdrawals. No fingernail chewing. I’ve heard that quitting heroin is easier than quitting Marlboro Lights. But where did I hear that? From another smoker, a few years ago, and my guess is that this urban myth was being passed around among smokers so that we could justify our inability to quit.

So: Did I quit because of strong self-discipline? Please. I have all the drive and ambition of Julie Christie settling into her smiling opium-den stupor at the end of McCabe and Mrs. Miller. As a rule, if I set a goal for myself (meet the deadline.,.pay the taxes…change the oil) it’s a guarantee that I’ll blow it – and try to weasel my way out of it, with middling success.

Did I quit because all those gruesome public-service commercials on cable between innings of the Yankee games finally wore me down? Nope; those weren’t photographs of my tar-pocked lungs. Did I heed the warning of the doctor who told me that half of all deaths are smoking-related? Nope; if I didn’t die of smoking, hell, I’d die of something else. (Cue the old Shoe comic strip where the boss says to cigar-smoking Shoe: “Those things are going to take years off your life.” Shoe’s response: “Well, they probably weren’t going to be very good years anyway.”)

Did I finally start to listen to the friends who voiced their concerns about my habit, out of genuine kindness? Nope. It all fell on deaf ears.

The truth is, when you finally don’t want to smoke, the only voice that can get through is yours. Which is why when I was standing in line at the convenience store a few minutes ago – to buy Dots – I remained silent when the guy in front of me said to the clerk, “anything menthol, 100s, and cheap.”

I could have said, “Hey, you can quit.” But I didn’t have to. I figure some day I’ll see him in the front row of the seminar – the 15-second seminar, where I come out on stage, point to my brain, say, “You don’t know your own strength,” and exit, stage right, back to the green room, where I open a fresh bag of barbecue chips and pour myself another glass of Mirth.

You have to love it: a brash, loose-cannon, Us-Against-Everybody-Else franchise struts and barks its way through the playoffs, following the lead of a verbose, defiant rotund head coach with an X-rated vocabulary — and a distinctly aberrant behavioral quirk. They topple the favored establishment teams, and gloat over the corpses. They’re people, not drones.
True, they flashed a few less-than-admirable qualities over the season. Their regard for the opposite sex is somewhere between Neanderthal and Andrew Dice Clay. One of their stars arrived from another team with a legal rap sheet that covers all the bases. Another star blew twice the legal limit as the sun rose — on a practice day.
They were near the top of the league in penalties – and on top of it in distractions. They not only bent the rules, but brazenly broke them.
But what’s better, in an increasingly corporate-commercial league than a bad-boy team that still marches to the cocky beat of its own drummer – a team that could give a bleep about what everyone else thinks, as it aims for the Super Bowl? A team you either love or hate, with no in-between?
Man, do I miss the 1976 Oakland Raiders.
But since John Madden’s outlaw Super-Bowl-winning silver-and-black are all grandfathers now, I’m going to root for the rebellious, hilarious, weird-ass Jets: a beacon of refreshing chaos in a league so tightly wrapped that you can get fined for wearing the wrong sock, and defensive backs have to file in advance for permission to cover receivers. Today, as the old Raider tight end Raymond Chester told me, “players are independent contractors. They are each mini-sports corporations.”
But every now and then – far too infrequently – the NFL, despite its determination to homogenize its entertainment product, produces a team of winning renegades who seem to muscle their way to the top by the sheer weight of their irreverence. A team whose innocent-outlaw vibe gives a collective nod to their fist-flying mercenary ancestors. The Ryan Express is a direct descendant of the Ken Stabler Badasses. And the game is better for it.
Now, to be clear: I don’t endorse Santonio Holmes’ checkered past, from weed possession to charges of domestic abuse to suspensions for banned substances; his Raider predecessor in the category of all-around bad-boy, the defensive end John Matuszak, never actually tried to hurt anyone, except himself — despite shooting his guns into restaurant ceilings and out of car windows, and ingesting a myriad of substances. Nor am I condoning Braylon Edwards’ September DUI arrest at 5 a.m.; The old Raiders’ drinking habits never actually resulted in an arrest — just a few shattered plate-glass windows, a few bar-top stripteases, a Harley being driven through a restaurant and a fullback betting he could dive into a shot glass (and losing the bet, though he did hit the glass.)
The Jets’ sexist treatment of a comely Mexican TV reporter, and Brett Favre’s alleged sexts to a massage therapist? Way over the line. When the Raiders mistreated women, they always did it with the woman’s consent. When topless queen Carol Doda used her ample endowments to stop the puck at the annual air-hockey tournament, she was honored to have been asked. When linebacker Phil Villapiano asked a local girl to interrupt Raider practice by circling the field dressed in nothing but socks and sneakers, she was adequately compensated. True, Pat Toomay married a bartendress to one of her customers, even though he wasn’t legally a minister of anything…but hey, the team paid for their honeymoon in Tahoe.
Of course, Jet strength coach Sal Alosi tripping a Dolphin special-teams guy was clearly a felony, but, in a clear echo of the old Raider ideology, it was the act of a man willing to do anything to win…like Gene Upshaw wrapping his forearms in tape and pads, getting pregame approval by the officials, then returning to the locker room to soak them in hot water, so they’d harden into casts. Or Fred Biletnikoff using so much Stickum on his hands that his trainer had to hold Freddy’s halftime cigarettes as he puffed on them. Or George Atkinson and Jack Tatum doing everything short of laying landmines to keep receivers out of their territory.
Rex Ryan’s apparent foot fetish? A tad stranger than Madden’s fear of flying, born of his intense claustrophobia – a neurosis that made every Raider road-trip flight an adventure, whether Pinky was being sponged off by a stewardess or was swearing at the pilot. But both represent a refreshing slice of the bizarre in a fraternity of interchangeables. And at least Ryan has a sex life, when most of his peers spend their nights on a fold-out office couch after dissecting the opponent’s kickoff-return schemes until 3:30 a.m.
Of course, he also has something else: a refreshingly uncensored mouth. Ryan’s verbal madness (“This one is me against Manning! This is me against Belichick! This is me against Hu Jintao!”) clearly has a method: it takes the spotlight off the players who don’t want it…and empowers those who do want it, like Bart Scott, to say wonderful things like “The Patriots defense couldn’t stop a nosebleed.”
In truth the Raiders didn’t verbally bait or boast. They let their image precede them – and teams feared for their lives before the opening kickoff. Ryan’s Jets cultivated their wooly image by letting the Hard Knocks cameras into the locker room. Now, more often than not, when a team lets HBO into training camp, the ensuing season is disastrous. These Jets have gone farther than any Hard Knocks team: the exposure fueled their fire and honed their NFL black-sheep profile…as if it needed honing. (You think the league likes having a head coach with a foot fetish? An owner who questioned the legitimacy of the coin flip that gave the Giants the first game in the new stadium? A cornerback who has trouble remembering all of his kids’ names?)
Ryan’s true bond with Madden (who finished his coaching career with a better winning percentage than Lombardi’s) is his trust in his players to be men, and do their jobs on the field, and then give them enough rope not to hang themselves, but be themselves.
Like the Raiders, these Jets are fueled by their faith that the organization has their back — not to mention the certainty that they’ll make the playoffs. Under Madden, the Raiders made the playoffs eight of ten years. Ryan is two for two. And I’m guessing that, after this week, his next headline quote will be either, “This is me against Halas!” or “This is me against Lombardi!”

