Salon.com has an excerpt from One Day at Fenway, Steve Kettmann’s book covering the Aug 30, 2003 Sox-Yankees game at Fenway from different perspectives. (Yes, it’s the one for which Rob Neyer wrote a review under a fake name.) It’s excerpted from the epilogue, and at least judging by the excerpt it’s certainly not horrible writing, despite Neyer’s views. I like this quote:
They are talking about the luxury of caring about something deeply. Nowhere has a deep and abiding attachment to a team been passed from generation to generation the way it has been in Boston. Most sports fans aren’t so lucky. Passion like that has become rare in American life, where allegiances tend to last weeks or months.
Really? But Slate says passion and exuberance are the new new thing in American ideas! More seriously, I’m not sure most allegiances are that fickle. Just that most people know how to place life above their teams. Us Sox fans, we know better.
What Kettmann is driving at, perhaps, is that the passion of the Sox fan carries both the modern sense of the word and the old sense of “suffering” (as in the title of The Passion of the Christ). Being a true sports fan is like religion sometimes: it takes some faith to stick it out when things aren’t going well.