“You were dealing with illegal drugs. Tell me, as a [former] police officer, how that isn’t being a drug dealer?”
I squirmed as I watched Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) interrogate Brian McNamee, Roger Clemens’ former trainer, last week. The Congressional hearing was a result of McNamee naming Clemens as a steroid user in a December report issued by former Senator George Mitchell. Since then, a he-said/he-said situation has developed between the two men.
Although many sports reporters have supported McNamee, he has been widely disparaged for a history of shady behavior, including a rape investigation in 2001 that led to his dismissal by the New York Yankees.
Most people watching the hearing would have squirmed because McNamee resembled a used car salesman, sweating profusely as the questioning intensified. But my reason was different: I felt awkward because this man has given my community the most press it has received in years. McNamee was born, raised, and still lives in my hometown.
I live in a small community called Breezy Point on the Rockaway Peninsula in New York City. Whatever you’re picturing in your head right now, I can say fairly confidently that you’re wrong. There is no other place anywhere in the City that comes close to resembling my neighborhood. Breezy Point is a beach community—only 4,000 of the 12,000 residents live there year round. When a friend from high school visited, the first thing he said was, “The houses, they’re built on sand.” And when I tell people that it is a private community, the manicured lawns and McMansions of Greenwich and the New York suburbs probably come to mind; most people do not think of a place with only one real road and a fair number of shotgun bungalows.
When the McNamee story broke in December, I read descriptions of Breezy Point in Sports Illustrated, ESPN and The New York Times. The one phrase that appeared in almost every article, “the Irish Riviera,” really is the perfect description. It conjures an image of immigrants escaping the Irish Potato Famine to construct a little shantytown on the beach and lounge around in their glorious pallor. For the most part, that image is not far from reality.
The vast majority of the community’s residents are Irish civil servants; the most common visitors on career day in elementary school were always cops and firemen. My family is no exception: my mom cooks a mean corned beef and cabbage, and my father, a retired firefighter, has a bottle of Jameson’s in the liquor cabinet. According to the last Census, Breezy Point has the highest percentage of Irish-Americans of any zip code in the country, and several bartenders in the community have told me that our zip code also has the nation’s highest per capita consumption of Budweiser, though sadly that isn’t addressed in the census.
While Brian McNamee has definitely raised my town’s profile, Breezy Point has had its share of infamy without his help. Sadly, the majority of cases involve charges of racial prejudice. Breezy Point made headlines after the 1991 Crown Heights riots, which polarized New York City over the deaths of black children at the hand of a Hasidic Jewish driver. The Brooklyn District Attorney, Charles Hynes, maintained a summer house in Breezy Point, and when he failed to get an indictment of the driver, the Reverend Al Sharpton led a 200-person march through the neighborhood. Sharpton and his followers marched down the main road chanting, “Hynes, Hynes, have you heard? This is not Johannesburg!”
While not entirely without merit, allegations of discrimination indict the whole community for the sins of a few. Sharpton’s insidious chant was stuck in my head years later when he spoke at my high school for a Martin Luther King Day assembly. He managed to make me question, once again, the place that I call home.
When I was in middle school, McNamee brought most of the Yankees pitching staff to Breezy Point to sign autographs and raise money for charity. Roger Clemens, Andy Pettite, Mike Mussina and David Cone—even as a lifelong Mets fan, I couldn’t help but be impressed.
Watching the hearing, I did my best to reconcile the man who brought the Yankees to my small community to raise money for charity with the man forced to testify under threat of prosecution by federal authorities and labeled a drug dealer by members of Congress.
The truth lies somewhere in the middle, just as it does with Breezy Point, neither one of the last enclaves of the Klan in America nor a modern setting for Angela’s Ashes.