“According to a lawyer in baseball briefed on the negotiations, the Yankees have made Jeter a three-year, $45 million offer… The lawyer spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to jeopardize his access to sensitive information.”– New York Times

NEW YORK – As the discussions between New York Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter and the team grow increasingly contentious, several sources close to the situation are maintaining that, despite a recent fall-off in productivity, Jeter should be paid everything he is asking for.

“I just can’t picture him in another uniform.” said a String Theory physicist from the University of Chicago, who requested anonymity because he was speaking from a parallel universe in which neither time nor space are prerequisites for existence. “Then, given these 11 dimensions, I can’t really picture anything.”

“He would certainly have been an all-star in any of our own sports, if we’d had any,” said a former priest from his ziggurat in the Sumerian city-state of Uruk by means of cuneiform, 5,000 years ago, who stamped his words in reeds from the banks of the Tigris river on condition of anonymity because his king, Gilgamesh, might exile him to the kingdom of Sargon of Akkad. “He certainly has god-like qualities.”

“I saw him in a diner last season, and he tipped generously,” said a Yankee fan friend of mine in Montclair, N.J, on the condition of anonymity because he doesn’t really know anything about anything, and doesn’t want this known. “He was eating an egg-white omelet with spinach, and when I asked him to sign my napkin, he was quick to oblige, I offered to send him a signed copy of my biography of Moose Skowron, but he politely declined.”

“Dude’s worth every penny,” said a clerk at the Duane Reade drugstore on East 13th Street, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was under the influence of methamphetamines he’d manufactured using over-the-counter ingredients in the store, and couldn’t remember his own name, and thought that Jeter was a rhythm guitarist for the current incarnation of the Steve Miller Band. “The man can still play a wicked slide.”

“I’d pay him everything he’s asking for, and then some,” said a general manager of a team in the Japanese Professional League, who texted on the condition of anonymity because he was in the bathtub at the Swissotel Nankai Osaka, and was afraid that his mistress would come in and see that he was texting on the IPad she’d just given him, because if it fell into the bathtub, it would short out.

“I’ve always admired how he stayed out of trouble, and was always ready to play, even in the increasingly unpredictable Northeast weather conditions,” said a meteorologist at a midwestern NBC affiliate who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his superiors had forbidden him to speak about the effects of global warming.

“Would they have given FDR what he was asking for, even if, entering his fourth term, his performance had fallen off?” said a Yankee shortstop and captain, who spoke on conditions of anonymity because he was integrally involved in the negotiations, and unauthorized to speak, lest it compromise his negotiating position. “I think so.”

“I have no comment at this point,” said Yankee general manager Brian Cashman, on the condition of anonymity because the conversation was supposed to be off the record, but I decided it wasn’t.

The downsides of suddenly not smoking after eight years of enslavement: Trying to ignore my lungs chanting “Feed me!!!” all day, like the carnivorous plant in Little Shop of Horrors. Trying to open the insidious little Nicorette packages until I finally give up and resort to garden shears. Shouting at my middle-school musical cast at Indian Mountain, instead of directing them. Shouting at my cat, instead of petting her. Shouting at the hot-water tap for not getting hot fast enough. Having the attention-span of a fruit fly. Eating peanut-butter cups like they were…candy. Having to talk on the phone without them. Having to drink without them. Having to write without them.

The upsides of giving them up: Saving $15.82 a day. Not having to lean over the gas burner when I can’t find the matches, and singing my hair lighting the cigarette. Not having ashes fall into the keyboard anymore. Not having to empty the ashtrays into the wastebasket and having a cloud of ashes re-erupt like Vesuvius into my face. Not having to flick ashes into the car ashtray in the dark and knocking the burning ash to the car floor and frantically trying to stomp it out as I face an oncoming truck on the tricky S-curve bend on Rte. 44. Not having my clothes smell like they were salvaged from a fire anymore. Being able to run on the Hotchkiss track. Being able to run up the stairs. Being able to taste the subtlety of sautéed kale.

But the real upside: re-discovering what I knew all along: that I have will power. That the addiction is all in my brain.

Of course, as you read this, I’m only on Day 17. If I’m lucky, there’ll be a Day 18. But quitting cigarettes a few weeks ago was worth its weight in pain if only because of the psychological high, a bliss all its own. The self-esteem quotient is skyrocketing.

I know from the power of the brain when it comes to cigarette addiction. Flash back 30 years ago, to when I visited a doctor on the Upper East Side. I was in my late Twenties, and just about every known substance had visited my bloodstream in the previous few years. I was smoking three packs a day. I was a mess. So after the exam, this famous doctor (who happened to be Claus von Bulow’s personal physician, which gave him some weird cred) walked into the examining room, looked at his clipboard, and said, “You know you have a heart murmur, right?”

“Sure,” I said, the cool, surly rebel. “Had it since birth.” “Well,” said the man in the white coat. “If you keep smoking I give you about ten years. Settle up with the receptionist on your way out.” Then he walked out of the room. I walked out of the building onto East 72d Street and launched my pack of Newports into a trash can.

It was 23 years before I had another cigarette. That’s how I know it’s all in your head. All we need is motivation.

So why did I start again? After a quarter of a century of running five miles three times a week? And shaking my head at the poor fools buying their discount Mustang Lights at the Cumby in Millerton? Simple. I signed a book contract for more money than I could imagine (just a Christmas bonus for a bond-broker, maybe, but a whole lot to a struggling writer). And the pressure of having to deliver a work of literature commensurate with that bloated paycheck began to freak me out.

