Guardian, 29 October 2004
It was the opening of Catch-22: love at first sight. Yossarian? Me. The Chaplain: a grungy hole of a baseball ground called Fenway Park. A chilly Boston night in April 1982, the Red Sox playing the Oakland A’s, managed by the somewhat recovering drunk, ex-Yankee Billy Martin. What was I doing there? No idea.
Cricket and football (our football) were my games and would stay that way, never mind that I was living in Boston. Every month my dad had taken me to Lords to see Middlesex – the Comptons, Freddie Titmus, Alan Moss – and I’d happily inhaled the mix of beer tankards and fresh-cut grass while Arthur Schama went blissfully to sleep as the county lost yet again to Sussex (Ted Dexter). In winters it was White Hart Lane – starting early – when Alf Ramsey played for them in his long baggy black shorts, and then into the glory glory years of Nicholson, Blanchflower, Mackay and the dashingly undependable Greaves. So why would I want to waste my time watching glorified rounders in what looked like a terrible dump, its drab paint a bilious grey-green and peeling, just like the girders on the elevated freeway?
Because my friend John Clive had nagged and nagged and I had given in. He was an unlikely Sox fan himself: my colleague in the Harvard history department; biographer of Macaulay; originally Hans Kleyff from Jewish Berlin: big, round, soft and exuberant with dark-brown eyes, and a hoarse chuckle. He loved great historical writing, Apple Brown Betty (a pudding, not a call girl) and the Red Sox. So (grudgingly bemused) I went along for the ride, all innocent of the imminent and irreversible Change in Life, the coup de foudre; the date with fate that was about to hit.
My nose got it before the rest of me did. Walking among the mass of the Sox Nation converging on the ballpark, up Yawkey Way, the nose surrendered to the smell of Italian sausage and frying onion peddled from the street stalls. You eat them sandwiched in hot doughy rolls, with screaming yellow mustard dripping out the end, and we did. Holy shit, there was something in those sausages; something that obviously made people happy, for happy this crowd surely was: kids and grandpas; lots of loud Boston women with insecure dye-jobs and square shoulders encased in warm-up jackets that had seen many years of heartache; dads with six-year-olds riding on their shoulders. A crowd pouring through the gates from tough Irish Southie, patrician Marblehead or, like us, from bosky Lexington.
Inside, Fenway was unpromising: a mass scurrying up and down dark and dirty ramps; programmes hawked, the notorious horse-trough toilets already brimming horribly from hours of Yawkey Way beer. But then, the climb up the steps into ballpark heaven: a blaze of golden light; grass as damply brilliant and as soft as a meadow in County Donegal; men in blue-and-red jackets gently warming up; a thuck-thuck as the baseball hit the mitt; an ancient organ that sighed and groaned and wheezed and sang while welcoming us to the inner sanctum of the cathedral; an even more ancient announcer, the late, great Sherm Feller, who from the depths of his avuncular baritone declared, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to Fenway Park’, and from the ladies and gentlemen and boys and girls a soft roar of mass pleasure that rippled round the stands, and my cricket-loving, football-doting self was a hopeless, helpless goner; Middlesex and Spurs were yesterday’s passions. This, I thought, as I improbably caught the bag of peanuts chucked at me from fifteen feet by the vendor, was where I had to be. This was home.
The Red Sox won that evening: veterans (as I rapidly learned) charging round the bases, such as ‘Yaz’ Yastrzemski, a high-octane hulk; taciturn Jim Rice, the slugger leaping at the edge of the outfield to hoist in what seemed sure home runs; Dwight ‘Dewey’ Evans, natty in his trim moustaches, an elegant stance at the plate, cracking line drives through the emerald grass. So we went home happy, but being the Red Sox Nation, morning-after moodiness replaced the brief euphoria. Catch-22 – we won, but actually we should have lost – began in earnest. There were anxieties about the veterans. How long could this bunch hack it? Was it Yaz’s last hurrah? And indeed I had noticed the air of slightly decrepit gentility – like much of Boston – hanging over the team as they chawed their chewing tobacco.
I had no idea, of course, what I’d got myself into. I was still clueless about recognising pitches, especially from the bleachers or the box seats way out behind third base; couldn’t tell a cut fastball from a slider if they hit me in the face. (It takes time, but believe me, it repays study. Great pitchers can turn the ball in mid-air in ways that spin bowlers have scarcely dreamed of.) Much more ominously, I had no idea of the dreaded history: the feckless sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees by the owner Harry Frazee, reputedly to finance the Broadway musical No, No, Nanette; the ensuing ‘Curse of the Bambino’; the failure to win a World Series since the Kaiser hung up his helmet.
I vaguely knew of the Yankees–Sox rivalry, but – since the Bronx Bombers were themselves regularly bombing in the 1980s – who cared? I had no idea whatsoever of the saga of torment; the moments of deluded euphoria (Carleton Fisk hitting the walk-off homer in Game 6 of the 1976 series against Cincinnati) before the crushing putdown (the loss of the same series in Game 7); an epic of sustained pain that by comparison made the pecking of Prometheus look like a day at the beach.
I would learn in the worst possible way: the notorious 1986 World Series against the New York Mets. In the American League Championship series (semi-finals to you lot) the Sox had come from a strike away from being eliminated by the California Angels, when a pitcher called Donnie Moore served a fat one over the plate to Dave ‘Hendu’ Henderson, who saw it coming with his name on it, grinned one of his gap-toothed grins and sent it away. Stuck with the stigma of being the ‘goat’, poor Moore went into a depressive slide and committed suicide. We went into the World Series against the Mets high on confidence – we had the brilliant pitching duo of Roger Clemens and Bruce Hurst and some of those unbowed veteran hitters from the early ’80s. One strike away from Winning It All in Game 6, a ball notoriously trickled through the open gate of Bill Buckner’s bandy legs and the Mets came back from the grave. In Game 7 it was our hearts into which the stake was driven.
Years – decades – of roller-coaster elation and despair followed. In the meantime I had done something unforgivable, saddled my own two kids with this infatuated allegiance; taken them to Fenway, shoved peanuts and sausages into their faces, made them do the ‘wave’; embarrassed them with my roaring abuse of visiting Yanks; taught them (yes, I could do that now) the difference between the cut fastball and the slider; in short, pretty much ruined their blameless lives.
This came home to me in the worst possible way, almost exactly a year ago when I took my son, eighteen, and grown prematurely wise in Soxian pessimism, to Yankee stadium to see the seventh and deciding game of the American League Championship. Around the seventh inning, well up on the Yanks, our ace Pedro Martinez pitching, we dared a cautious smile of anticipation. The Yankee fans were leaving in depressed droves; those that weren’t were scowling at us or hiding their faces in their hands. Then Martinez, kept in for an inning too long, suddenly folded, surrendering hits. Amidst pandemonium the game tied, and then a homer by the aptly named Aaron Boone won it for the Evil Empire. My son’s face was drained of colour, but he was the grown-up attempting to console his unhinged father. So now you know why I was up at 4 a.m. on Thursday morning watching every last pitch of the game with St Louis online; now you can measure the combination of ecstatic disbelief and narcotic jubilation coursing through my veins as our ace closer, Keith Foulke, made the last out.
A bit OTT? Absolutely not, my world-weary cricketing friends. Anything is possible in 2004: the trains will run on time; balmy breezes will drift over Wales in December; the lion will lie down with the lamb; and, oh yes, a Red Sox fan will, come January, be sworn into office as the forty-fourth President of the United States.