The Best Red Sox Story Ever
Synchronicity - n. the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner... and the chance that they would occur together by random chance must be very small.
“Not everything is in your books, Stephen.”- Capt. Jack Aubrey, Master and Commander
With everything that’s going on right now in Boston sports there are 10,000 things I could, and probably should, be writing about. I could be beating my chest about the Celtics, bragging about the first place Red Sox, crowing about the Patriots, or just going off wiseassily on some non-sports related rant. But I’ll save that for next time. I just passed a five year anniversary of the single most surreal event I’ve ever been a part of, May 31, 2003. I still have the t-shirt with the date on it. I’m not being facetious, it was something that fundamentally changed the way I look at... well at everything. If I hadn’t been a part of this, I’d probably think the story was embellished or exaggerated or completely made up like some John Tomase hatchet job. But on my kids, I swear this is how it happened, as well as I can remember it. So forgive me my self-indulgence; sometimes you’ve got to write something just for yourself and this is one of those times.
I’ll start at the beginning. I grew up in Weymouth. Among my group of friends was a guy we called “Killa.” The nickname was a takeoff of his last name, and also meant to be a little ironic because if you ranked everyone on Earth in order of how much that nickname fit them, our Killa wouldn’t have been in the top 4 billion. Even though Killa died a couple of years after we got out of high school, this story is still all about him.
Typically when someone is talking about someone who died, they act like the departed was their closest and dearest friend, like they were inseparable. Well to be honest, that wasn’t the case with me and Killa. We were friends for sure, just that there were several guys each of us were closer buddies with. In the complicated Venn Diagram of a teenager’s social life, we were in each other’s social circle, and our inner circle of friends had plenty of overlap. We weren’t casual acquaintances or tertiary friends, it would apt to call us secondary friends. There were many nights he gave me a ride to and from our regular pickup basketball games, but if you told me we were never in each other’s house, I wouldn’t be surprised. Our friendship was mostly spent in school, talking about the Red Sox. Killa always took the role of objective, knowledgeable kid who could criticize the Sox and back it up with facts, and I was the shameless homer for whom they could do no wrong. Which now that I think about it, describes practically every friendship I have to this day. (Personal growth is not really my thing.) But I can honestly say I never spent a minute in his company I didn’t enjoy.
Killa was one of those guys that everyone who knew him would call “a good shit.” Still, he sort of went his own way. When most of us were in the early stages of our lifelong love affair with beer and crowded parties where everyone talks too loud and pukes too much, he took a pass, preferring instead to hang out with the girlfriend he’d had since Jr. High. It would be wrong to say he was shy or socially awkward. He was far from it. “Unassuming” might be a good way to describe him. The house party and drinking in the woods behind the high school scene just didn’t appeal to him to the point where one time he asked our buddy Brink (whom it would be safe to say was his best friend) “What’s it like to go to a party and get drunk?” He’d simply never done it.
There was one time when my friend Kenny called me with luxury box tickets to Fenway, but I couldn’t make it. I had an after school job at some convenience store (yes, it was a dream, and I was able to make it come true) and had to work that night; the only time before or since I’ve been offered luxury seats and I couldn’t go because I couldn’t pass up the chance to earn four hours of minimum wage. The only thing that keeps me from killing myself about that is that Kenny took Killa in my place. And I’ll never forget the way his dad’s voice cracked at the wake when he told us how happy Killa sounded that night when he called home from the suite to say how awesome it was.
Like I said, we were just a couple of years out of high school when Killa died. It was single car accident. Obviously no booze or drugs or anything were involved. There was speculation that he was tired from studying and went off the road. Or maybe I just assumed that to be so because more than once I almost nodded off at the wheel after all night cramming marathons. The way I found out was I was working that same stupid convenience store job (follow your dreams, kids) one afternoon when Brink walked in. I swear this is true, that I didn’t even have to ask if someone had died; I knew it from the look on his face. I just said “Who?” and he said “Killa.” It’s hard to have a much worse moment than that.