I needed to relax. More alcohol was out of the question. When you get to the third glass of wine, the sentences begin to unravel. Weed? Hadn’t touched the stuff in a decade: who needs cotton candy in their brain?

But wait…cigarettes! I quit ‘em once, I’ll quit ‘em again!
So I started up. Finished the book. Kept smoking. Finished the next book. Kept smoking. Finished the next book, which came out last month. Kept smoking. And then, in October, decided that I’d done enough coughing and wheezing for a while.

So I laid out a plan. I found a friend who wanted to quit, too. True, she was only smoking two cigarettes a day, and I was smoking two packs. But still, there’s safety in numbers. Then I looked at the calendar. We had dinner parties on three consecutive Saturdays, ending November 13, which meant alcohol and conviviality, which meant smoking. And the Giants had a huge game against the Cowboys on the 14th: no way to get through a Giant game without cigarettes.
And som on the morning of the 15th, I awoke, and took a breath, and coughed, as usual. On the morning of the 16th, I didn’t cough. On the morning of the 17th, I said to myself, “Well done.” On the morning of the 18th, I woke up thinking, “I did it! Three days! So when I can I start again!” This other voice in my head said, “Umm…never.”

Which is how I got to Day Seventeen, and counting. Phone calls are tough. Writing is tougher. But damn, does this feel good.

I’m honored to be here, for a couple of reasons. First of all, I’m lucky enough to be in the presence of students whose talents are destined to make a difference in a world that needs you. Secondly, I’m glad to be able to talk to you when you’re all at finishing up one stage of your education and taking on the next set of challenges. You’re being honored tonight because you take your schoolwork seriously – not because you’re supposed to, but because you like to. That’s sort of unusual. And that’s why on behalf of my generation whose own revolution forty years ago didn’t do much to change the world, I want to asik you to go ahead and make the difference we couldn’t. Because I think you can. By following your heart. Listen to those who teach you. Absorb their wisdom. But at the end of the day, listen to yourself.

My generation was the first to recognize that we needed to start paying attention to the environment. But we didn’t do enough. We knew that poverty and hunger were a global affliction. But we didn’t do enough. I think you guys will. And here’s how I hope you’re going to do it: by being true to yourselves, and following the path where your passions lead you, and then finding that place where what you love to do meets with the place it can do us all the most good. And I don’t think that’s going to be hard to do. Because for the first time in a long time, our next generation has the right priorities.

I had some of the right priorities. By the time I’d finished sixth grade, I knew I liked to write. By college, I knew I wasn’t good at anything else anyway, so I kept at it, because it felt right. Now I’ve published a half-dozen books and a hundred magazine stories. I’ve made a living doing what I love. Which feels good…but I have one regret. I didn’t make enough of a difference. I’ve interviewed hundreds of celebrities and sports stars, met powerful people, and got published in a lot of fancy magazines. I took my talent…and used it for me. I had a gift, as a good writer, and I used it to advance my own career, and stoke my own ego.

Did my story about the late son of a baseball manager advance the AIDS cause? Maybe. Did my story about nuclear suitcases advance national security? Maybe. But did my stories about George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg and Derek Jeter make any real difference? No. That’s where my generation failed. We recognized what needed to be changed, but in the end, we didn’t make the change count.

So now it’s your turn. And I know you’re going to succeed. Because you guys go into the world knowing what has to be changed. But I’m going to give you a hint to help you: Follow your heart. Whether you want write songs, build bridges or make ice cream. Do it. Listen to yourself, and follow that voice. And let it take you where you’re needed most. If you have a passion, don’t let anyone stand in your way.

I mention songwriting because my own daughter has been doing it since she was 12. We kept saying, “Honey, don’t you know how hard it is to be a singer?” Thankfully, she didn’t listen. She’s a senior at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and she’s writing and singing her songs, and she is happy. Will her road be tough? Totally. Is the right road for her? Totally. Do her songs make people smile? Totally.

Ice-cream? Yeah. About ten years ago, I was writing a story about Phish, which happens to be my favorite band. They were holding one of their annual three-day festivals. This one was up in Plattsburgh, New York, at an abandoned air force base. And on the second day, Ben and Jerry – you’ve probably heard of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream – showed up on the stage. So after that set, I asked Trey Anastasio, the guitarist, why Ben and Jerry were up there, other than that they were all from Vermont. Trey told me, “Check out what they do.” So I did. And I found out that they put a lot of their profits into a foundation. Now, they now only have their foundation, they’re helping Vermont farmers sustain their crops without hurting the environment. Their foundation helps education in the region. And their ice cream, using local ingredients, is still really, really good.

Oh – and as for Trey? Phish’s guitarist? He went to a fancy prep school, but decided that music was what he was good at it. It’s worked out pretty well. Phish makes 20,000 people smile at every concert, 100 times a year.

Ben, Jerry and Trey didn’t do it for the ego. And it turns out that people don’t do the most good when we’re trying to be the center of attention. We do the most good when we follow our instincts. There’s a great book that came out last year called Drive, by Daniel Pink. It’s about what motivates people to do their best work, based on a lot of university psychology studies, and it comes up with an amazing discovery. For centuries –no, for thousands of years — it’s been assumed that we do our best work when we’re motivated by rewards. Money or ego or fame. But it turns out that money doesn’t motivate us to be our best. Material success doesn’t motivate us to be our best. A desire to be better than everyone else, to be famous, doesn’t motivate us to be our best.
Study after study say that we’re at our best at what we do – whether it’s building airplanes, searching for an AIDS vaccine or playing the clarinet — when we’re doing what we love to do, and finding ways to help others when we do it. It turns out that the greatest motivation there is is following your own instincts. And it makes sense, doesn’t it? Because I don’t have to tell you that your own instincts are to do good, right? We’re at our best when we’re contributing –in small ways, and big ways, and not for money or fame.

That’s why you guys are here, right? Because you’re not doing well because you want rewards. You know that the best reward is knowing you’re doing your best. And here’s a great example that will prove it, from Pink’s book. Imagine that fifteen years ago, someone told you that two internet encyclopedias were starting up. One was being created by billionaire Bill Gates of Microsoft. He was going to hire the best minds to write it, and pay them really well. He would hire business-manager people who had run successful companies to oversee the encyclopedia’s creation, and he would pay them well. It would be displayed on Microsoft’s network, and reach billions of people.

