Red Sox Nation in Our Living Room

I am a life-long New York Yankees fan, and I am okay with this. (The first step is admitting powerlessness and that life has become unmanageable.) The eternal American desire to root for an underdog or even a lovable loser--the Cubs, the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Red Sox until 2004--did not pass me by, even as a fan of the Yankees; this is because when I was growing up in the 1970s, the Yankees gave fans two of the team's extended stretches of losing: in the early 1970s, when the team was owned by CBS, and then again in the late 1980s and early '90s, when the team's owner repeatedly fired managers, signed second-rate free agents to two-year contracts only to see them under-perform in both seasons, or traded young talent for older "talent."

My team, which I admit had also shown me some success before I was a teenager--three World Series in a row in the '70s--was not a "lovable loser," it was a laughingstock by the early '90s, and I took a perverse pride in this. "Now I know," I said to no one ever, "What it is like to root for heartbreak." Of course, seeing multiple World Series trophies held aloft by various pinstriped "heroes" before and after that dark Stump Merrill-Bucky Dent-Dallas Green era puts my rooting for a laughingstock of a team in perspective: the trophies that starting arriving after 1996 were readily, happily seen as a deserved reward for living through those few tough years. But when Don Mattingly is one's favorite player and he is the one major Yankee in history to have to buy a ticket to see a World Series game, well, let's just say I was defensively proud of having stood by those sickeningly bad teams. I like knowing what it is like to root for a heartbreaking team (or thinking that I do) and having sympathy for the "lovable loser" teams; it turns out I like rooting for a juggernaut team even more, though.

My dad in a recent photo.

My father is a New Englander, a Vermonter who now lives on Cape Cod, where New England gazes longingly towards old England. He comes by his rooting for the Boston Red Sox (argh and double-argh!) as honestly as he can, and I do not love him the less for it, nor do I think he ever resented me, his only son, for being a Yankee fan. (Maybe all that family role-play therapy that we never really participated in was worth it, after all.)

He is one of those Red Sox fans for whom 2004 was created: born in 1935, he probably listened to the 1946 team's World Series loss on the radio, and saw the 1967 and 1975 losses on television. All of them legendary, seven-game World Series, but all losses followed by decade-long postseason droughts.

In 1986, I was almost 18, a college freshman living at home, and another legendary Red Sox World Series was unfolding, this time against the other New York team, the Mets. My sole memory of Game 6 and Mookie Wilson's slow game-ending dribbler through Bill Buckner's legs is that I was standing behind my dad, who was sitting in his favorite armchair. When the play unfolded, I saw my dad's shoulders react. A stoic man by nature, my dad simply silently shuddered, like an evil thought had passed through his mind and he had urgently worked to dismiss it; I am glad to this day that I did not see his face. He stood and said something about one more game in a way that exhibited no confidence and then went to bed. 

Eighteen years later, in the fall of 2004, my life had taken a dip in fortune and I was once again living at home with my parents, now residing on Cape Cod. The Red Sox had already done the unthinkable and unforgivable in the postseason and defeated my team in the Championship Series. But when the Red Sox won it all that memorable season, I can say that I was proud to be the son who was with his dad when his beloved lovable loser team finally broke through and he was able to enjoy a championship for the first time in his life.

He has now enjoyed two more to my team's one more, earned in 2009, and I think this is quite enough.

The article I link to here, from The Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/), considers the existential irony that recent Red Sox history presents the world: that young Red Sox fans have known a very successful team, winner or three World Series in a decade, while fans of my father's generation still carry the spiritual wound (at first, I wrote that as a minor joke, but I realize it's only half tongue-in-cheek) ... still carry the wary style of love learned from rooting for a lovable loser team for 86 years.

A Tale of Two Red Sox Nations