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Meaningful Sox
Meaningful Sox
The cancer would have killed most men long ago, but not George Sumner. The Waltham, Mass., native had served three years aboard the USS Arkansas in World War II, raised six kids with a hell of a lot more love than the money that came from fixing oil burners, and watched from his favorite leather chair in front of the television - except for the handful of times he had the money to buy bleacher seats at Fenway - his Boston Red Sox, who had found a way not to win the World Series in every one of the 79 years of his life. George Sumner knew something about persistence.
The doctors and his family thought they had lost George last Christmas Day, more than two years after the diagnosis. Somehow George pulled through. And soon, though still sick and racked by the chemo, the radiation and the trips in and out of hospitals for weeks at a time, George was saying, "You know what? With Pedro and Schilling we've got a pretty good staff this year. Please let this be the year."
On the night of Oct 13, 2004, George Sumner knew he was running out of persistence. The TV in his room at Newton-Wellesley Hospital was showing Pedro Martinez and the Red Sox losing to the Yankees in Game 2 of the ALCS - this after Boston had lost Game 1 behind Schilling. During the commercial breaks Sumner talked with his daughter Leah about what to do with his personal possessions. Only a few days earlier his wife had told him, "If the pain is too much, it's O.K. if you want to go."
But Leah knew how much George loved the Red Sox, saw how closely he still watched their games and understood that her father, ever quick with a smile of a joke, was up to something. "Dad, you're waiting around to see if they go to the World Series, aren't you?" she said. "You really want to see them win it, right?"
A sparkle flickered in the sick man's eyes and a smile creased his lips. "Don't tell your mother," he whispered.
At that moment, 30 miles away in Weymouth, Mass., Jamie Andrews stewed about the Red Sox' losing again, but found some relief in knowing that he might be spared the conflict he had feared for almost nine months. His wife, Alice, was due to give birth on Oct. 27. Game 4 of the World Series was scheduled for that night. Jamie was the kind of tortured fan who could not watch when the Red Sox were protecting a lead late in the game, because of a chronic, aching certainty that his team would blow it again.
Alice was not happy that Jamie worried at all about the possible conflict between the birth and the Sox. She threatened to bar him from the delivery room that night if the Sox were playing. "Pathetic" she called his obsession with his team. "It's not my fault," Jamie would plead, and then fall on the DNA defense, "It was passed down through generations, from my grandfather to my mother to me."
Oh, well, Jamie though as he watched the Red Sox lose Game 2, at least now I won't have to worry about my team in the World Series when my baby is born.
The most powerful words in the English language are monosyllabic: love, hate, born, die, live, sex, kill, cry, want, need, give, take, Sawx.
The Red Sox are, of course, a civic religion in New England. As grounds crew workers tended to the Fenway Park field last summer after a night game, one of the found a white plastic bottle of holy water in the outfield grass. There was a handwritten message on the side: GO SOX. The team's 2003 highlight film, punctuated by the crescendo of the walk-off home run by the Yankees in Game 7, was chirstined, "Still, We Believe."
Rooting for the Red Sox is, as evident in the daily obituary pages, a life's definitive calling. Every day all over New England, and sometimes beyond, death notices include age, occupation, parish and allegiance to the Sox. Charles Brezeau, born in North Adams, Mass., and an Army vet who was awarded a Purple Heart in World War II, lived his entire 85 year life without seeing the Red Sox win a World Sereies, though barely so. When he passed on, just two days before the Sox won the 2004 World Series, the eulogy noted him as a man who "loved the Red Sox and cheap beer."
What the Red Sox mean to their faithful - and larger still, what sport at its best means to American culture - never more was evident than at precisely 11:40 EDT on the night of Oct. 27. At that moment in St. Louis, Red Sox closer Keith Foulke, upon fielding a ground ball, threw to first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz for the final out of the World Series - and the first Red Sox world championship since 1918. And then all hell didn't break loose. It pretty much froze over.
All over New England, church bells clanged. Grown men wept. Convicts cheered. Children rushed into the streets. Horns honked. Champagne corks popped. Strangers hugged.
Virginia Muise, 111, and Fred Hale, 113, smiled. Both Virginia, who kept a Red Sox cap beside her nightstand in New Hampshire, and Fred, who lived in Maine, were Red Sox fans who, curse be damned, were born before Babe Ruth himself. Virginia was the oldest person in New England. Fred was the oldest man in the world. Within three weeks after they had watched the Sox with the Series, both of them passed away.
