Big "What Ifs": "Popeye Doyle" & Peter Manso RIP

In 1981 New York City Mayor Ed Koch was overwhelming re-elected to a second term. He was so popular that he received the nomination of both the Republican and Democratic parties. His landslide win established him as a formidable political figure and higher office called. 

Koch answered it by running for Governor of New York State -- and failed spectacularly. 

He gave an interview to a journalist named Peter Manso -- who has just died at the age of 84 -- in Playboy magazine. With his deft interviewing skills, Manso got Koch to admit what he thought about upstate New York, and the same thing that made Koch so popular in NYC -- his brashness, his "tell-it-like-it-is", no-holds-barred instinct to speak his mind -- terminated his campaign for governor. Koch told Manso about upstate, "It's sterile. It's nothing. It's wasting your life … a joke … you have to drive 20 miles to buy a gingham dress or a Sears Roebuck suit … [Albany is] small town life at its worst.”

Even in an age before social media, these comments sparked widespread outrage -- and Koch ended up losing the Democratic primary to then-Lieutenant Governor Mario Cuomo. The history speaks for itself -- Cuomo wound up serving as governor for three terms, from 1983 to 1995, and now his son Andrew Cuomo is governor, having been in office since 2011 (whether he'll make it to the end of his term in 2022 remains to be seen). 

So Peter Manso changed the course of New York City and New York State history. But for him -- and it's a big "what if" -- Ed Koch might have wound up as governor and the Cuomo dynasty that has ruled New York off-and-on for 40 years might never have gotten off the ground. 

Then there's Doyle, Popeye Doyle.

You might recognize the name if you've ever seen the 1971 classic The French Connection and the 1975 sequel. Doyle is the quintessential OG rough-and-gruff police detective, a sort of NYC Dirty Harry -- he doesn't play-by-the-rules or conform in order to deliver justice to his benighted city. In the mid-1980s, a decade of so after the second movie, someone got the idea that a TV show about Popeye Doyle might be a idea -- so a pilot was made starring Ed O'Neill called, quite brilliantly, Popeye Doyle. The plot is fairly basic -- a model is murdered, and Doyle tracks the case which gets him involved with a drug cartel and terrorists. 

But only the pilot was made -- the TV show, to quote Pulp Fiction, "became nothing." It was broadcast in the fall of 1986 and shortly thereafter Ed O'Neill went on to star in Married ... with Children for a decade and then, years later, the great Modern Family for another decade. So another big "what if" is that had Popeye Doyle been picked up and run for even one season, O'Neill probably would never have done Married ... or Modern Family and the history of television would be very different. 

Both "what ifs" are reminders that the course of history -- whether political or cultural -- is made by the decisions we make, by seemingly random choices and transient events or desires, or by unforced errors (like Koch's) or aesthetic judgments (like Popeye Doyle). We live with the results, for better or worse, of the decisions that we and others make that affect our lives and those of us around us. 

Life in NYC and everywhere is determined and altered by people's choices, and everything else lives on in the realm of the "what ifs."