You would think we'd all be getting down on our hands and knees and offering up our heartfelt gratitude to the sports gods for the bounty that is the Red Sox, Patriots and Celtics at the moment, not to mention BC, the Revs, even the Bruins. And, well, I am. But if you haven't read Steve Almond's piece about us in Salon, you should, because it will fuel your thinking on the topic. Almond is a pretty cool guy to judge by his writing - see "Candy Freak" and the op-ed "Condoleezza Rice at Boston College? I quit." In Salon, he says that Boston fans are "suffering a profound crisis of identity" amid our winning ways. It's a funny summing up of one school of thought on
our current situation, although it also marks him forever as not one of us.
Almond's rhetorical excess and outsider's presumption are grievously annoying at times - "The fans here are more passionate and knowledgeable than fans in most other cities. By their own reckoning, this intense devotion grants them the right to whine." And he spreads his brush too broadly over all of Boston sports. As a 10-year resident he hasn't quite absorbed the long-term weighting of the teams in our history; Celtics' fans suffering is recent and minor after decades of hegemony that overshadow even the current Patriots. But we must acknowledge that the greatest baseball triumph ever in 2004 also marked the end of a shared burden that made Red Sox fandom special. For so long we were a Homer Simpson quote - "We're suffered more than the Jews and Charlie Brown combined." Released from our bonds, we relish the new world order. But we must also accept that life is different now - at least for those of us who've been fans long enough to understand that a lime-green baseball cap with a gothic B on the front does not a Sox cap make. The question that Almond's piece forces us to consider is ... are we truly grateful for that?
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