Rewriting History

By Ryan McGowan

Some day, maybe in 2034, some disgruntled, fan-beaten manager of the Boston Red Sox will issue a harsh rant to the assembled throng of media members in the clubhouse:

“All the negativity in this town sucks.  It sucks, and it stinks, and it sucks.  Doug Mientkiewicz isn’t walking through that door, friends.  Dave Roberts isn’t walking through that door, and Pokey Reese is not walking through that door.  And if they did, they’d be old and gray.”OK, so maybe the mention of those three guys might not be realistic, even if the Pitino-esque tirade might be.  (Who knows how lethal the media will be in 30 years?)  But chances are that any ballplayer who was lucky enough to call himself a member of the 2004 World Series champion Boston Red Sox will be able to live a Van Wilder-esque charmed existence in this town for the rest of his life.

Where to begin even dissecting the events of the past two weeks?  When I sat down to try to put into words the whirlwind of thoughts and emotions that have been streaming through my head for what seems like months (but was really more like 86 years of emotion condensed into 14 days, squeezed into a microcosm of every Red Sox fan’s life like Wayne Szalinski’s child-shrinking machine), I was reminded of words I wrote two weeks ago, during Game 4 of the ALCS against the Yankees.

I would love to be able to say that I believed that the Sox could come back from three games down, but that would be horrible revisionist history.  I wish I could say I always believed.  But that Sunday night, sitting here by myself watching the Sox losing 4-3 with the specter of the superhuman Mariano Rivera awaiting in the bullpen, I felt like St. Peter, alone and dejected, wandering the streets of Jerusalem.  (Sorry for the New Testament reference, but with the Sox, fandom is basically a religion of its own.)  My roommate Beth (aka Ace) went to bed in the sixth inning.  My other roommate Scott was out of town.  My girlfriend Jennifer didn’t want to watch the game.  I didn’t even want to watch.  I skipped the first three innings, but some weird masochistic, self-loathing force (the same force which kept us as Sox fans over the years) made me put the game on.  But it was over.  I felt like I denied my Sox fandom three times.  We were all dead and buried citizens of Red Sox Nation.  And I sat down at my kitchen table to write the eulogy for the disappointing, frustrating failure of a season that was the 2004 Boston Red Sox campaign.

I started writing one column, but I junked it after a few paragraphs because I thought it was too negative, bitter, and downright angry.  Not the kind of stuff you’d want to read in an otherwise jovial, devil-may-care mood.  I ended up writing a column titled “I Almost Bought a Yankee Hat,” a story of a painstakingly disgruntled, semi-jealous Red Sox fan who flirted with the idea of switching allegiances, but decided against it because to do so would mean losing his soul.  (Autobiographical?  Perhaps.)

I couldn’t help it, though; I WAS negative.  I WAS bitter.   But most of all, I WAS angry.  I was angry at God (specifically, the subsection of His authority that controls Major League Baseball) for constantly inflicting this pain on Red Sox Nation, eternally stringing us along with the carrot of a World Series win and then pulling it away at the last minute.  I was reminded of Sisyphus, the Greek criminal whose punishment in the afterlife was to perpetually roll a giant boulder up a mountain, only to have it roll back to the ground just before reaching the top.  Less literary-inclined readers might be more familiar with Lucy always pulling the football out from under Charlie Brown.  Either way, I wasn’t happy.

Some excerpts from my scrapped eulogy:

“Mike Barnicle of the Herald wrote of the Sox-Yanks rivalry last week: `This is the final chapter.’  And he was right.  The so-called rivalry is over.”
“Stephen King couldn’t have scripted an ending roughly akin to the terminal unplugging of an otherwise entertaining 2004 Red Sox season (and the death of the Sox-Yankees rivalry) that was the American League Championship Series.”
“Two teams.  One team always wins.  The other team always loses.  It’s like a children’s book, with a Good Guy who wins and a Bad Guy who doesn’t.  The trouble is, we apparently root for the Bad Guys.”
“The Sox-Yankees rivalry, when it all comes down to it, might as well be the Globetrotters against the Washington Generals, or North Attleboro High taking on the elite teams of the NFL.”