"It is the story of hope and faith rewarded," says Red Sox Executive Vice President Charles Stienberg. "You really believe that this is the story they're going to teach seven-year-olds 50 years from now. When they say, 'Naw, I can't do this,' tou can say, 'Ah, yes you can. The obstacle was much great for these 25 men, and they overcame. So can you.' "
What makes the Red Sox undeniably, inforgettably Sportsmen, however, is that their achievement transcended the ballpark like that of no other professional sports team. The 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers were the coda to a sweet, special time and place in Americana. The 1968 Detroit Tigers gave needed joy to a city teeming with anger and strife. The 2001 Yankees provided a gathering place, even as a diversion, for a grieving, wounded city. The 2004 Red Sox made an even deeper impact because this championship was a lifetime in the making.
The Boston team connected generations, for the first time, with joy instead of disappointment as the emotional mortar. This team changed the way a people, raised to expect the worst, would think of themselves and the future. And the impact, like all things in that great, wide community called Red Sox Nation, resounded from cradle to grave.
On the morning after the Red Sox won the World Series, Sgt. Paul Barnicle, a detective with the Boston Police and the brother of Boston Herald columnist Mike Barnicle, left his shift at six, purchased a single red rose at the city's flower market, drove 42 miles to a cemetary and placed the rose on the headstone of his mother and father, among the many who had not lived long enough to see it. At the bottom of the gravestone, below mention of their dates and kids, was a single line: "Darn those Red Sox."
Like snowflakes in a blizzard came the e-mails. More than 10,000 of them flew into the Red Sox' server in the first 10 days after Boston won the World Series. No two exactly alike. They came from New England, but they also came from Japan, Italy, Pakistan and at least 11 other countries. The New England town hall of the 21st Century was electronic.
There were thank-you letters. There were love letters. There were some worded as if the were written to family members, and indeed the Red Sox were, in their own unkempt, scruffy, irreverent way, a likable and familial bunch. How could the faithful not love a band of characters self-deprecatingly self-dubbed the "idiots"?
DH David Ortiz, who slammed three walk-off postseason hits, was the Big Papi of the lineup and the clubhouse, with his outsized grin as much a signature of this team as his bat. Leftfielder Manny Ramirez hit like a machine but played the game with a sandlot smile plastered on his mug, even when taking pratfalls in the outfield. Long-locked centerfielder Johnny Damon made women swoon and men cheer, and with his Nazarene look, prompted a T-Shirt and bumper sticker bonanza (WWJDD: What Would Johnny Damon Do?)
First baseman Kevin Millar, with his Honest Abe bears and goofball personality, had the discipline to draw the walk off Yankees closer Rivera that began Boston's comeback in the ninth inning of ALCS Game 4. Derek Lowe, another shaggy eccentric, became the first pitcher to win the clinching game of three postseason series in one October. Foulke, third baseman Bill Mueller, catcher Jason Varitek and rightfielder Trot Nixon, known for his pine-tar encrusted helmet, provided gritty ballast.
Besides the e-mails there were boxes upon boxes of letters, photos, postcards, school projects and drawings that continue to cover what little floor space is left in the Red Sox' offices. Mostly the missives convey profound gratitude.
"Thank you," wrote Maryan Farzeneh, a Boston University graduate student from Iran, "for being another reason for me and my boyfriend to connect and love each other. He is a Red SOx fan and moved to Ohio to study two years ago. There were countless nights that I kept the phone next to the radio so that we could listen to the game together."
Maryan had never seen a baseball game before 1998. She knew how obsessed people back home were about soccer teams. "Although I should admit," she wrote, "that is nothing like the relationship between the Red Sox and New England."
Nightfall, and the little girl lies on her back in the rear seat of a sedan as it chugs homeward to Hartford. She watches the stars twinkle in between the wooden telephone poles and rhythmically interrupt her view of the Summer sky. And there is a familiar company of a gravelly voice on the car radio providing play-by-play of Red Sox baseball. The great Ted Williams, her mother's favorite, is batting.
Roberta Rogers closes her eyes, and she is that little girl again, and the world is just as perfect and as full of wonder and possibilities as it was on those warm summer nights growing up in postwar New England.
