shetuck
What do you need water for, Sunshine?
Anybody hear this Frank Deford commentary from NPR's Morning Edition today? A bit over-romantic, in my view, but that's Deford's style, tifwiw. Anyway... interesting piece:
The Athens of America has become Sparta
The Athens of America has become Sparta
Sweetness and Light
by Frank Deford
Boston, Back on Top with a Vengeance
Audio Link: Listen Now [3 min 29 sec]
NPR Morning Edition
December 5, 2007
Isn't it the most amazing thing, what's happened to Boston?
In sports, the Athens of America has become Sparta.
What a transformation. We used to look at sporting Boston as sort of a quaint, fey, idiosyncratic place ? not quite American. Shoot, Boston didn't even much care for football. The Redskins left town for Washington, and nobody missed them. When the Patriots arrived a quarter-century later, they were barely tolerated as something of a distraction from the autumn foliage.
The greatest team of all time, the Celtics of the 1960s, was mostly ignored by the home folk. All that mattered in the winter was hockey ? the Bruins ? and all year round, baseball, the Sawx. Never mind that neither the Bruins nor the Sawx could win. In fact, that was the best part of being a Boston sports fan ? suffering greatly, but doing so with condescension.
There are two elements, I believe, which have set Boston fans apart. First, New England is surely the most distinct area unto itself left in the United States. And Boston, The Hub, is like the capital of a little country within a country ? like Scotland or the Basque region or the Kurdish part of Iraq. Not idly do they call it The Red Sox Nation.
Then too, Bostoniana always had Quebec, beloved home of hockey and, especially, the Bruins' arch rivals, the legendary Canadiens, hemming it in on the north. And, on the south, New York, sanctuary city of the brutish Yankees and the crude Yankee dollar.
It was only a part of the defeatish charm of the Red Sox that they lost all those years. The pain was all the more exquisite that New York's Yankees always won. If the Knicks had only been the Yankees of basketball, then the Celtics would have mattered.
cont'd...