Now: the other encyclopedia was going to be written by everyday people who wanted to write about things that interested them, for no money, with no money behind the project, and no boss. Which one would you have predicted would have survived? Microsoft’s encyclopedia folded a few years ago. Wikipedia is the best encyclopedia in history. Written for free, available to all of us for free. The thousands of people who are bringing us bits of knowledge on Wikipedia, without their names attached to their work, have found a purpose in doing what they want to do – helping us learn.

Last week, I spent some time with a guy who found his purpose in a very tragic way. His name is Howard Lutnick. He was the president of a financial company called Cantor Fitzgerald. He was very wealthy, and he liked nice cars and big houses. And then, on the morning of 9/11, Lutnick wasn’t in the office yet. He was taking his son to his first day of kindergarten when terrorists hit the World Trade Center. His entire New York company was on floors above where the plane hit. They all died. 758 people. Today, ten years later, Lutnick has rebuilt the company. Each year he gives one-quarter of the company’s profits to the families of those who died. He no longer has a taste for nice cars. He spends all day, every day, helping put those families back together, as best he can. He is following his heart, and doing the best he can, in the only way he knows how. And he has done a tremendous amount of good. And now knows that success doesn’t mean you’re the best at what you do, and so you can buy the BMW. Success is knowing that you made a difference. And felt good about doing it.

Now: for you guys going into seventh grade, you’re going to have a blast. The academic challenges are going to be tough. But you’ll handle them, because you’re ready. For those of you stepping into high school, the challenges are more than academic: you’re going to see that all sorts of horizons are going to open up, but you’ll also see that a lot of adults are going to want you to take a path they want you to take because they think it’s the right one. Sometimes, they’ll be right. Sometimes they won’t. It’s up to you to listen to your heart when you make those choices. But don’t turn down any of those paths. Right now I’m directing a musical at a school over in Lakeville. My lead is a kid who came to the school to play football. Turns out he can act and sing, too.

And those of you going into college? who don’t know what they want to do, and for the last few years have been hearing all these adults asking, “So what do you want to do with your life?” You don’t have to know. If you do, you’re rare. If you do, of course, follow it. But if you don’t have your goal yet, don’t try and make one up because you think you’re going to have to have one. Wait for it to find you. You have a lot of time.

A study of “goal-seeking” by Harvard professors came up with this conclusion: “goal-setting should be prescribed selectively, presented with a warning label, and closely monitored.” What they mean is that going for goals that others set for you can be counterproductive. To narrow your focus on a goal can blind you to other possibility of other ways of doing things.
I’ll leave you with a lyric from a musical called Evita, written by the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. It’s about the wife of a dictator in Argentina. And this is what she sings: “And as for fortune and as for fame I never invited them in though it seemed to the world they were all I desired. They are illusions. They’re not the solutions they promised to be.”

There’s a thing called the American Dream. Generations of Americans have bought into it. It’s a good dream. But for a long time now, it’s included too much success for “me” and not enough for “us.” Now we have a new dream: to take care of the planet and take care of its people. I have no doubt you’re going to find the solutions we need. As long as you follow your hearts.

Were you a Raiders fan when you were younger?

Insanely so. At Yale in the Seventies, when my boring, gray-flannel Giants were foundering, I was an angry, anarchic, substance-loving rebel without a cause…except pro football. There was only one way to reconcile those two disparate personalities: falling in love with a football team that wore its hair to its shoulders, its eyeblack like vampiric mascara, and its attitude on its (ragged) black sleeves — playing in a grassy stadium where the sun was still shining on television when, back East, it had already turned into dark, depressing Sunday Night, which meant that indecipherable classes about Immanuel Kant were looming at dawn. The weekly Raider games were my soulful salvation.

What drew you to writing about this team now?

For thirty years – starting just about the time the Cowboys were anointed as “America’s Team” — I’ve been watching with dismay as the NFL deteriorates from sport into High Entertainment, into a show where, as tight end Raymond Chester puts it in the book, “the “players are independent contractors. They are each mini sports corporations.” In my last book, The Glory Game, with Frank Gifford, we recreated the 1958 Colts and Giants: an era when the game still had a foot in its lunchpail roots, when the players would hang in the locker room after practice to be with their friends, then head off to Toots Shor’s to get blitzed, because Toots would always pick up the check, and they were making less money than bus drivers. So after I finished that one, I wondered: What was the last great football team that played the sport for love and camaraderie, not money or fame? It was a no-brainer: the Raiders of the Seventies. During that one decade, they won more games than any other team, including a Super Bowl. But much more intriguingly, they played for each other, they partied hard and long, and they loved their downtrodden city as much as the city loved them. Each summer the vets would show up in training camp early, so they could hang with their friends. Would that ever happen now? No way.

The Seventies produced a number of colorful teams, including the Steel Curtain Steelers, the Bronx Zoo Yankees, and the We Are Family Pirates. Was there something about that decade?

Absolutely…and let’s not forget the no-hitter Dock Ellis pitched on acid in 1970! History judges the Seventies as a light footprint in our national history, and it may have been, culturally…but in pro sports, the ideological vestiges of the Sixties lived on into the Seventies. The athletes who emerged as stars in the Seventies had grown up as kids in the Sixties — when their adolescent sports tracks kept them from joining in the rebellion until they turned pro, at which point many of them became free to channel their inner Abbie Hoffman/Malcolm X. Pro sports has always been, always will be, a conservative collective corporation, business-management-wise, but –weirdly – in pro sports, the revolution now lived on. In the Seventies, the pro athlete started to truly become empowered, as television embraced sports as a viable revenue stream. At that tipping point, a lot of the athletes found the most counter-intuitive of stages on which to display their rebellious souls: the playing field.

How different would the NFL be today if Al Davis and not Pete Rozelle had become commissioner?

