Boyz n the Hood
October 30, 2025
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I thought we'd talk macroeconomics. Nope. Sports!
Remember a while back when I couldn’t decide if I should join a group of guys from my building for a Saturday afternoon in New Haven’s famed Wooster Street Italian neighborhood?
Well, my Florida friend, Gwen Keegan, told me in no uncertain terms that I should consider myself blessed to be invited. So I took her advice, bit the bullet (bit the pizza, rather) and threw myself into the jaunt last week.
My building, you need to know, is named The Eli, pictured below. It's listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is residence to lots of Yale grad students and faculty, both active and retired.
Our objective that afternoon was Zeleni’s, rated among Connecticut’s top three pizza restaurants and the top fifty nationwide.
I was intimidated when I met the others in the party, all but one of them “Yale-affiliated” as they liked to say.
“No,” I answered when they inquired, “I’m Fordham, in The Bronx.”
I'm from New Jersey, so I wanted to add, "You got a problem with that?" But I knew better.
Only one other of the bunch was not a Yalie, an educator who works with autistic people. He was Jewish and sported a goatee, as well as a Bronx accent I found comforting.
He and I bonded immediately, and our new friendship was cemented at the first corner we came to on our walk to Wooster Street.
The decision was, do we cross at this corner or at the next traffic light a block away. There was a lengthy debate while we waited for a green light.
“Look at the Yale guys trying to figure out how to cross the street,” my new best friend whispered to me.
And so it went, right up to the time the check came and one of the Yale guys suggested we determine who had how many slices and then do a forward progression.
Not really. He was joking, right? Right?
I’m sure he meant to say proportional allocation or pro-rata distribution – dividing something according to each person's share of the whole. It's not typically called "forward progression" in mathematics.
Using this method, I would pay for the slices I ate, divided by the total slices, times the total bill.
Not wanting to crow about my Fordham bona fides by lecturing the Yale guy about his misuse of higher math terminology, I simply threw a twenty into the pot, and we progressed across Wooster Street to an Italian bakery whose lined-up patrons stretched out the door.
That was all fun, but when the entire dinner conversation – I mean entire – centered on sports, I tuned out (Do I look bored enough in the picture above?). I also started to analyze what was going on.
The differences between male social groupings and female are profound:
- Men often bond by doing things together—sports, projects, shared interests—with friendship developing alongside the activity.
- Men's groups tend toward more hierarchical communication with clear turn-taking, friendly competition or teasing, and bonding through shared activities rather than emotional disclosure.
- Male groups often use teasing, playful insults and humor to bond.
- Men's groups typically establish clear hierarchies and status, sometimes through competitive elements. Hell, isn’t this whole blog an example of my competitiveness with the Yale men?
By the end of the meal, the group had reached a conclusion. The next gathering would not be for pizza, but to take in a Yale hockey game next month.
I will be facilitating a healing poetry retreat weekend then and, unfortunately, will be unable to attend. Whew!
