Having lived in the Greater Boston area most of my life, I’ve been a Boston Red Sox fan for as long as I can remember. I was much too young to remember the successful teams of the early 70’s, the Red Sox of my youth were a mediocre team that never made a World Series. Just the thought of the Sox winning it all was laugable.
In 1984 my family moved to Italy. There we lived in a pretty rural area, and unlike today where cell phones and the internet provide constant access to everything, things were a bit different. In our little village of about 3-4 families (depending on the season), my Aunt and Uncle were the only ones who had a phone. As you can immagine, along with many other cultural differences, no more baseball. For a few months another Aunt of ours in Boston would send me the Sunday Boston Globe, but as the weeks went by I suddenly began to think less and less about the Red Sox, Bruins, and Celtics. The Pats were a joke then so no big loss.
In the summer of 1987, American relatives from New York came to visit one of our neighbors, one was a boy about my age. Along with a chance to speak English and catch up on things in general, eventually we started talking about baseball. As clearly as I can remember what I had for breakfast 5 minutes ago, I remember asking “Hey how have the Red Sox been doing?”
He suddenly looked at me with a huge grin and a look of stupor at the same time. “How can this idiot have not yet known?” must have been his first thought. So he began to tell the story.
The Red Sox had been in the World Series! And against his favorite Mets! He tells me that the Sox are about to win Game 6, then proceeds to mime playing first base and re-enacts the famous gaffe seen and talked about by every baseball fan for probably a year until that point. I was speechless. I decided not to ask about the Bruins.
