FleetCenter Is A Living Testament To Boston Sports History

It was a little embarrassing that I’d never been to a Celtics game after over two years here in Boston. But man, was I breaking in with style after getting a free ride to a Premium Club Suite with 11 friends last Friday.

The thing is, the most striking aspect of my first Celtics experience wasn’t the posh atmosphere, and it certainly wasn’t the basketball (Celtics-Clippers, let’s be honest here). Hell, it wasn’t even the bonehead who decided to douse the home team’s bench with pepper spray and delay the ending to a terribly played game. Instead, my mouth dropped open at the history crammed into the arena, making it the perfect microcosm of a Bostonian’s sports memories starting from the early 1900s.

So my amazement got me thinking—what is this strange fascination that millions of sports fans have for watching grown men and women play games that are actually ridiculously silly in the grand scheme of things? Why do smelly old jerseys and fading pictures still make us both catch our breath and giddy with excitement?

There are rows of Celtics and Bruins championship banners and retired numbers suspended over the court. As one of my friends pointed out, those banners must seem like a heavy load literally hanging over the heads of the current players.

There are hundreds of incredible pictures perched on the walls, but I gaped at one in particular. There was Harvard’s very own Angela Ruggiero ’02-’04, beaming and carrying the U.S. flag after playing with the Olympic team. Ruggiero is, of course, currently captaining the women’s hockey team in its quest for an NCAA championship.

There are displays crowded into every corner, with my favorite one being the obstructed-view seat from the Boston Garden. A peeling orange metal seat is placed directly behind a column; when you sit down in it, you’re staring at a quirky little note about how there were almost 2,000 such obstructed-view seats in the old hockey rink.

So back to the question at hand—what is so great about all of this clutter?

Well, I found my answer in the hockey mask of Gerry “Cheesy” Cheevers, the Bruins goalie of the 1970 and 1972 Stanley Cup champions. A strange choice, perhaps, to explain all the emotions that sports have imbued within them, but something about this mask makes sense.

Cheevers’ mask is of the Jason-era, a plain white plastic shield that would actually do nothing to stop a puck. But Cheevers’ mask is out of the ordinary since he made a habit out of drawing stitches on the mask with a permanent pen to show where the puck nailed him.

But regardless of the visceral repulsion that the mask first gave me, it revealed a huge part of his and many other athlete’s character. In Cheevers’ mask I see a burning desire to play because why else would anyone subject himself to an onslaught of pucks and huge, angry men? I see dedication in training because those hours crouching in the goal could not have been fun. I see the ability to work with a team to fulfill a lifelong dream to be the unequivocal best.

In sports purists’ terms, athletes are not merely using God-given skills to make a quick buck or to entertain the masses. Athletes feel the need to compete, to engage in each hellacious, grueling and exhilarating period of time termed a “season.”

No matter what pressure they’re under—like the constant reminder of their own shortcomings while playing underneath all those championship banners—they have a need to play. No matter what scale of competition, national or Ivy League, the passion for the game is consuming. And as fans, we channel into this energy with our allegiance—allegiance that will cause well over a thousand people to pay to sit in seats with no view of the rink whatsoever.

So I see all these elements in Cheevers’ mask. And most of all, from the very fact that it’s on display, I see how the fans are there every step of the way, even during the less-than-stellar present, while remembering the glory days of the past.

—Staff writer Brenda E. Lee can be reached at belee@fas.harvard.edu.