Once every summer her parents took her and her brother, Nathaniel, to Boston to stay at the Kenmore Hotel and watch the Red Sox at Fenway. Nathaniel liked to operate the safety gates of the hotel elevator, often letting on and off the visiting ballplayers who stayed at the Kenmore.
"We didn't have much money," Roberta says. "We didn't take vacations, didn't go to the beach. That was it. We went to the Kenmore, and watched the Red Sox at Fenway. I still have the images of the crowds, the stadium, the feel of the cement under my feet, passing hot dogs down the row, the big green monster, the Citgo sign coming into view as we drove into Boston, telling us we were almost there."
Roberta lives in Virginia. Her mother is now living in a retirement community at 95 years of age, and still judges people by their rooting interests in baseball. "Acceptable in they root for the Sox, suspect if they don't, and if they are a Damnyankee (always one word) fan, hardly worth mentioning," she often quips.
On Oct. 27, two outs in the bottom of the ninth, Boston winning 3-0, Roberta paced in her living room, her eyes turned away from the TV. "Oh, Bill," she said to her husband, "they can still be the Red Sox! They still can lose this game!" It was not without good reason that her mother had called them the Red Flops all these years. "And then I heard the roar," Roberta says.
This time they really did it. The Red Sox really won. She called her children and then everyone she could think of. It was too late to ring her mother, she figured. So Roberta went to see her mother first thing next morning. "Mom, guess what? I've got the best news!" Roberta siad. 'They won! The Red Sox won!"
Kathryn's face lit up with a big smile, and she lifted both fists in triumph. And then the mother and daughter laughed and laughed, just like little girls.
"Is that what I think it is?" The conductor on the 11:15 AM Acela train out of Boston, Larry Soloman, had recognized Charles Steinberg and noted the size of the case he was carrying.
"Yes," the Red Sox VP replied. "Would you like to see it?" Steinberg opened the case and revealed the gleaming gold Commissioner's Trophy, the Red Sox' world championship trophy. Soloman, who had survived leukemia and rooting for the Sox, fought back tears.
"I've only cried twice my entire life," Soloman says. "Once, when the Vietnam War ended, and then when the Sox won the world series."
Everywhere the trophy goes someone weeps at the sight of it. Everyone wants to touch it, like Thomas probing the wounds of the risen Jesus, just to make sure it is true.
Why? Why should the bond between a people and their baseball team be so intense? Fenway Park is a part of it, offering a physical continuum to the bond, not only because Papi can stand in the same batter's box as Teddy Ballgame, but also because a son might sit in the same wooden-slat seat as his father.
"We do have our tragic history," says the poet Donal Hall, a Vermonter who lives in the house where his great-grandfather once lived. The Sox have specialized not, like the Chicago Cubs, in woebegone, hopeless baseball, but in an agonizing, painful kind. Indeed, hope was at the very breakable heart of cruelty. From the 1967 Impossible Dream team until last season, the Red Sox had fielded 31 winning teams in 37 years, nine of which reached the postseason dying a fiery, painful death.
"It's probably the desperatly cruel winters we endure in New England," Mike Barnicle offers as an explanation. "When the Red Sox appear, that's the season when the sun is back and warmth returns and we associate them with that. People stay here all their lives, and get imbued into the spirit of the Red Sox."
If you are born north of Hartford, there is no other big league baseball team for which to root, just as it has been since the Braves left Boston for Milwaukee in 1953. It is a birthright to which you quickly learn the oral history. The Babe, Denny Galehouse, Johnny Pesky, Bucky Dent, Bill Buckner and Aaron Boone are beads on a string, an anti-rosary committed to memory by every son and daughter of New England.
At 11:40 on Oct. 27, David Nathan, a third generation Sox fan, held a bottle of champagne in one hand and a telephone in the other, his father on the other end of the line. David screamed so loud that he woke up his four-year old son Jack, the fourth generation who, along with his brother's daughter, will know a whole new world of Sox fandom. the string of beads have forever been broken.
David's wife recorded the moment with a video camera. Two weeks later David would sit and write it all down in a long email, expressing his thanks to Red Sox owner John Henry.
It was one minute after midnight on Oct. 20, and Jared Dolphin, 30, had just assumed his guard post on the overnight shift at the Corrigan-Radgowski correctional facility in Montville, Conn. The inamte in the cell nearest him was 10 years into a 180-year sentence for killing his girlfriends entire family, including the dog.