How different would the United States be if Ralph Nader had been elected president? We’d have an entirely different league, in a hundred different ways. Rozelle was a slick team player – and an ace marketer. His job in 1966 was to turn the merging leagues into one revenue-producing entertainment product. (He could have done the same thing with competing grocery-store chains, and probably been as professionally satisfied.) Rozelle was a tanned, handsome, central-casting spokesman who was great at unruffling inter-owner-feud feathers and smilingly molding the sport into an attractive television commodity: the architect of the game we have today. If Davis the historian/ego had prevailed, Al’s dictatorial Roman-emperor streak (think the good emperors: Augustus, not Caligula) would have turned the league into a league of warring nation-tribes, with mano-a-mano competition between franchises: no holds barred, no restrictions on stealing other players, winner take all. The losers would have Darwinianly disappeared. At heart, Davis is a male Ayn Rand. But more significantly, under Davis the old players would have been taken care of; for all of his empire-building instincts, Davis’ real managerial talent lay in his love for each and every one of his players. He never forgot that he himself wasn’t good enough to play, and he always held his athletes in reverence for their skills. He treated them like kings. If Davis had run the whole shop back then, we wouldn’t have infirm ex-NFLers having to beg for help today. On the other hand, he probably wouldn’t have allowed for the revenue-sharing that Giant owner Wellington Mara spearheaded, which is the underlying economic factor that contributes to the parity in the modern league, and allows every fan in every city to have honest hopes of reaching the playoffs each year. But this is all a fantasy: Al as Commissioner would have lasted a season or two before being expelled, in a coup of boorish, foppish industrialists who would have toppled him, as Rome did with most of its emperors (although they probably wouldn’t have used the Praetorian Guard to murder him, so he’d have retired to an island fortress, like Catalina, and started another league).

Do you think people have forgotten what a great coach John Madden was? These days he’s best known as a commentator and video-game pitchman.

If Madden had wanted to erase his name from the pantheon of great coaches (which I know he didn’t; today he holds enormous pride in his coaching achievements), he couldn’t have chosen a better post-coaching career: becoming the Greek Chorus of the sport for four decades, and thereby obscuring his brief coaching brilliance. He walked away at the top, like Jim Brown: with a better winning-percentage than Vince Lombardi’s. I’d put him on the Rushmore of coaching with George Halas, Paul Brown and Lombardi. But his talent as a coach lay in a philosophy entirely antithetical to the other three: he was anti-authoritarian. He turned his players loose six days a week as long as they showed up full-bore on Sunday, and treated them like men doing a job, professionals who could be trusted about doing the work they were being paid for. As Ken Stabler put it in the book, one of his credos was “On the field, go play. Off the field, go play.” Or, as tight end Ted Kwalick said, “I was glad to play for a coach who treated you like a man, not like a kid.” That saying about giving someone enough rope to hang themselves? Madden gave them enough rope to be themselves. And the result of that looseness was that they loved him, and showed up on Sunday determined to make him proud. Like Davis, Madden revered his players, and liked them as people. The bottom line is that John never bought into the idea of coaches being drill-sergeants, or mind-masters arranging pawns (or slabs of meat). He saw himself as a shepherd of a bunch of grown-up, athletes who were proud of their individuality, and let them roam where they wanted to.

Who’s your favorite of the Badass Raiders? Stabler, Biletnikoff, Guy, Upshaw, Moore?

Definitely Stabler, with linebacker Phil Villapiano second and Freddy Biletnikoff third. Gene Upshaw was arguably the best guard in history, but didn’t buy into the team-vibe craziness; he was a politician. Ray Guy partied with the best, and is inarguably the best ever at his position, but hey, he was a punter (even if he wanted to start at safety). The true definition of a Badass in this context is someone who was at the top of his game on and off the field. So, the bronze: Biletnikoff was responsible for bringing Carol Doda, the Hall-of-Fame topless dancer, to training camp, and played his way into the football Hall of Fame, chain-smoking all the way. The silver: Villapiano would go straight from the practice field to the nearby hotel bar, drinking various whiskies on the rocks (with John Matuszak, Otis Sistrunk and Ted Hendricks) – and then, on Sunday, play like a madman. Foo wasn’t happy unless his tackles spilled some blood (his opponents’, or his own; he didn’t care). But Ken Stabler was the uncontested gold-medal Badass. He could party until dawn and throw three TDs the next afternoon. But his off-field odysseys paled next to his Sunday leadership. The more intense the game situation, the calmer he grew, until he was Zen-like at the critical points in games, completely cool and composed. The team kept winning, week after week, year after year, for one reason: because they believed, to a man, that Ken Stabler would win the game for them in the fourth quarter. And he almost always did. In that Super Bowl, for the most part calling his own plays, he was a Buddhic machine. The all loved him.

In covering the Raiders of that era, your book also reminds us of how the NFL has changed in the last three decades. Are there any teams in the league now that carry on the tradition of the Madden/Davis Raiders? Perhaps the Baltimore Ravens?

Definitely the Ravens, although Rex Ryan, the coach of the Jets, has a lot of Madden in him: big, funny, loose, with total faith in his players. But the Ravens fit the Badass bill. They wear black, they’re from a downtrodden town, and they hit harder than any team in history. Ray Lewis would have been a great Badass - although he overstepped the Badass bounds…after all, he was indicted for murder, and none of the Raiders was ever even busted. The Raiders’ rebellions never resulted in anything more than having to walk home because they were too drunk to change a flat tire. But going by another definition of Badass – which is that other teams are literally afraid to play you, for fear of their careers, and/or their lives – then the Ravens are our last holdover.

Do you think the image created by the Badass Raiders of the Seventies is also responsible for the franchise being adopted as an icon by gangsta rap after the team moved to L.A. (as Ice Cube documented in his film “Straight Outta L.A.)?

From the very beginning, as the also-ran team in the Bay Area, representing an industrial multi-racial town lying a couple of bridges away from a gentrified cultural capital, the Raiders appealed to underclasses. In the Seventies, when the team was half African-American, the stands in the Coliseum were equally black and white, and the tailgating parties the players joined in on after every game in the parking lots were always multiracial – white, black, Asian. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale were huge Raider fans (as were the local, Sonny Barger-led chapter of the Hell’s Angels). Even if the Raiders had been a bad team in those years, instead of great, they would still have sown the seeds of revolution. Ice Cube’s documentary was an inevitable anthem to an American philosophy that gangsta rap represents: authority at the cost of individual expression is dangerous authority, and must be defied. The cool thing is that hard-core rappers (discluding the ones who actually engage in gunplay) recognized, as Raider fans always have, that football isn’t just a sport; it’s now embedded, as it should be, as a manifestation/expression of our modern national and cultural bloodstream, as powerful as music. The idea that baseball is America’s “pastime” is painfully accurate; that game represents the centuries-old-school belief that our land was at its best when we could move the old farmland-game into vacant lots in the newly humming industrialized cities, and that White America would happily click on, while the factory workers migrating from the South would just truck on, happily oppressed. Professional football, as commercial as it’s now become, is nonetheless as joyous an expression of our actual national collective vibe as hip-hop and rap. We’ve always been good at music, ever since Midwestern Lutheran/European church music met urban jazz in the Twenties. And we’ve always been good at sports. It’s natural that the two should have merged in Oakland. (The only thing that disappointed me, music/football-wise, is that the true pioneers of punk, Black Flag, never adopted the Raiders. But it’s never too late. They must be touring somewhere.)

