It’s Good to Be Spoiled
“What do you do when your real life exceeds your dreams?”
“Keep it to yourself.”
-Broadcast News
“It's not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”
-David Merrick (Broadway producer)
In the history of American sports, there’s never been a better time to be a fan in one particular city at one particular moment than to be living in Boston right here, right now. We’re riding a gravy train with biscuit wheels. Everything we want is there for the taking. We’re Maverick and Goose and the bar is a target-rich environment of hot Kelly McGillis types who’d love to talk astrophysics from the back of your motorcycle. We’re Charlie Weis at an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. Life is the Playboy mansion, and we’re Hef, walking past The Grotto and culling whichever Bunny we want from the herd. We’re Paris Hilton on a shopping spree at the Paris Hilton. The sports world is an open bar wedding, and we’re a bunch of Dorchester Irishmen with designated driver. We’re Fat Elvis and our life is one big endless cycle of fried peanut butter & banana sandwiches, mixing painkillers and passing out on the toilet. And there’s no Memphis Mafia around to tell us we’re overdoing it, it’s time we cleaned up our act, and oh by the way, Roustabout sucked.
We’re the spoiled brat of the sports world. We listen to no one, don’t do what we’re told, don’t play nice and still get anything we want. Remember that kid you went to school with, whose parents bought him/her a new car as soon as he/she got their license? Who never worked a day in their life, was never nice to anyone and still was given their heart’s desire just for the asking? And all the times you were riding your Schwinn to your crappy minimum wage job in the hope that maybe you’d be able to scrape together enough to buy a 100,000 mile Ford Pinto, you wondered what it would be like to be that kid? Well being a Boston sports fan right now might be the closest you’ll ever come to knowing. And you have to admit, it feels pretty good, doesn’t it?
It’s our century. After all those decades of being Danny Noonan, kowtowing to the millionaires and worrying about our future in the lumberyard, we get to be the Spaulding, hanging out at the Yacht Club smoking the really good reefer we bought from a Negro and picking our nose whenever we damned well please.
Naturally the Boston fan population is handling this success with all the class and quiet dignity you’d expect from a region famous for its Puritan traditions. Just kidding. We’re handling it like we’re a snotty little rich bitch on “My Sweet 16" and why not? We’re entitled. We deserve nothing but the best. Let the Patriots fall within a 2-minute warning of a perfect season and collectively we can throw a hissy fit, go to our room and sob that they’ve “ruined eeeeverythiiiing!!!” like that girl did when her mom gave her the new Lexus SUV the day before her birthday party.
And we do so because we know we can. We can feel like the Patriots broke our hearts for being 99.9% successful because we know they’ll come back next year and make it up to us. Or someone else will. The Pats didn’t give us the Lexus exactly when we wanted it, so daddy gave us the NBA Championship to make up for it, because it’s only the best for us. We’d gone, what? Eight months? without a championship, and that’s too long to be deprived.
None of which is to suggest we don’t appreciate what we have. You can be blase’ about many things, Rose, but not Titanic. We spent too goddamned long being the laughingstock of the sports world to feel embarrassed about our embarrassment of riches. The rest of the world might have conveniently forgotten the Dark Times before the Patriots-Rams Super Bowl, but we haven’t. Remember “Loserville”? That’s what Gerry Callahan was calling Boston in the Herald in the days of Pete Carroll, Jimy Williams and Rick Pitino, and the epithet was as fitting then as “City of Champions” is today. The four Boston teams had spent a decade and a half leading the most devout fans in the country through the desert, so pardon us if once we found the oasis we felt like building a luxury resort and staying a while.
Take the championship parades. We’ve had six of them in the past seven years (seven if you count that fiasco with Ray Bourque an the Colorado Avalanche’s Stanley Cup which is the kind of thing you do in Loserville), and it’s not exactly like they’ve started to become routine. If anything, they’re getting bigger as we get the hang of them. To a man, the Celtics say they were astonished by the size of the crowds last Thursday. As a matter of fact, it might be time to change the Rolling Rallies up before they become routine. Since they’re no longer a special event, but are part of our everyday lives, we need to make them more cost effective. It’s expensive and time-consuming to keep blocking off parade routes, hire detail cops, set up saw horses, shell out all that overtime, lose all that productivity, clean up afterwards and so forth. That might work fine for New York where they have a parade once every decade or so. But since we do one every three or four months, and will for the foreseeable future, it’s time we streamlined the system. Boston needs a permanent Rolling Rally set up. A monorail maybe. Or a gondola like the used to have in Disney. Some kind of permanent structure above the city to carry the Champions-of-the-Month and their trophies around in a way that won’t mess up traffic or create any public safety headaches. It would probably pay for itself in two years or six championships, whichever comes first.
To the surprise of no one, we’re becoming universally reviled for our success. The rest of the nation long ago lost patience with us. They hate the swagger and confidence. When they had us where they wanted us, they adored the false Dan Shaughnessy archetype of the lovable loser who expected the worst when he wasn’t pulling pianos out of ponds. Now they boo us like they’re a Maury Povich audience and we’re a sexually active teen. What-eva. We do what we waaaant...
But still, just because you’re spoiled rotten by success, it doesn’t mean each championship isn’t special. Quite the contrary. I heard someone say that picking a favorite championship of the 2000's is like picking your favorite child. But that’s ridiculous. Picking a favorite kid is easy. I prefer the smart, quiet one who’ll make me Joe Simpson-like piles of money. Picking a favorite champion is much harder. Do you go with the 2004 Red Sox who broke an 86 year old curse for your departed granny and Johnny Pesky? Or do you pick the 2007-08 Celtics, who went from second worst team in the league to box-to-wire dominance in one year with team play, effort and heart? What about the 2001 Patriots, the ones who started it all and the only true Cinderella champion in Boston history?
Personally, I’m deferring to Tom Brady on this one. Like he always says, my favorite championship is the next one. Not to be greedy or anything.