A Time For Glory

Oh, the dilemma. As I loitered in the Dunster House Common Room for the final innings of game four, surrounded by a squawking throng of simian Red Sox fans, I couldn’t decide whether I should root for a Colorado comeback, out of my usual Schadenfreude for Boston sports, or rather bite my lip and hope for a quick Sox victory so as to get the whole damn thing over with. I was leaning towards the latter; the exquisite masochism of Boston sports fans, born out of centuries of Irish-Catholic resentment and sexual privation was getting tedious; and besides, I had long ago come to the realization that they enjoyed their misery even more than I did.

Then my friend made the mistake—a cardinal sin really—of revealing a dispassionate aesthetic appreciation for the game of baseball, complimenting a Colorado Rockies’ hitter with a pretty innocuous observation: “Good eye, there.” Of course, this elicited a cacophony of jeers and a Manichaean, even Bush-like inquisition to determine if he was in fact “with us or against us.”

For a bewildering moment, I forgot that I attend a cosmopolitan university, whose diverse student body hails from all over the world, even regions where baseball is virtually unknown; and even, perhaps, Colorado. At that point, my rancor swerved towards the poseurs and bandwaggoners in their borrowed Red Sox raiment, hungry voyeurs for the already vicarious pleasure of sports fandom.

But the stars were aligned, and as the ninth inning wound down anticlimactically, I adopted a stoic attitude. The lukewarm champagne would be popped, the hoots and hollers would commence, and with the help of the relentlessly-advertised Cialis, as well as some surging testosterone from a World Series victory embellished by the Patriots Übermensch destruction of the Washington Redskins, many aging and rusty Bostonians would be getting lucky for possibly the first time since the Sox last won the Series (a paltry wait, in comparison to the 86-year drought that had preceded it). Drunken college students, and other young revelers, would gush into Copley and Kenmore squares, lubricated into a Dionysian frenzy by a victory in which they played no part, but for which they felt invincibly enjoined to turn over cars and set a lot of things on fire. Of course, the Boston police would already be waiting for them, foaming at the mouth, massaging their batons, and fantasizing about spraying their “non-lethal” rubber bullets into a crowd of spoiled hooligans. And so it goes.

As the final pitch wafted into Jason Varitek’s glove, into “History,” I felt myself in a mood of serenity, even reconciliation with the Red Sox franchise. I congratulated my friends who had not acted like douche-bags—after all, as a baseball fan who has never experienced the rapture of his team winning a World Series, I still have enough reverence for the game to know that it at least deserves a slap on the back. I also reflected: Perhaps this is the end of an era for Boston, an end to the persecution complex, to the insufferable masochism, to the bitter winter despair that never abates come April.

In fact, I’m convinced it is the end of an era, but I should have been careful what I wished for. For this Second Coming is even more monstrous than the past. It is hubris, overweening obnoxious arrogance, an inversion of all that was wrong with the past. It’s hard to blame them, with the world champion Red Sox and the Olympian Patriots. Of course, no one mentions the Celtics or Bruins anymore, mummified teams of a dead divinity. But it is really swinging from one pole of narcissism to another: first the eternal victim, now the eternal champion. Boston sports radio, infesting the airwaves and our morning dining halls, has been singing this tune all year now. And though Boston clings so piously to its musty Catholicism, it is easy to see the formation of new trinities: Bellicheck-Brady-Moss, Francona-Ortiz-Beckett.

The comparison is far-fetched, perhaps offensive. But it speaks to the crux of what is wrong with this town, which is that it derives too much of its culture, its passion, its self-esteem, from a passive intake of the Eucharist of sports. When the Yankees lose, New Yorkers are pissed, but they quickly get over it and realize all the wonderful things about their city that they can actively, energetically participate in. Boston needs to learn that there is life after January, and that while sports are great, they are still only circuses, performed to give us joy but not the meaning of our lives.



David L. Golding ’08, a Crimson editorial editor, is an English and American literature and language concentrator in Dunster House.