Why have the Raiders been so mediocre lately and is there hope that the Raider franchise might one day soon become a Super Bowl champion again?

Soon? No. Sooner or later? Well, yes — eventually; revenue-sharing and free-agency guarantee surprises every few years; the days of dynasties are over. But the Raiders carry a handicap: Davis’ continuing insistence at being the black- sheep iconoclast in the league, relying on his old gut instinct to find players whom everyone has overlooked. But this is no longer a viable strategy; thanks to the scouting combines and the internet, every team’s personnel staff now knows every player out there, from Notre Dame to Bloomsburg University. When I asked the Badass defensive coordinator Bob Zeman about the machinations of Draft Day back in the Seventies, he told me, “Of course, Al would make the final pick. It might be 10 to one against him, but he’d make the pick.” I suspect that this is still the case, and Davis’ judgment has slipped. Their last few drafts have been questionable. And he has no Madden in the trip-wired, high-tempered Tom Cable. Sadly (with apologies to Robert A. Heinlein and Leon Russell) Davis has become a Stranger in a Strange Land. Until he relinquishes the lifelong belief that one iron-willed genius can rule his world, the Raiders will struggle. Maybe he ought to start over in another frontier sport – say, female roller derby. But I know that he won’t, and that he can’t. The Raiders keep him alive, and who can begrudge him that? Sports has never seen, and never will see, another Al Davis. His brain is still totally football-obsessed – and still sharp. Let’s just hope he gets lucky in the next few years. If not, he can always revel in the memory of 1976, when Badasses roamed the landscape — dominant, defiant, and laughing at how they were the luckiest, and happiest, men in the world.

I was sitting on my front porch in Millerton when I heard the sounds of a concert band whose brassy notes drifted over my neighbors’ trees and lured me, like a siren-song, down to the center of town. As I walked down the hill, the music grew louder. It was an astounding piece of music: an emotional, evocative tone poem that changed keys, changed tempos, changed moods, the brass pulling me into depths, the woodwinds pulling me out, the tympani accenting each musical emotion. It was a killer. It was clearly being performed by a world-class concert band.

When I reached the lawn of the Simmons Way Inn, with its bright yellow façade restored to nineteenth century perfection, I saw that the musicians were not wearing tuxedos and dresses, or jackets and boaters. They were wearing the gray and white fatigues of the 42nd Infantry Division Band, The Rainbow Division of the National Guard, based in Camp Smith, over in Cortland Manor. They were playing modern composer Steven Reineke’s Pilatus: Mountain of the Dragons, beneath a soaring pine tree, the shadows dappling the grass, sun glinting off the bells of the trombones. They were surrounded by people on lawnchairs, people on blankets, people standing under trees for the shade.

Across the street, shopkeepers were poking their heads out of doors to listen to the music. Up on the porch of the inn, people had set up chairs. On Main Street, wandering couples out for a Sunday village stroll with their babies were pulled in like moths to a musical flame. It was all like some Technicolor dream of the way things used to be in small-town America, only better. I glanced around at the crowd. I saw a Middle Eastern woman in a white headscarf. I saw tee-shirted vets. I saw a woman in a white linen dress and straw hat dressed like the matron of a country manse. I saw young couples whose dress and hair spoke clearly of New York weekenders who’d just bought their farmhouse in Columbia County, or in Colebrook, or Stanfordville, sitting next to a Millertonian couple whose ancestors founded my railroad town. I saw two little giggling girls running around with balloon animals, One was white. One was black.

And there was concert music being played by soldiers who, a few years ago, were stationed in the Iraq city of Tikhrit, the battle at the height of the ugliest fighting. They were the first national guard unit to be deployed overseas since the Korean War. But on this day, politics played no role in the proceedings. Pride did.

The band took a break, and a half-dozen of them broke into a new incarnation, their Latin group known as Combo Libertad. That group gave way to the 42d Division’s rock band, Three Day Pass, who broke into, of all things, a faithful version of a Green Day song, with Sergeant John Lastella, a trombonist, seizing the vocals: Army playing punk! And not badly at all. They followed it with a faithful rendition of Come On Eileen, a great hit for Dexy’s Midnight Runners in the eighties.

To my left, a couple started dancing. The woman was young and pretty, wearing, tight black leggings. The man was in his seventies at least, and handsome. He looked a little like Burt Lancaster. He was white-haired, white-mustached, with a purple shirt, shorts and black ankle socks, and he was grinning as he danced.

When the rock band finished their set, I took a break to wander the village. The shops and streets were deserted. All of Millerton had assembled at the bucolic center of town for the music. I got back to my spot just in time for the second half of the show: the patriotic-themed selections. Sergeant Jennifer Lucas took the microphone, her stomach bulging beneath her uniform; she was seven and a half months pregnant.

She sang a medley called “The Ultimate Patriotic Sing-Along:” The U.S. Air Force song, the Navy song, the army song, and the marine anthem, With each song, various members of the audience rose, in accordance with their particular affiliation or sympathy. I rose for the Marine anthem. My dad was in the Marines’ First Division in the Second World War. I myself would have dodged the draft if my lottery number had been draftable. It wasn’t.

But then I grew up, and wrote a book about him that took me back to all his South Pacific battlefields, the jungles still littered with rusting hulks of amphibious vehicles and bullet casings, and my feeling about military uniforms changed. When I got a letter from an old marine who’d read my book who told me I could now officially call myself a marine, and signed it Semper Fi, it was one of the highlights of my life.

After the concert, I spoke to some of the musicians. Sergeant Lastella, the vocalist of the rock band, told me that Three Day Pass worked on the rock stuff “after hours.” I remarked that the 42nd infantry band had a lot of offshoots, music-wise: “Whatever the mission calls for,” he said, laughing.

