By Ryan McGowan
If you let it, rain can do a lot to dampen your spirits (pun intended, I guess). In July, on the morning of the annual McGowan Open golf tournament, I woke up to a drizzle that eventually turned into a torrential downpour on the eighth hole. Fearing a lightning strike akin to the Bishop on the 18th green in Caddyshack, we took an unscheduled hour and a half break in the clubhouse, during which a bunch of us cracked open some Bud Lites at 8:30 AM on a Saturday. My team was leading the tournament at the turn; a cancellation of the tourney after nine holes would have given Team Brewsaders our first-ever possession of the McGowan Cup trophy. Sadly, the rain ruined it for us. When it eventually abated enough for us to finish the round, the grips on our clubs and the soggy fairway turf destroyed any momentum we had from the front nine. We finished something like 11th out of 28 teams; the winners came from a group that hadn`t started their round until 10:30 AM, after the course had dried up and we had left to get a head start on the after-party. Looking back, it would have probably been in our best interests if we had, in fact, been smote down by lightning on the 9th green. At the very least I wouldn’t have had to walk around in sponge-wet shorts like Aquaman for two more hours.
The dampened McGowan Open was on my mind on Friday night when I sat down to watch the Sox-Yankees game from The Stadium. By some cruel twist of fate, Jennifer brought me to a birthday party for a girl she works with, and the party was at another girl’s apartment (who happens to be a Yankee fan). Watching a Sox-Yankees game with a Yankee fan in the room (and, especially, at said person’s house) is always dangerous to friendships and spleens alike. One of the two often gets ruptured in the course of nine innings. Historically speaking, there have only been three possible outcomes from a Sox-Yankees game in the Bronx, and none of them are ever fun to experience with a Yankee fan in the room:
(1) Sox jump out to an early lead and pound the Bombers into submission, resulting in all the NY fans leaving early. Yankee Fan in the Room insists on turning the game off in the fourth inning to watch “Dance 360” (possibly the only show on TV around their level of intellectual understanding) and not allow the Boston fans any leeway of celebration.
(2) Sox jump out to an early lead and blow it in the late innings, sometimes due to a defensive gaffe, other times to an inept manager leaving an obviously finished pitcher in way too long. We helplessly watch Mariano Rivera set us down 1-2-3 in the ninth, leading to wild bacchanalia in the Stadium, crazy chants of “1918”, and local Yankee fans’ obnoxious taunting the rest of the night about how tonight’s game was somehow some large sociological microcosm of just one more reason that New York is superior to Boston in all respects (including quality of pizza, hours of operation of bars and clubs, subway service, etc), and that they (by extension) are superior to us because they grew up within 150 miles of Yankee Stadium and we didn’t.
(3) Yankees jump out to an early lead and the Sox implode in all areas, so much so that the Sox players’ wives are wearing paper bags on their heads by the sixth inning.
With only these three options in the past, I always considered it fandom suicide to watch a Sox-Yanks game at the home of a Yankee fan, roughly akin to opening a bottle of Hunt’s ketchup in the Kerry household, or trying to convince the Bush family to install natural gas heat in the Kennebunkport compound. So, reluctantly, I drove through the rain over to Watertown for this party, and hunkered down for the game.
A funny thing happened, though. None of the previous three game options occurred. In fact, an entirely new (and heretofore foreign) script took place: the Sox, pestered by two rain delays, refused to let the wet weather, the hostile crowd, or the self-protective home team defeat them. They fought and executed (with the help of some clutch hitting, skillful baserunning, and timely managerial moves from Terry Francona) a miraculous comeback off Rivera in the ninth, and then we watched OUR closer, Keith Foulke, come out and set the Bombers down 1,2,3 in the bottom of the ninth.
We celebrated in the Home of the Yankee Fan. We didn’t know what else to do. “Dance 360” wasn’t on anywhere. There were no “1918” chants to be heard anywhere. Jack Nicholson had hopefully suffocated on his bandwagon Yankee poncho. Yankee Fan had shut up. It was a different feeling, and led us to think the impossible. Dare we say, sweep the Yanks in Yankee Stadium?
On Friday night at roughly midnight, the stars were all aligned for this to happen. We all eagerly awaited a great weekend in sports. A possible Sox sweep, which looked all the more promising with Derek Lowe vs. Jon Lieber on Saturday, and Pedro and Mussina locking heads on Sunday. Two more days of the Ryder Cup, which, even after a disappointing showing by our big guns on Friday, still looked like it was ours for the taking. The Pats on the road against the hapless Arizona Cardinals. Trap game? Not with this team. Not with this coach.
