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Sports

New York City has teams in the four major North American professional sports leagues, each of which also has its headquarters in the city.

Baseball is the city's most closely followed sport. There have been fourteen World Series championship series between New York City teams, in matchups called Subway Series. The city's two current Major League Baseball teams are the New York Yankees and the New York Mets, who enjoy a rivalry arguably as fierce as that between the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. There are also two minor league baseball teams in the city, the Staten Island Yankees and Brooklyn Cyclones.

The city is represented in the National Football League by the New York Jets and New York Giants (officially the New York Football Giants), although both teams play their home games in Giants Stadium in nearby New Jersey.

The New York Rangers represent the city in the National Hockey League, calling Madison Square Gardens in Manhattan home.

The city's National Basketball Association team is the New York Knicks. The first national college-level basketball championship, the National Invitation Tournament, was held in New York in 1938 and remains in the city. Rucker Park in Harlem is a celebrated court where many professional athletes play in the summer league.


The New York City Marathon is the largest marathon in the world.As a global city, New York supports many events outside these sports. These include the U.S. Tennis Open, the New York City Marathon and the Millrose Games, an annual track and field meet whose featured event is the Wanamaker Mile. Boxing is also a very prominent part of the city's sporting scene, with events like the Amateur Boxing Golden Gloves being held at Madison Square Garden each year. The New York City Marathon is the world's largest, and the 2004-2006 runnings hold the top three places in the marathons with the largest number of finishers, including 37,866 finishers in 2006.

Many sports are associated with New York's immigrant communities. Stickball, a street version of baseball, was popularized by youths in working class Puerto Rican, Italian, and Irish neighborhoods in the 1930s. In recent years several amateur cricket leagues have emerged with the arrival of immigrants from South Asia and the Caribbean.




This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City.