How often do you get a chance to rewrite history?

The Red Sox, with one historic, thrilling, not-enough-adjectives-can-describe-it playoff run, gave me the chance to rewrite history.  I feel like Marty McFly making his father slug Biff Tannen, or Superman flying at near-warp speed around the Earth to turn back time so Lois wouldn’t die.  I feel like I could walk out to my driveway and find my 4Runner replaced with a kick-ass DeLorean (complete with a working Flux Capacitor), and I could go out in my backyard and find a green Krypton crystal hidden among the fall leaves (and while we’re at it, maybe a helpless, naked woman of limited English knowledge and very low sense of inhibition).  Why not?  Haven’t the Sox taught us in the past few weeks that anything is possible?

I didn’t think my experience as a Sox fan could get any lower than ALCS Game 3, a 19-8 drubbing at the hands of the Yanks.  A matchup that had so much potential, a red-hot Bronson Arroyo vs. a Kevin Brown that would have a hard time cracking the starting rotation of Keanu Reeves’ team in “Hardball”, ended with the Sox getting trounced and me watching “Can’t Hardly Wait” with Jen and Ace in lieu of the final five innings.  After that beating, waiting for Game 4 was like waiting for an anal cavity search.  Why did I want to watch Game 4?  To watch the Yankees celebrate sweeping the Sox at Fenway Park?  To remind myself that we had at least one more year of Bucky Dent highlights, Bill Buckner references, and incessant “1918” chants at Yankee Stadium?  As I watched the middle innings of Game 4, I felt like I was in the hospital, saying goodbye to a close relative with a terminal disease.  

This might be an extreme analogy, but when you go through the day-to-day experience of following a baseball team over six months (and 26 years, for me), you feel like you know the players as well as you know your best friends.  And as much as we hoped that the season can be prolonged so we could spend more time watching our pseudo-friends on the team, rational thought and experience had taught us to brace ourselves against the inevitable letdown.  Another October montage of the Ambiguously Metrosexual Duo (Jeter and A-Fraud), Matsui, Posada, and the Yankee dynasty of corporate boredom marching on with another pennant.

Wow, that seems so long ago.  In a lot of ways, it was.  

The history had already been written.  All you had to do was copy and paste from the archives of the Sox-Yankees rivalry.  I am sure every sportswriter in attendance at Game 4 had the usual “Yankees Win/Sox Collapse Again” article written for the early Monday editions.  How many writers filed their stories (as I did) before the ninth inning, before Rivera’s unlikely series-changing walk to Kevin Millar, the subsequent legendary stolen base by Roberts, and the ultra-clutch Mueller RBI-single to tie the game?  How many people were risen from the dead by that cosmic change of events?

Every Sox fan has a story about the past few weeks.  Everyone can name The Moment when they realized that they were going to come back.  I don’t believe for a second anyone who says that they knew the comeback was going to happen after Game 3.  The Sox had been embarrassed, their will to compete seemingly sucked out of them by one Matsui and Sheffield extra-base hit after another.  But after Roberts stole that base and Big Papi deposited one into the bullpen at 1:21 AM to keep the Sox alive, some people believed.

Others (such as myself) had their Moment during Game 5, when my BSSC hoops league team walked into the gym at the Watertown Middle School for an 8:00 game with our radio in tow, prepared to listen to Joe and Jerry call the action from Fenway while we half-heartedly played some basketball.  At least five other radios were tuned to WEEI in the gym; the Sox were on everyone’s mind, and suddenly we all believed.

And who could not believe after the Schilling Game in Game 6?  Who wasn’t a full convert after Bellhorn’s double was correctly reversed to a home run, or when A-Rod was ruled out for interference after swatting the ball out of Arroyo’s glove like an ersatz Hamburger Helper?  Those are the calls that, historically, ALWAYS had gone against the Sox.  And in Yankee Stadium, no less.  When Keith Foulke, pitching on pure adrenaline and guts, struck out Tony Clark to close out the game, suddenly it seemed like maybe, just maybe, this time the results would be different.