Collectively we did our best to memorialize the lad. We put together fundraisers which gave the town a batting cage and set up a scholarship fund in his name. It seemed a lot more worthwhile than... with all due respect to people who do such things... putting a bunch of flowers and baseball card on a chain link fence at the scene of the accident. Mostly though, we tried to keep remembering him among ourselves, bringing him up in conversations, toasting his memory at weddings and class reunions, and not forgetting how much he’s missed even to this day.
Fast forward to May of ‘03. A group of guys, led by our nicknameless buddy John, put together a fantasy baseball day at Fenway. For a bunch of Red Sox obsessed aging wanna be jocks, it couldn’t have been better if we’d stepped out of an Iowa cornfield. In exchange for a donation to Red Sox Charities, we played a game on the field at Fenway. Uniforms, wooden bats, the National Anthem, a Babe Ruth impersonator... a Field of Dreams. I say “we” when I should say “they” because I never took the field. I was welcome to, but I was offered the choice of playing ball or being the PA announcer, which was a either a comment on my ball playing or my rampant attention whore-ism, or both. Anyway, I accepted the Sherm Feller role. And among the people we honored was Killa by having his dad throw out the first pitch. Even though Mr. Killa was in his 80's, he fired a perfect strike while two dugouts filled with his late son’s friends, and one in the PA booth, picked dust out of their eyes.
Afterward, we went over to The Player’s Club, which is now Game On!, for a reception. We were joined by wives, families, and of course Mr. Killa. He couldn’t stay long, but stopped to thank everyone and we gathered the Weymouth boys around to take a picture with him before he left. We looked for an appropriate backdrop, and there was a wall painted to look like the Green Monster, but people were sitting in front of it eating, so instead we picked an empty area in front of an enormous picture of Dwight Evans. Smile. Click. Handshakes all around and thanks for coming, Mr. Killa. A minute later, our friend Jake looked at the giant picture of Dewey and said “You know what? I have this same exact picture on the wall in my basement. I cut it out of The Globe and framed it because me and Killa were in it....
“... AND THERE HE IS!!!”
And there he was. My hand to God, there he was. Jake had been cropped out of the picture when they blew it up, but right there, in the lower left hand corner, sitting in the front row of the box seats behind the visitors on deck circle behind Evans, was our friend who died 20 years earlier. The one whose dad just left. The one who was never happier than the day he saw a game from the luxury box a hundred yards from where we stood. It’s important to note that this wasn’t a famous or iconic picture. It wasn’t Fisk waving the ball fair or Gedman throwing Clemens’ 20th strikeout pitch around the infield. There are eight pictures like it in the sports page every day of the year. All indistinguishable except this is one, the one we ended up in front of, had Killa in it.
That was five years ago, and it still defies explanation. The rules of logic don’t apply. Personally I’m not smart enough to figure out how it happened, just that it did. Or maybe I don’t care to have it explained. Prior to May 31, 2003, I never had much tolerance for people who perpetuate this myth that there’s something supernatural surrounding about the Sox. Curses and miracles and Greek tragedies and all that crap that sells books to guys who wear cardigans with elbow patches. But what the hell? Why not? A friend’s picture shows up on a wall in Fenway on a day when his friends are honoring him. Another deceased Red Sox lifer shows up in a billboard outside the ballpark. A hawk attacks a teenage girl named Alexa Rodriguez. There’s a lunar eclipse the night we bury my Sox-loving mother and there isn’t another one until a year later, the night they win Game 4 against St. Louis. Is it supernatural? I don’t know. But I’m convinced there’s some things in this world, and with this team, that simply cannot be coincidence.
As a post script, I took out my high school year book and here’s how a friend signed it:
“Dwight Evans is a bum. And Reggie Jackson is great. But the Sox will win it in this year.- Killa”