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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The Red Sox may finally be on the verge of ending The Curse and beating the Yankees. But even if they don't, their fans have been blessed with that rarest of gifts -- passion. An exclusive excerpt from Steve Kettmann's "One Day at Fenway."
Sep 24, 2004 | "I'm not a religious person, but spiritual. That was a religious experience, that Game Seven. When that Aaron Boone homer went out, I don't care who you were, you were hugging your fellow Yankee soulmate. I was like in a trance. I was cursing up a storm. They all looked at me like I was crazy. The cops looked at me like I was crazy. I was foaming at the mouth. I wasn't talking to anyone in particular, just screaming at the top of my lungs about how the Red Sox were never going to win."
-- Spike Lee
No one who set foot in the Red Sox clubhouse just after Aaron Boone's Game Seven, eleventh-inning homer at Yankee Stadium will ever forget what it was like to be there. It almost hurt to be in the room with the Red Sox. It almost hurt to step into the line of sight of hunched-over players staring galaxies away. They all sat around morosely, replaying the mental pictures of that Tim Wakefield knuckler that did not knuckle, the crack of Aaron Boone's bat and the instant certainty that the ball would land in a throng of bouncing, grinning Yankee fans.
All around the close quarters of the room, men who were paid millions of dollars to play a boy's game looked as lost as children. They had no idea just how bad the disappointment would be when it kicked in with full force that they had lost Game Seven of the American League Championship Series to the Yankees, and lost it in a way no one in baseball would ever forget.
Their millions could not help them. Call it their dirty little secret: Almost all of them cared far more about winning and losing than they let on. Even for spoiled, pampered, big-league players, a loss like this stung and stung deeply. None of the players moved. Neither did any of the reporters ushered into the room fifteen minutes after the game. It seemed indecent to probe these psyches. It already felt redundant to voice the obvious questions that would reverberate in New England throughout the long, long winter.
"One Day at Fenway: A Day in the Life of Baseball in America"
By Steve Kettmann
Atria Books
320 pages
Nonfiction
Only one man was moving. He went from player to player, and to some he gave hugs, to others a slap on the back. To all of them he offered words of gratitude, delivered with the understated conviction of a man who had accomplished enough in life to save his thanks for special occasions. John Henry did not join some of his players in shedding tears. He had cried joyfully back at Fenway Park when a David Ortiz deep fly fell behind Oakland right fielder Jermaine Dye, sending that playoff series back to Oakland for a deciding Game Five. But for Henry, this was no time for tears; this was a time for duty. He hugged infielder Lou Merloni, red-eyed and disoriented, and drifted toward the clubhouse door, moving like a sleepwalker.
Outside, Henry did not know what to do with himself. He took a few steps toward the dark tunnel leading to the visitors' dugout, and suddenly stopped. He turned back toward the clubhouse, and thought better of that, too. I approached Henry and asked in a low voice about his circuit around the room. He started to move his jaw, ready to form words, but none came.
Henry and I had spoken often that memorable fall, and I sat with Henry in his private box during the early innings of that wild Game Three with the Yankees, the infamous game where Pedro Martinez stiff-armed Don Zimmer to the ground and all hell broke loose. But now Henry was staring right through me. He was staring right through the concrete walls behind me, like a man who just wanted to know when this sudden dizziness and disorientation would let up enough for him to feel his feet touching the ground again.
The answer, of course, is that it might never. Henry was five outs away from taking the Red Sox to the World Series and having a great shot at becoming the man who killed the curse. It was a Red Sox owner, Harry Frazee, who sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees on January 5, 1920, offering an intoxicating story line to stitch together more than eight decades of Red Sox teams finding colorful ways to fall short of winning the Series. The idea that the Red Sox have been cursed ever since is a romantic notion, a story that gets told and retold until the retelling is the whole idea. To argue over whether the curse exists is to miss the point: It exists if enough people feel that it does. It exists if Aaron Boone of all people can hit that homer to put the Yankees back in the World Series and talk afterward about the importance of ghosts.
