February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Tynan flew to South Dakota Monday to speak to a women’s group in Fargo, the city made famous in the Hollywood movie of the same name.
But whether or not Tynan’s recent story ends up with a Hollywood happy ending remained well up in the air.
Tynan was benched by the Yankees after he was reported to the club for making remarks deemed anti-Semitic in the presence of a woman viewing an apartment in the building he lives in on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Tynan said he was only joking but apologized nevertheless, and in a most public way, singing his trademark “God Bless America” at the Anti-Defamation League’s annual dinner in Manhattan last week.
The ADL accepted Tynan’s apology and the story might have ended there.
But there is still the matter of the Yankees and the years that Tynan has notched up singing at Yankee Stadium during games, regular season and post.
“The ADL were very good to me. They judged my remark as being inappropriate, not Anti-Semitic,” Tynan told the Echo by phone from Minneapolis Airport as he prepared to board a flight to Fargo.
Tynan also heaped praise on New York’s Catholic archbishop Timothy Dolan who, he said, had been “brilliant to me.”
Tynan said he had promised Dolan that he would sing at midnight Mass on Christmas Eve at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
But while Tynan is welcome in the cathedral, and likely many a synagogue after receiving the blessing of the ADL, he still misses Yankee Stadium, not least now as the Yankees are going for the World Series.
“I’m delighted for the Yankees,” he said.
He has, however, not heard anything from the Bronx with regard to a possible return to the stadium.
The New York Post reported that “The Yanks said they had no plan to bring Tynan back to sing.”
A call by the Echo to Rubenstein Associates, the public relations firm that speaks for the Yankess, had not been returned by presstime.