A Few Thoughts On Living In The City of Champions
A quick bit of personal history: I’m the youngest of five, so my folks were a lot older than most. My dad was born the year after the Red Sox won a World Series. My mom died the year before they won their next one. So both my parents went their whole lives… box-to-wire… without ever knowing what it was like to watch the Sox win it all. Their grandson is 12 years old, and he’s on his third championship. When I was a little younger than him, I cried myself to sleep because the Sox lost to the Reds in the last World Series to end at Fenway. A few years later I got followed home from school by this asshole (one of my friends for life… I was in his wedding party and he was in mine… but a pure, unadulterated Masshole nevertheless) taunting and berating me the whole way home because Bucky Dent hit a home run in a playoff game to complete the biggest chokejob in major league history. I talked about the Bill Buckner play on The Curse of the Bambino on HBO. The night the Grady Little debacle happened in 2003, I stayed up all through the night writing my first ever sports column; an angry, badly written, amateurish screed about why it always sucks to be a Red Sox fan that was probably read by 20 people..
And now? Now I get to write for the biggest, best, most popular sports/culture blog in the only city worth writing about sports in. In an era of unprecedented success and sustained excellence. Where the storm drains flow with spilled champagne and one Duckboat parade begins as soon as we’re just cleaning up from the last one. Since 2001, we’ve had 16 teams in their league semifinals, 12 in their league finals, and 8 championships by all 4 pro teams. We’ve seen teams win championships while losing their franchise player (2001 Patriots), after being down 0-3 to their arch rivals (the ’04 Sox), striking out completely in the draft lottery (’08 Celtics) and a season after blowing a 3-0 lead in the playoffs (2011 Bruins). Now we get a Sox team doing maybe the biggest turnaround of them all in a rebuilding year where you got laughed at if you said they’d win 88 games. With good reason. They pulled off a miracle in a city that’s made miracles part of the culture. And being part of a website that gets to be front and center of it all? Every day you appreciate how special all this is.
It makes you wonder what life is like for people who live in other cities. Even in towns where they’ve got 4 teams… say Phoenix or Minneapolis… what are they talking about today? Larry Fitzgerald? Adrian Peterson? The prospects for the Suns or the Wild? It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for them. If by “feel sorry for them” I mean I wish I had friends there so I could call them and say how we hadn’t played for a championship since June and good it feels to finally end that 28-month championship drought.
Is that being a dick about it? Of course it is. But we deserve it. We earn this. We care more than any other city. We pay higher prices, fight worse traffic, fight for harder parking spots and sell out more games than anyone else. Being a fan in this town is an ordeal. We do it because this matters to us. We demand more of our teams than anyone else because we hold up our end of the bargain and damn well expect they do likewise.
And that’s why we embrace teams like your 2013 World Series Champions so much. They’re guys who get it. Who thrive in this environment and feed off the energy of a packed barn every night and become part of the culture here. Guys who appreciate what a disproportionate place all this has in our lives and love being a part of it. And let’s just see to it this roll never stops. When you waited generations for an era like this and spent your whole life paying your dues and caring more than anyone else, you wouldn’t ever want it any other way. @JerryThornton1