In the case of the 42nd, it called for two things back in Tikhrit. The first was security. But they had a secondary duty, Sergeant Lucas told me. The band played to entertain the rest of the soldiers. They played as troops shipped out to go home, and new troops came in. And they played whenever an Iraqi national security guard class graduated into combat level efficiency. And now they were playing for my hometown.

Then I asked her about the patch on all of their shoulder: only half a rainbow, but with no colors. The Rainbow Division had initially gotten its name from Douglas MacArthur, who had observed that its members came from cities and town all across the land, stretching across the United States like a rainbow. It was the first division in its corps to enter Germany. It seized 6,000 square miles of Nazi Germany.

Sergeant Lucas told me that the rainbow symbol on her shoulder was cut in half, and drained of color, because the division had lost so many soldiers in Europe.

As the band packed up its instruments, and my friends and neighbors folded their blankets, I lingered on the lawn, savoring the moment, and thinking about how lucky we’d been in my little village, to have been reminded by 40 extraordinary men and women of the uniting power of music, and pride. We may not have a gazebo or a bandstand or a carousel, like those cinematic depictions of Everytown USA, but we have something realer: a village of neighbors, and friends. Of merchants. Of migrants. Of shopkeepers and city folk, who bonded one afternoon to celebrate American sacrifice — and American rebirth: Sergeant Lucas’ husband and her father were in that band, too. She’ll be having that first baby in a few weeks, and I have no doubt it will someday wear the uniform of the 42nd.

The last soldier I talked to was the man who had wielded the baton, Chief Warrant Officer Mark Kimes. I thanked him.

“No, thank _you_,” he said, with a very wide smile. “It was a great crowd, and it was a great setting. It was like a Norman Rockwell painting.”

Then the band packed into its bus and traveled a half-mile down the road, to the Legion Hall where, I imagine, a few of them tipped a few elbows at the hall’s bar. I even thought of going in – after all, unofficially, I was a marine. But no. I’m not military. That’s sacred ground. But I am from Millerton, and on this day, that felt pretty good.

The face was weathered, etched by a lifetime of carrying a very heavy weight. The gait was slightly awkward; he’d lost his left leg below the knee in 2003, a casualty of diabetes. But on this night last winter, as fans clustered around him at Fred Biletnikoff’s anti-drug foundation dinner in a hotel ballroom south of Oakland, Jack Tatum was not wearing the expression of an assassin. “You never make a tackle with a smile on your face,” Woody Hayes had told him back at Ohio State, but on this night, his smile was wide, and open, and welcoming. The graying dreadlocks that swooped all the way down to his waist — hair that spoke of a 61-year-old man who had always lived by no rules but his own — swayed as he turned to accommodate each new autograph-seeker,

The hair had always been part of The Assassin’s signature. In the Seventies, as the most storied and feared member of the Raiders’ fabled defensive backfield – “The Soul Patrol” — Tatum had sported a fearsome Afro and a Fu Manchu and a menacing glare as he bore down on opposing receivers the way a tractor-trailer might bear down on a squirrel on a rural highway. A three-time Pro Bowler, he was the hardest-hitting safety the game has ever known, A Sports Illustrated poll named him one of the top five defensive backs of all time. NFL.com named him the sixth “most-feared tackler of all time.”

Mike Siani, a Raider receiver of the time, puts him in the top two: “Pound for pound, he was the toughest football player I’ve ever seen. The only guy I could ever compare him to is Butkus.” “When Jack hit someone, it was a different sound,” linebacker Phil Villapiano told me. “There was a different sound between everyone else‘s hits and Jack Tatum’s hits.“

I introduced myself, and told him I was writing a book about his Super-Bowl winning Raiders of 1976: the last team of the old era, when you could be an outlaw and a rebel and a partier, and still play championship football. “Cool,” he said. “Call me.” I did, and left a few messages. But his health was failing. I didn’t want to press. I knew that, 32 years after the Darryl Stingley play, the hit for which he’ll forever be known, he was still reluctant to give interviews.

Then, one day, Tatum called me back, and we talked about the many unknown sides to the man. Of his grandfather’s farm in North Carolina: “If I hadn’t played football, I’d’ve probably been a farmer,” he told me. “I just liked the peace and serenity.” Of his other nickname on the Raiders – The Reverend – because, off the field, he was so contemplative and quiet. “Both my dad and grandfather were quiet and reflective guys, but they were real men,” he said. Clearly, in Tatum’s mind, the two were not mutually exclusive concepts,

“He was quick to smile, and so relaxed,” Raider fullback Mark van Eeghen told me. “Quick to giggle and laugh. Then he’d put the helmet on, and, Jesus, the switch that would turn on.”

“I wanted them to know that I was in control of the field from the middle to the hashmarks,” Tatum told me. “If you wanted to play in that area, you had to pay. You had to pay me. But you can’t be off the field what people see on the field. That’s a whole different world … It was a different person when you take the field.”

And, finally, we talked about Darryl Stingley. It had been a meaningless exhibition game in August of 1978, in Oakland: Steve Grogan’s pass had sailed high and behind the receiver, out of reach. As the two neared each other, Tatum lowered his head off to the left, so as to avoid a head-to-head hit; Tatum’s tackles had always been torso-to-torso, mano-a-mano. He had never been a head-hunter. But Stingley lowered his head, and it collided with Tatum’s right shoulder. Two of his vertebrae fractured, instantly rendering him a quadraplegic.

“My shoulder pad hit him,” Tatum told me, reluctant but willing to discuss the play. “It wasn’t head to head. And, yes, it was legal.” It was a horrid confluence of events, just tragic physics. After the game, Tatum went to the hospital to visit Stingley but was denied admission: “When I got there they told me only the family was allowed to come that day,” Tatum told me.

Up until his death in 2007, Stingley never professed any anger at Tatum. “For me to go on and adapt to a new way of life,” Stingley, who would die of complications from the injury, said in 1983, “I had to forgive him. I don’t harbor any ill feelings toward him. In my heart I forgave Jack Tatum a long time ago.”

It’s a sentiment worth following, for the Assassin disappeared years ago. The Reverend devoted his final years to the Jack Tatum Fund for Youthful Diabetes. The legacy should encompass more than the ferocity. It should speak of the farmer, too.