Some of the inmates wore makeshift Red Sox "caps" - a commissary bandana or handkerchief festooned with a hand-drawn iconic "B". Technically they were considered contraband, but the rules were bent when it comes to rooting for the Red Sox. A few inmates watched ALCS Game 7 on a 12 inch portable television. Most leaned their faces against the little window of their cell door to catch the game on the cell block TV. Others saw only the reflection of the TV on the window of another cell door.
A Sox fan himself, Dolphin watched as Alan Embree retired the Yankees' Ruben Sierra on a ground ball to end the greatest comeback in sports history. Dolphin started to cry. "Suddenly the block erupted," Dolphin wrote in an e-mail. "I bristled immediately and instinctively my hand reached for my flashlight. It was pandemonium - whistling, shouting, pounding on sinks, doors, bunks, anything cons could find. This was against every housing rule in the book, so I jumped up ready to lay down the law."
"But as I stood there, looking around the block, I felt something else. I felt hope. Here I was, less than 10 feet away from guys who will never see the outside of prison ever again in their lives. But as I watched them scream, holler and pound on the doors I realized them and I had something in common. That night we all could have hope back into our lives. As Red Sox fans, we had watched the impossible happen, and if that dream could come true, why couldn't others."
On the day after Christmas 2003, Gregory Miller, 38, of Foxboro, Mass., an enthusiastic Sox fan, dropped dead of an aneurysm. He left behind a wife, Sharon, six-year-old twin boys and an 18-month old daughter. Sharon fell into unspeakable sadness and loneliness.
And then came October 2004 and the Red Sox.
Sharon, not much more than a casual fan before then, grew enthralled with the team's playoff run. She called her mother, Carolyn Bailey, in Walpole, Mass., as many as 15 times during a game to complain, exult, worry, commiserate and celebrate. She even made jokes for the first time in months. It was the first time her mother heard Sharon act like the joyful girl she had been before her husband's terrible illness.
The day after the Red Sox won the World Series, Carolyn wrote a letter to the team. In it she said of her daughter, "The Red Sox became her medicine on the road back from this tragedy. On behalf of my entire family - thank you from the bottom of our hears."
Leah Storey of Tilton, New Hampshire, composed her own letter of thanks to the Red Sox. Her father had died exactly one year before the Red Sox won the World Series. Then her 26-year-old brother, Ethan, died of an accidental drug overdose only hours after enthusiastically watching the Red Sox win Game 5 in the ALCS. When the Red Sox won the World Series, Ethan's friends and family rushed outside the Storey house, yelled for joy, popped open a bottle of Dom Perignon, and gazed up in wonder at a lunar eclipse.
"To su, with the memory of Ethan's happy night fresh in our minds, those games took on new meaning," Leah wrote of Boston's run to the Championship, "Almost as if they were being played in his honor. Thank you for not letting him down. I can't express enough the comfort we derived from watching you play night after night. It didn't erase the pain, but it helped."
On Oct. 25, the Sox were two victories away from winning the World Series when doctors sent George Sumner home to his house to die. There was nothing they could do. Every day was a struggle. Leah prayed hard every day for a sweep.
On the morning of Game 4, which stood to be the highlight of Jamie Andrew's life as a "pathetic", obsessed Red Sox fan, his wife, Alice, went into labor. Here it was: the conflict he had feared all summer. At 2:30 PM he took her into South Shore Hospital, where they were greeted by nurses wearing Red Sox jerseys over their scrubs.
At 8:25 PM, Alice was in the delivery room. There was a TV in the room. The game in St. Louis was about to begin.
"Turn on the game." It was Alice who wanted the game on. Johnny Damon stepped into the batter's box. "Johnny Damon!" Alice shouted. "He'll hit a home run." And Damon, long brown locks flowing, did just that.
The Red Sox led, 3-0, in the bottom of the fifth, when the Cardinals put a runner on third base with one out. Jamie could not stand the anxiety. His head hurt, and he was having diffuculty breathing. He broke out in hives. It was too much for him to take. He asked Alice to turn off the television. Alice demanded that they leave it on for the end of the inning. Lowe worked out of the jam, and off the TV went.
At home in Waltham, George Sumner slipped in and out of sleep. His eyes were alert when the game was on, but when an inning ended he would say in a whisper, "Wake me up when the game comes back." Each time no one in the room was certain if he would open his eyes ever again.
