Go Sox?

10-29-07
I enjoy tennis, men's diving, wrestling, and pairs figure skating championships. So when the Red Sox won the World Series last night, my elation sort of took me by surprise. It was a screaming and whooping and high-fiving the kittens, sort of elation. Why so happy? Well, unless the Red Sox or the Yankees are playing, I generally don't like the sport, but I think with those two teams it is more about the struggle between good and evil that lures me in and gets my blood boiling. Red Sox: good. Yankees: evil.

I grew up in Massachusetts, where love for the Red Sox ranks up there with love for Ted Kennedy and the Pope. In that order. Until three years ago the Red Sox had not won a world championship since 1918, I only remember this fact because it was the year my father was born, and he was forever lamenting that he would go to his grave having never experienced a Red Sox World Series win, blah-blah-blah... It was that damn curse, The Curse of the Bambino, when in 1920 Babe Ruth was traded to the Yankees and the Red Sox eighty-six-year losing streak began. It was the longest losing streak in the history of baseball.

Now the Sox have won their second series in four years; my father is still very much alive; my three brothers are obnoxiously gloating up and down the Eastern seaboard; and I am inexplicably joyous over a sporting event where the players are ridiculously overdressed. Go figure.