As I rode the T down to Faneuil Hall for Game 7, I remember feeling an eerie sense of calm.  I didn’t think there was any way the Sox would lose.  Even though I learned long ago (reinforced by the Grady Moment) never to feel relaxed until the final out of the last inning, somehow it was different in Game 7.  As soon as Ortiz hit his monster blast and Damon broke out of his slump with the quickest grand slam in memory, the game was over.  Sure, Pedro’s curious relief stint in the seventh inning provided some drama (and some near-heart attacks).  But in the end, the dynamics of the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry, and the concept of Red Sox fandom itself, had been irrevocably changed.  The comfort of guaranteed victory for spoiled Yankees fans was erased forever, as was the expectation of crushing defeat that has always been in Sox fans’ heads, deep down in places we don’t like to talk about at parties.  We wanted the Sox on that wall; we NEEDED them on that wall.  Thankfully, this time, they proved that they could finally handle the truth.

Where to even go from there?  How can you put something in historical perspective that has unequivocally altered the existence and worldview of millions of sports fans?  

For my entire lifetime, and for the lifespan of any Sox fan under the age of roughly 95, “Red Sox” has been synonymous with “loser”, with “choker”, with “disappointment.”  Fans and scribes have waxed poetic about the theater, the tragedy, and the inherent distinction of the one supposedly Truly Cursed Franchise in sports.  How do you rationalize the validation, once and for all, that the Curse of the Bambino was nothing more than Shaughnessy-perpetuated trash?  That we really weren’t predestined losers all along, that maybe we really did simply have a bad century?  That everything we’d ever been taken for granted about the experience of following the Red Sox was hogwash?

Everything has changed.  Over the summer, I wrote a two-part piece that explored whether the Patriots or the Sox were tops in Boston.  In the Sox piece, I described what I thought a possible Red Sox World Series victory parade would be like.  On Saturday, I checked the archives and I re-read the article.  It was surreal, to read about an experience that I wrote about under the assumption that it might never happen, when I had just watched that very parade earlier that morning!  An event that for my entire life lived in my mind as a fabricated figment of my imagination was played out before my very eyes as I peered through binoculars at a motorcade of Duck Boats passing by the corner of Beacon St and Tremont St, and then later cheering from the banks of the Charles River as the players floated by, just soaking up all the energy (no pun intended).  

Who could ever put into words that experience?  Who ever gets a chance to live your dreams, to watch them unfold before you like a movie that you wrote yourself?  Only it wasn’t a movie; it was real.  I watched it.  I watched Derek Lowe make the Yankees his daddies in Game 7, and then did the same to the Cardinals in Game 4.  I watched Schilling pitch his heart out, bloody sock and all.  I watched Bellhorn win World Series Game 1 with a towering shot off Pesky’s Pole, and I watched Pedro turn up the heat for one more vintage start in Game 3, with a little help from Jeff “Why Can’t We Get Guys Like That?” Suppan.  I watched Johnny Damon essentially end the Series with a homer on the fourth pitch of Game 4.  Finally, I watched Foulke stab a harmless grounder off the bat of Edgar Renteria, underhand to first… and finally we could relax.  And celebrate.  And savor it all.  

I like to think we all learned something about life from this team.  As much as the past heartbreaks have stung, they just made the final moment of victory so much more rewarding.  We as fans are able to experience the thrill of victory, but without losing our soul as so many victory-spoiled Yankees fans have.  The stings of ’46, ’48, ’49, ’67, ’75, ’78, ’86, ’99, and ’03 have been forgotten.  All those colossal failures and monumental collapses now just seem like preludes to 2004, like appetizers to sweeten the experience of the main course of ’04.  

And so as I attempt to reflect on it, I am happy as a fan and as a human being that I never got to publish those two articles I wrote on that lonely Sunday night of Game 4 against the Yanks.  I have been lucky enough to have literally gotten a chance to rewrite history.  The past can’t be changed, but the Sox this year certainly wrote a new, and immensely more powerful, chapter, in the most heroic, appropriate, and memorable way possible.  

Now if you excuse me, I’m going to hop in the DeLorean and see if I can get Parish, McHale, and Bird to play for the Celts this year.  The Green could sure use them if they want to make it a Boston Three-Peat in 2004.