Sweet Bird Of Truth Wrote:
Here's the copy-paste for those whose fingers are too delicate to click the link.
Friday, October 29, 2004
Title may strip New Englanders of identity
By CHRIS CHURCHILL
Staff Writer
Copyright © 2004 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
New England is Charlie Brown, and we just kicked the football.
After nearly a century of futility and frustration, tears and tissues, heartache and horrors, the team that validated New England's inherent pessimism and deepened its inferiority complex now sits atop the baseball universe. Some believe our corner of the world will never be the same.
"Over the years you develop a psychology as a Red Sox fan, and there's a real connection between that psychology and the psychology of New England," said Joseph Conforti, a New England Studies professor at the University of Southern Maine and a lifelong Red Sox fan. "I think that's been radically altered, and I don't know where this leads."
Newcomers to New England might roll their eyes at this week's hullabaloo and point out that the Red Sox are only a baseball team, a group of 25 wealthy men who dress up in funny uniforms and play a child's game.
But they don't understand.
The Red Sox, historians say, have long been the perfect personification of New England's deepest fears and beliefs. The baseball team that always failed, often in stunning ways, neatly fit a region that clings to its original Calvinism and believes suffering has value, human beings are flawed and fate will almost always break your heart.
Losing to the New York Yankees every year had special meaning for a region that was once the nation's center but slipped to its periphery. Boston was America's dominant city, historians say, but bitterly watched as New York became the world's capital of finance and culture -- a shift nicely symbolized by Babe Ruth's leaving town to become the best player in the history of the game.
And a baseball team that failed in the autumn suited a region where summer always gives way to a cold, dark and harsh winter, a grim season that allows New Englanders time to rue their Red Sox while looking forward to spring training and a new beginning.
"It is designed to break your heart," said former baseball Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti, a New Englander and Red Sox fan who died in 1989. "The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone."
But this October there is no broken heart for Red Sox fans. This time, it's Yankees fans who look up at gray November skies with dismayed souls and chilled bones. The ghost of Babe Ruth can rest in peace. His haunting days are over.
Does that mean the central identity of the Red Sox fan is also over? Does our gloomy climate turn California sunny, with nary a cloud or snowflake in the sky? Do New Englanders suddenly become more optimistic? Or do we remain fatalistic and lose that special connection with our baseball team?
"It is such an overturning of history and tradition and the New England psychology, and I think it's going to take some time to sort this all out," Conforti said. "We are no longer special in our suffering. That's a really significant change for us as baseball fans and people who are so invested in the Red Sox as a regional drama."
For Red Sox fans, the World Series victory on Wednesday night fulfilled a dream 86 years in the making. But like a 4-year-old surrounded by wrapping paper and empty boxes on Christmas morning, some fans might be asking if this is all there is.
"I wouldn't be surprised if people felt a little less happy than they expected," said Thane Pittman, head of the psychology department at Colby College. "Whenever you have really struggled for something, it's very common for there to be a letdown and to be a little depressed."
Pittman is not a Red Sox fan, and he's a newcomer to New England. He cites psychological studies that show people identify more with teams that win and less with teams that lose, meaning the Red Sox could now become more popular than ever. To Pittman, the studies beg a question: Why did the Red Sox have so many fans after so many disappointing years?
But Richard Moss, a Colby College historian, said people stuck with the team because it made them a member of a unique tribe -- Red Sox Nation.
It's a tribe forged by regional identity and memories of the great-grandparents, grandparents and parents who passed the tradition along. Indeed, many Red Sox fans on Wednesday night instantly thought of loved ones who didn't live to see the Olde Towne Team celebrating on Busch Stadium's green grass.
In an increasingly homogenized world, where regional accents are fading and identical chain stores are replicated from sea to sea, Red Sox fans were made unique by their team and its losing ways, Moss said.
Winning the World Series, he added, carries risk, because it might make the Red Sox -- and their fans -- less distinctive.
Yet Moss noted that the Red Sox beat the Yankees in never-seen-before fashion, rallying from three games down. That, combined with Fenway Park and the special devotion of the fans, means the Red Sox will remain a unique and iconic baseball team.
Still, New England's baseball fans may find that success feels strange.
"I think people are really, really happy," Moss said. "But somewhere in the back of their minds they're asking, 'Aren't we supposed to lose?' "