So when I woke up (albeit late) on Saturday morning, even the hammering downpour that was whipping through Brighton couldn’t crush my enthusiasm for the sports weekend that was to come. The rain had canceled my original intention to go watch the boys from my alma mater of Holy Cross play down the street against Harvard, but it was all the better since HC football is such an incredible joke right now, I would have been embarrassed to be wearing my purple anywhere near the Coliseum. Either way, it didn’t matter; Sox-Yanks at 1, college football all day, “Reno 911” marathon in between. In the words of Kramer, “Giddy up.”
Turns out I should have gradually pulled out my small intestines with a salad fork instead. I would have gotten more pleasure from that than I did from watching the meltdown in Yankee Stadium that was Derek Lowe and the Red Sox. Hey, good job with that momentum, guys. For anyone who doesn’t understand what being a Red Sox fan is all about, this weekend summed it up in ugly splendor. I hate to sound like one of those self-indulgent, comical “We’re Cursed!!!!” whiners, but if you want to know what being a Red Sox fan is really like, just relieve the weekend of September 17-19, 2004.
After a spectacular come-from-behind victory against possibly the best closer in the history of the game, the Sox return to the field no more than thirteen hours later and hack up a proverbial lung. Derek Lowe fields a dribbler back to the mound and inexplicably throws to third base (where there isn’t a force play), apparently deciding that the sure out at first is too easy for him. Now, I am obviously not a major-league caliber ballplayer, but if I did that on my BSSC coed slow-pitch softball team, I’d be probably drinking beers by myself at the Last Drop after the game. Leiber makes 0-for-the-series Jason Varitek (now something like 0-for-36 in the Bronx this year) look like Corey Haim in Lucas. The Yanks piled on run after run, and the whole time, Tim McCarver is sitting there gloating, reminding us all about the Red Sox franchise’s past collapses and almost causing me to kick in the TV screen when his face appears on it. Kevin Youkilis, concerned that he shouldn’t have been playing during Rosh Hashanah, consequently swings the bat like Paul Pfeiffer from “The Wonder Years.” The only thing that could have been worse on Saturday would be if the Yankees sent Paris Hilton up to bat. (Why not? She’s everywhere else lately, it seems.) With the way things were going that day, I wouldn’t be surprised if Paris had cranked a ground-rule double off Lowe… captured on video, of course.
Even still, you could chalk that game up to the old baseball mantra that “Hey, it happens sometimes.” On Sunday, the sun was shining, there were 12 singles matches yet to be played in the Ryder Cup, and the Sox had their ace pitching, the guy who couldn’t possibly be intimidated by the pressure of pitching against the Yankees. The guy who went into the Stadium in Game 7 last year and silenced the mighty Yankees, only to be left out to dry in the single worst managerial move (or non-move) in the history of sports. There’s no way Sunday could have been any worse than Saturday.
Well, it was. This time, it was worse, because with Pedro on the mound, I expected more than just “wham, bam, Sheffield two-run HR, Mussina dominates, thank you, ma’am.” By the sixth inning, down 8-1, I needed a tranquilizer shot in my neck like the one that Sean William Scott had for the donkeys in Old School. I finally changed the channel when A-Rod hit a blast off The Other Pedro, Mr. “I’m Really Not Older than Jesse Orosco, I Just Look Like It” Astacio.
The Patriots managed to salvage a little bit of the weekend with a win in the Valley of the Sun. But by that point, I was pretty much numb to the fan experience that was 9/19/04. Two straight days of blowout losses to the Yankees and to European golfers can make you feel like you’re on more lithium than Kurt Cobain and the guy from Garden State combined. Besides, how fired up can you get over a win against a team that features Josh “Don’t Call Me Cade” McCown at quarterback, 43-year veteran Emmitt Smith at tailback, and assorted XFL castoffs on the rest of the roster (except for rookie phenom Larry Fitzgerald)? The biggest thing you worry about while playing Arizona is whether your defensive guys will have enough water on the sidelines. This wasn’t exactly Patriots-Colts in the playoffs here.
Plus, Deion Branch got banged up, Brady threw a few interceptions, and my friend Seamus (a Scottsdale resident) was probably in the stands at Sun Devil Stadium wearing a Cardinals jersey and futilely heckling Tedy Bruschi about being a big, soft wuss. (There are currently no Vegas odds on whether Seamus would survive that confrontation.) It was a flawed consolation, but it was still a solace nonetheless. However, if Daunte Culpepper gets held to fewer than 31 fantasy points tonight, my team will start out 2-0 for the first time in many years. There’s chance yet to salvage the weekend.
Let’s just root for some McGowan Open-style rainouts next weekend when the Yanks come to Fenway. I don’t think my neck can handle too many more of those tranquilizer shots.
