year of the underdog

By the time that Plaxico Burress caught Eli Manning’s 13-yard pass into the end zone, most Americans understood what was going on. It wasn’t just that the play that had set it up was a frantic throw by Manning under so much pressure that he had appeared to be down seven or eight times before David Tyree leapt into the stratosphere to catch his toss—and it wasn’t that Manning himself was an underappreciated younger brother—and it wasn’t even the upset itself, the New York Giants beating a team that was favored by a score differential so massive that most sportswriters had given up and used scientific notation to represent the numbers. There was so much more to it than the game itself; most people had begun to understand that.

It was a year, you must understand, that had already seen Juno, a weird little indyish film about a weird little indyish girl, come out of limited release to become the number-one film in the country and be nominated for several hundred awards.

And then, finally, there was the Strange and Beautiful Case of Uno. On the 13th of February the world awoke to headlines screaming that a beagle, for the first time ever, had won the Westminster Dog Show. For a century, common wisdom had maintained that the plenitude and variety of smells in New York City alone would guarantee that no beagle would ever be able to stay focused enough to even stay in the show ring. But somehow Uno rose above his natural instincts and, when he was named Best in Show, he let out a howl that was every bit as affecting as Burress’ tears.

Yes, it was the Year of the Underdog all over America, but nowhere more than in the City. And none there were more aware of the underdogginess of the times than the group of former Hillary Clinton advisors, who huddled underneath a Cross Bronx Expressway bridge, homeless and penniless, passing around cheap vodka in a plastic bottle and wondering what the hell had happened to their once-sure thing.

spacedark