Cracked king crab legs on ice with assorted sauces? Strip loin with cilantro pesto and spring green beans? Or maybe a customized omelette, with only the freshest of farmers-market ingredients? I was paralyzed by indecision. So I finally opted for a plate of sushi, featuring a crab roll that rivaled any I had ever tasted. My friend went for the strip loin. Then both of us opted for crisp, sugary wafers topped with chocolate mousse for dessert.

Then we walked down the private stairway from the dining room, past the potted palm tree, and took our seats for the baseball game. They were exquisitely comfortable seats, a few rows behind the Yankee dugout. Immediately, a smiling waiter appeared out of nowhere and took my next order: shrimp cocktail.

Well, why not indulge? It all came free with the ticket. I was experiencing my first trip, and likely my last, to the Legends Suites seats of Yankee Stadium, courtesy of the friend of a friend who couldn’t be at the park that day, to use his season tickets, which, I’m guessing, cost him something in the neighborhood of the Gross National Product of the Ivory Coast.

The waiter re-appeared, pleasantly inconspicuously, every inning or so. His service was impeccable. Some time around the fifth inning, I darted back into the free-snack area, where free piles of childhood candies beckoned to the children of my fellow privileged patrons like some Willy Wonka dream come true. I snatched some Twizzlers to take back to my seat.

The game? Right — the game. Well, as I remember, the Yankees hit several home runs and pummeled the Houston Astros unmercifully. A-Rod made a great stab, as usual, at third. But the rest of the details are rather fuzzy. Because somehow it didn’t feel like being at a baseball game, no matter how close I was to the field – close enough to see Derek Jeter, waving a bat in the on-deck circle, checking out the very pretty lady a few seats away from me as she returned from a snack run (I think she’d grabbed some Good N Plenty.) Close enough to see Rodriguez warming up, waving that bat like a club, so that Astro pitcher Wandy Rodriguez was already flinching before A-Rod even approached the plate.

It was like watching baseball from the emperor’s suite at the Coliseum. A decline-and-fall-of-the-Roman-Empire vibe hovered all around me. I kept looking over my shoulder, to check out the regular fans, in embarrassment, wondering whether they were staring darts at my back in envy or disdain, or at the four men in front of me, wearing baseball hats with financial-institution logos on the crowns, who spent most of the day talking about tennis and boats.

I’m not really complaining, mind you. If modern baseball salaries requires teams to create stadiums at taxpayers’ expense where the class system rivals the heyday of the Boston Brahmins, then so be it. If you have to pay top dollar to get an Alex Rodriguez, I’m all for it. But as I wandered out after the game toward the subway – finally mingling with actual baseball fans — I didn’t feel as if I’d seen a baseball game. I mean, I know the game had been out there, and the Yankees were getting a lot of hits, and 45,000 fans in regular baseball seats were enjoying themselves, because I could hear their roars. But in my padded, servanted shell, nibbling my free Twizzlers, attended by my waiter-butler, I felt as if I were secreted in some bubble, or as if I was watching the players through some invisible, shimmering aura. I kept waiting for the feel of a baseball game to seep through. It never did. The way sitting in a opera box seals you off from the opera, Only with free tuna sashimi thrown in.

As I headed up the stairs to the 4 train, I felt full, but I didn’t feel satisfied.

So a few days later I went looking for some baseball, and found it in my own backyard. In Torrington. The team is called the Titans. A five-dollar ticket gets you as close to the field as a Legends Suite ticket. The Titans are college kids. They play in the Atlantic Collegiate Baseball League, whose players hail from everywhere from Notre Dame and Cal-Fullerton to local community colleges. And they play very good baseball.

The Titans play in an intimate place called Fuessenich Park, capacity 1500, named for the late Frederick Fuessinich, a formerly prominent citizen in a formerly prominent mill town. The Naugatuck River runs beyond left field, in front of an old, condemned factory that harkens to the days when the game left the farms and came into the cities, the days when company teams played intense, entertaining baseball. Fuessinch Field feels like baseball.

Before the game, the Titans mingle with the fans on the field. The night I went to see them play, Ralph Dieguez, a Cuban-American from Post University in Waterbury, was lobbing a tennis ball back and forth with a couple of little kids near the first-base line while the rest of his teammates signed autographs for kids whose awe-stricken expressions at the men in the uniforms immediately made me realize what was missing from my Yankee Stadium experience: the feeling of community. The essence of baseball is the bond between fan and player. I envied the fans in the Yankee Stadium bleachers that day who were bonding with Nick Swisher out in right field. And with each other. But in the Legends Suites, you’re not allowed to mingle. You’re sealed off, literally and figuratively. A guard protects the Legends Suites section from the plebeians.

At Fuessenich Park everyone talks to everyone else. They don’t serve you food at your seats, so you get to stand in line at the concession stand, and talk to the people in front and in back of you while you wait for some of the best French fries you’ll ever eat and little kids holding ice cream chase each other in circles around you as you breathe in the fried-oil scent of a baseball park.

And here’s the coolest thing of all about our neighborhood team: the team and the community are one and the same. The Titans are owned by the community, and all of the gate receipts go to a different nonprofit organization at each of the 21 home games. On the night I saw the Titans play their arch rivals, the North Jersey Eagles – 15 batters have been clocked by pitches in their first six games — Falls Village Child Care took home my five dollars.

This revolutionary franchise model is the brainchild of a New Haven man named Ray Orzechowski and his two partners. Ray’s a professor of multi-media journalism at Quinnipiac College. After the old Torrington Twisters relocated to New Bedford this summer, Orzechowski and his friends, convinced that you could run a baseball team by selling memberships to the team, immediately looked to fill the void at the old ballpark. The Titans are supported by 500 members who paid $100 each for their season membership. The members literally own their team. They even get voting rights in club policies. They voted in Gregg Hunt, the manager. They voted the team name, and the team colors.

Orzechowski calls the Titan model “the democratization of sports.” I call it baseball the way it’s meant to be played: close enough to touch, with a full moon rising through sunset clouds beyond the right-field fence. With no waiters at your seat. Close enough to see the sharp break of a curveball – and hear the shouts of a bench-clearing brawl, which is the way my game ended, after a double play in the bottom of the ninth sealed the Eagles’ 3-1 win.

But as I walked to my car, in front of the stolid 19^th century armory that sits next to the park, I wasn’t dismayed by the outcome. The local baseball future is bright indeed. The Titans are in first place in their division, and have just announced that they’ll be hosting the Canadian national team in an exhibition in a few weeks.

I’ll be there. And I’ll bring my own Twizzlers.