Originally published October 1, 1991, by Mike Barnicle for The Boston Globe
A friend of mine from San Francisco called yesterday to gloat about the demise of the Red Sox and wonder whether or not baseball fans across New England had shed any tears on their pillow after Sunday’s brutal loss to Milwaukee. I thought this was ironic coming from someone who lives in a city where people blow kisses and wink at ballplayers instead of booing or cheering them during games but, out of politeness, I gave him a reply anyway.
“Bleep you!,” I explained.
Then, later in the day I heard several of these radio disc jockeys, most of whom have room temperature IQs, carrying on about “how the Red Sox have done it again.” A string of nitwit callers were saying the club choked or that they do this every year or that Boston will never win a World Series because of the tired old Harry FrazeeBabe Ruth thing and, more than likely, Chuck Stuart, the Police Department, the media and the incredibly grim racial tensions around here.
The fact of the matter is that the Red Sox, after throwing up on their shoes during July, gave us back a summer. They came from 12 games behind to provide us with an interesting, exciting September.
They played hard. They played hurt. And they played well above their collective heads because they don’t have much pitching and it requires someone with a Browning .9 millimeter in hand before any one of them can steal a base. The bottom line is there wasn’t any quit in them and I don’t know what else you can ask of or expect from a team these days.
The whiner syndrome is a tough thing to shake. Yet in this town it’s become a way of life, and it is totally unwarranted but completely expected because the truth is that Boston is a provincial tank town, a minorleague burg with an isolated, warped, and unbelievably provincial mentality that causes too many to think that the sun rises above the harbor and sets just past Route 128 each day and that nothing else exists.
Let’s start with sports. We have three pro teams: Red Sox, Celtics and Bruins, although ice hockey is tough to categorize because most of those who follow it require three minutes to answer the question “What color is the blue line?”
In the last few years, the Red Sox have done far better than teams in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, all of them large cities with big buildings, phone service and running water. But what do we hear around here? “Holy mackerel. They do this every year.” I guess all other majorleague American cities have teams that make it to the finals each year.
The Celtics win more than they lose. And the Bruins seem to be there every spring, but I admit that’s kind of a phony point because it seems in the National Hockey League nearly everyone from Marla Maples to the Malden Catholic Drum and Bugle Corps have a shot at the Stanley Cup.
You may have noticed that I omitted the football team from this analysis. That, for a simple reason: The Hoodsies or whatever it is they are called play in a toilet near Providence and exist only to provide renegade bike gangs with a place to gather each Sunday in the fall.
Oddly enough, one of the few things that allows Boston to cling to the reputation of being a major league city is the fact that it does have three professional franchises. That, plus a lot of good schools and some unbelievable hospitals are about the only thing between us and Des Moines.
I mean, think about it: The entire nation stumbles beneath the weight of a recesssion of near depression proportion and people in Boston walk around whining and blaming a lightweight former governor for present unemployment, as if no other area of the country has been hit.
We have one fairly sensational murder case and instead of being able to see it for exactly what it is the demented work of a single, insane fruitcake who was not smart enough to pull it off isolated whiners make it the crime of the century. We refuse to learn from it and then let it go.
We have black people who get beaten by whites and we have whites who get walloped by blacks.
It happens a lot from coast to coast because, trust me, race is still the single biggest factor and issue in this life of ours. But, according to some whiners in the media, no other city suffers from the weight of violence and discrimination the way Boston does. I guess the mobs in New York, the hate in Chicago, the bullets in L.A. are nothing compared to the stuff here.
Around here, people don’t know how to drive very well. They are incredibly rude. They can’t cross streets properly. You can’t find a decent restaurant that stays open late. We have very little perspective on life beyond the 617 area code, yet we act as if everyone in the world wants to live here and the only reason they don’t, or won’t, is the Red Sox.
Get a life.
###