Of Sox and Sucking

MONTREAL—After two years in their midst, I thought I’d finally lost them. I had driven 18 hours into the deserted hinterland that is rural New England, passed below stormy skies and crawled alongside a sea of Phish and finally made my way across the border in the wee morning hours—and, I naively assumed, safely outside their pestering reach.

I had barely swallowed the first bite of my brunch crepe the next morning when the lettering on one of the other patron’s shirts caught my eye. In huge block letters, so large that even I, stubbornly myopic, could make them out with little difficulty:

“POSADA IS A PUSSY.”

Apparently the Boston faithful had graduated from their “Yankees suck, Jeter swallows” routine and set their sights on New York catcher Jorge Posada. Though I was tucked away in a back-alley garden restaurant, Red Sox Nation had targeted me, too, as its inebriated agents would on several other occasions during my brief foray into the Great White North.

Nowhere proved safe during the abbreviated weekend. Inside Olympic Stadium, home of the Montreal Expos, more fans donned caps and jerseys pledging allegiance to Boston than the two teams actually competing right before their eyes. Granted, the Expos are neither popular nor particularly good and their opponents, the Houston Astros, would have been asking quite a bit of their fans to make the trek to the ballpark. But why the disproportionate number of visible Red Sox supporters, besmirching an otherwise splendid five-inning, no-hit effort from Montreal hurler Tony Armas?

The same question could easily be asked of any of the other encounters between Boston’s henchmen and me—sometimes sporting my dingy Yankees hat, sometimes not—during my two-day stay. Why the knowing glances in a bar’s inner bowels between complete strangers from Harvard and Northeastern, followed not long thereafter by an unprovoked chant of “Yankees suck!”? Why the need to inject themselves into conversations 30 feet away to curtly ask whether they could “wipe their ass with my hat?”

The fiery hatred most Red Sox fans openly espouse for their first-place counterparts seemed to not-so-quietly permeate the trip’s smallest detail. Would every aspect of an otherwise wonderful city be ruined for me by this loathsome invasion? The possibility of Notre Dame Cathedral’s crucifix adorned by an oversized Red Sox hat suddenly seemed all too real. An “obligatory” visit to the renowned establishment “Super Sex” was threatened to be derailed by the prospect of a dancer providing a tantalizing performance only to reveal a suggestively placed tattoo countering The Curse.

Perhaps it’s nostalgia or, more likely, the product of obliviousness in my younger days, but Red Sox fans weren’t always this way. Sure, they were never cute or cuddly, and their collective accent has always registered as foreign and plebeian to the New York ear, but those differences never seemed to constitute an unbridgeable gap.

Prior to their resurgence in 1994, the Yankees were, well, awful. With a lineup stocked with such no-names as Mike Blowers, Mel Hall and Alvaro Espinoza, the Yankees were the laughingstock of the American League, which—while perhaps prompting the occasional chuckle from Boston—provided little fodder for Red Sox fans to either cheer or jeer. Even when New York captured the World Series title in 1996, the response was muted. Another season, like every other since 1918, had come and gone without a World Series victory, but there was little reason to decry that year’s outcome any more than the Atlanta Braves’ title in 1995.

But in the intervening years, that hushed self-pity has metamorphosed into an aggressive self-loathing most frequently manifested in obnoxious ad hoc mob attacks on single unsuspecting Yankee fans. Red Sox fans don’t even need a reason to break out the “Yankees suck!” chant any more. A group of them recognize one another as Sox fans at a Dispatch concert? Yankees suck. The Celtics are blowing out the Cleveland Cavaliers at the FleetCenter? Yankees suck. The Patriots just won the Super Bowl and fans have started overturning cars and setting trash cans on fire? Yankees suck. Finals period has just ended? Yankees suck.

All things Yankee suddenly inflame the passions of Red Sox fans, even more so their phony hangers-on. According to even the most enlightened of these backers of perpetual losers, all supporters of New York’s American League squad are front runners who by definition must have supported the Mets a decade ago. And, no, they will not discuss any claims to the contrary. By the way, the Yankees suck.

Cheering for a loser isn’t easy, no matter what sport you’re following or what team you support. But Red Sox fans have, in large part, abandoned hope of a championship. That is no longer the year’s primary objective.

Rooting against the Yankees is. The Red Sox will—and here their thoughts are correct—inevitably foul up the most golden of opportunities, so why bother? Let’s just hope “the Evil Empire” doesn’t win, the logic goes. And, without fail, the Yankees do succeed and best the Red Sox. One can only imagine what would happen if the tables were somehow turned. After all, the Red Sox fans have come to depend on losing, to secretly love it. What would they do without it?

Oh well. No need to worry about that. Eight games behind the Yankees and struggling just to make the playoffs, one thing is for sure: The Red Sox suck.

Timothy J. McGinn ’06, a social studies concentrator in Quincy House, is sports chair of The Crimson. He’s heard Prague and Budapest are nice this time of year—and almost undoubtedly unoccupied by Red Sox Nation.