The Red Sox held their 3-0 lead, but the TV remained off in the delivery room of South Shore Hospital. At 11:27 PM Alice gave birth to a beautiful boy. Jamie noticed that the baby had unusually long hair in the back of his head.
"Can I check the TV for the final score?" he asked Alice.
"Sure," she said. It was 11:40 PM, and the Red Sox were jumping upon one another in the middle of the diamond. They were world champions.
George Sumner had waited his whole life to see this, including the last three where he was fighting an inevitable losing battle with cancer. He drew upon whatever strenght was left in his body and in the loudest whisper that was possible, he said, "Yippee!" And then he closed his eyes and went to sleep, for the final time.
George Sumner, avid Red Sox fan, passed away at 2:30 on Oct. 29. He was laid to rest with full military honors on Nov. 2, the same day Alice and Jamie Andrews took home a healthy baby boy. They named him Damon.
Ballplayers are not social scientists or curtural historians. Quite to the contrary, they create an insular fortress in which all considerations beyond the game itself are feared to carry the poison of what are known generically as "distractions."
The Red Sox are not from Boston; they come from all corners of the U.S. and Latin America, and flew to their real homes after a huge, cathartic parade on Oct. 30, during which normal life in New England was basically TiVoed for three hours.
There is an awful imbalance to our relationships with athletes, as if we are looking through a one-way mirror. We know them, love them, dress like them and somehow believe our actions, however trivial, alter the outcome of theirs, all while they know only that we are there but cannot really see us.
Howard Frank Mosher of Vermont was in Norther Maine in the summer of '03 for a book signing, during which he discussed his upcoming novel, Waiting for Teddy Williams, a fanciful tale in which the Red Sox (can you imagine?) win the Series; he heard a small group of people singing in the back of the bookstore. It sounded like, Johnny Angel, how I love him....
As Mosher drew closer, he realized they were singing, Johnny Damon, how I love him.... What was going on? he wondered.
"We're performing an incantation," one of these men said. "Damon has been in a slump. We this it's working. He was 4 for 5 last night."
Crazy. How could Damon know this? How could any Boston player know that the Reverend William Bourke, an avid Sox Fan who died in his native Rhode Island before Game 2 of the World Series, was buried the day after Boston won it all, with a commemorative Sox baseball and that morning's paper tucked into his casket?
How could Curt Schilling know that Laura Deforge, 84, of Winooksi, Vermont, who watched every Red Sox game on TV - many of them twice - turned the ALCS around when she found a lucky, 30-year-old Red Sox hat in her closet after Game 3? Laura wore in everywhere for the next 11 days, including to bingo.
"I've only been here a year," Schilling says, "and its humbling to be a part of the relationship between the Red Sox Nation and this team. I can't understand it all. I can't. All I can do is thank God the He blessed me with the skills that can have an impact on people's lives in some positive way."
The lives of these players are forever changed as professionals. Backup catcher Doug Mirabelli, for instance, will be a celebrity 30 years from now if he shows up anywhere from Woonsocket to Winooski. The '04 Red Sox have a sheen that will never fade or be surpassed.
The real resonance to this championship, however, is that it changed so many of the people on the other side of the one-way glass, poets and convicts, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the dying and the newborn.
The dawn that broke over New England on Oct. 28, the first in the life of little Damon Andrews, was unlike any other seen in three generations. Here began the birth of a new Red Sox Nations, sons no longer bearing the scars and dread of their fathers and grandfathers. It felt as clean and fresh as New Year's Day.
Damon's first dawn was also the last in the fully lived life of George Sumner.
"I walked into work that day," Leah Sumner says, "and i head tears in my eyes. People were saying, 'Did he see it? Did he see it? Please tell me your dad saw it.' You don't understand how much comfort it gave my brothers and sisters. It would have been that much sadder if he didn't get to see it."
"It was the best year, and it was the worst year. It was an unbelievable year, and I will tell my children and make sure they tell theirs of the Fall of '04."
The story they will tell is not just the story of George Sumner. It is not just the story of the 2004 Boston Red Sox. It is the story of the bond between a nation of fans and its beloved team.
"It's bigger than money. It's bigger than fame. It's who we are," Leah said. "My father used to say, 'there are three things you must know about me. I love my family. I love blues music. And I love the Red Sox.' "
