Figures. I go to my one and only baseball game tonight — Durham Bulls versus the Columbus Clippers — and a whopper of a thunderstorm rains it out. It wasn’t that I was looking for Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins (I met them once in a bar in the Bahamas on a bonefishing expedition and played pool and drank too much tequila with Tim in the lounge of the Pink Sands Hotel ((that’s my one and only Hollywood name drop)). It isn’t that I care much for baseball. I just wanted to sit in the southern evening and take in a frigging ballgame.
This was a company outing — after a full day meeting — and it was going to be fun … until the rain came. But whatever, I gave up on baseball on October 25, 1986 in the sixth game of the World Series, Red Sox vs. the Mets, when Bill Buckner committed his infamous error. The champagne was iced on the coffee table in front of me, ready to toast the Red Sox’s first series since cavemen roamed the earth, the big payoff of being a Red Sox fan since the age of 9 when they lost the Series to St. Louis in 1967 — The Impossible Dream Team with Jim Lonborg on the mound, Yaz, Tony Conigliaro …. I had stuck with them for twenty years, getting deranged and disappointed every season, my fanaticism rewarded only by the glory years of the Boston Bruins in the early 70s and the glorious dynasty of the Celtics in the 80s.
When Buckner blew it I threw the bottle of champagne at the TV and vowed never to watch another game, never read another newspaper article, to avert my eyes whenever they mentioned, shown, or otherwise invoked.
That worked until 2004 when they finally won a Series, but by then I was tainted, a fairweather fan. So … with cycling trashed by the Affair D’Floyd, I need a new sport. Maybe cricket.
