Being a Red Sox sports enthusiast involves a life of hope, heartache, and passion. You must endure cyclic disappointment, have belief through continual failure, and have the courage to believe that a group of ordinary men can come together to attain acts of gallantry.
According to David Barcomb, who is a sports enthusiast, for those born and brought up in Boston, the Red Sox are passed on like family treasure generation after generation. They are a cord that runs through family tradition and history. As a ritual of passage father pompously takes his son for the first time to Fenway Park. Grandfather sits on the verandah chatting with the grandchildren about the Red Sox of olden days. In the streets of Boston, brothers play baseball imagining to be their favorite player. But even a relocated Red Sox fan, that has discovered the team later in life and lives elsewhere, shares the same love for the team that is seen in behavior, lifestyle, and beliefs.
The life of a Red Sox fan is a rough one. The person’s behavior, manic and sporadic, is dictated by the team’s losses and wins. He can be a neurotic and fanatic, betrothed in a love-hate relationship where the position of the team determines his personality. After a loss he becomes withdrawn, gazing at the world with disbelieving sunken eyes and muttering to himself about that vital catch in the 7th inning that could have changed everything. When they win, the air is punched in exhilaration, leaps are made over the couch, and his life achieves a universal ecstasy where it appears as if nothing could ever be wrong. Companion fans call to celebrate in mutual congratulations, talking of game details. Beers are split open, downed, and thrown across the room. (As the motto goes in Boston- ‘win or lose we drink the booze’.) One walks around with a feeling of excitement in his step, swaggering of post-season possibilities and conversing with positivity. The win is a testament to one’s faith, and one believes, beyond anything that has taken place in the past and any prophecies that are made for the future, that the team can keep winning.
As David Barcomb believes, hope, heart and passion, is what comprises a Red Sox fan. One must completely love them, hurt for them enthusiastically. When they break your heart, one must be willing to forgive and hold them up when others put them down. A Red Sox fan is like no other fan. There can be no other team, there is no going back, and one is a fan for life. In February, one is filled with dreams of Spring Training, one’s heart begins to swell with fresh faith and hope and no matter what has occurred last fall one falls in love all over again. They make you wild and weary, impoverished and impassioned of spirit. They fill you with the promise of their harvest and leave the lore of their history with you. One wonders and one waits and one predict all season long, and in the end they deliver- lose or win. They provide you baseball: pure and beautiful and classic. They offer you themselves.
