Sox win fills a hole in my aching heart

As a longtime Boston Red Sox fan, let me assure you of one thing: I am handling winning just fine.

It’s such a refreshing change of pace. In the past week and a half, I have discovered that I can gloat just as obnoxiously and crow just as insufferably as any Yankee fan. In fact, I am doing it right now and it feels just … beautiful.

One of the many charges employed against Red Sox fans for decades is this: We are so immersed in our culture of self-pity and victimhood, we would be thrown into a strange existential despair if the Sox ever won at all. No longer would we be able to indulge our perpetual underdog nobility.

Well, let me tell you something. It wasn’t noble and I never did “indulge” in it. Nor did I wallow in it, revel in it, nor in any way enjoy it. I just plain hated it. Year after year, decade after decade, I hated losing.

We always suspected that winning would feel better. Now we have confirmation.

Still, we Red Sox fans can be magnanimous in victory. When the Yankees had the Red Sox by the throat at the end of game three of the league championship series, my Yankee-loving friend Bucky (not his real name, but the most vile name I can make up for him) walked right up to me, laughed maniacally and flipped the birds in my face.

That’s right. The “birds,” plural. With both hands. A kind of taunting, double-bird semaphore.

I had to sit there and take it, something that I, as a Red Sox fan, am used to.

So, when the Sox came back to win four straight in the biggest comeback ever, did I walk over and commit a dual-bird salute in Bucky’s face? No. I’m above that. Plus, I want him to stay awake nights wondering if Red Sox fans truly are nobler.

We’re not. But I want him to stay awake nights wondering about it.

Meanwhile, you might wonder how a fanatic Seattle Mariner fan, a Western born-and-raised guy, could also be a Red Sox fan. Well, when I was a kid in Colorado, my dad would pitch to my brother and me. He would accompany it with a running play-by-play commentary of our exploits. My brother he called Mickey Mantle, a Yankee. I was Ted Williams, a Red Sox player. Little did my dad realize he was sentencing me to decades of pain.

So I naturally identified with them and rooted hard for them (vainly) in their 1967 World Series near-miss. Same in 1975, when I was living in Wyoming and desperately fiddling with a car radio dial to bring in an Omaha station for the famous Carlton Fisk game.

The nadir of my Red Sox career came in 1986. A friend and I were steelhead fishing on the Methow River that October. During the evenings we stayed at his sweet little old mother’s house in Okanogan. She was no baseball fan. She had no idea who the Red Sox were, but she graciously let me watch the World Series in her living room, despite the groans and yelps that I kept producing on nearly every ill-fated play.

When Bill Stanley and Bill Buckner famously conspired to snatch defeat from sure victory, I fell face down on her living room rug and didn’t move for at least five minutes.

That sweet old grandmother stood there above me, looking down at my prone body, wringing her hands and saying to her son, “Is he OK? What’s wrong with him? Should we call the ambulance?”

Without raising my face from the carpet, I just waved my hand feebly. I wanted them to know I was alive and that I hadn’t actually passed out or anything. I just wanted to lie there and have some quiet time, possibly for a couple of decades.

So with this background, you can see why I consider winning the World Series an improvement, from a psycho-emotional standpoint.

Red Sox Nation is scattered all over America, but here in Spokane, it’s a minority obsession. I wanted to be at some Boston bar, joining in the celebration. I had to settle for hugging my wife Carol and going, “Whooo-hooo!” in the privacy of our own home.

Well, no, I couldn’t settle for just that. I also drove to Albertson’s, purchased a bottle of cheap champagne, went out in the back yard, shook it up and sprayed it around the lawn like an idiot.

I tried to get my wife to pour some on my head, but she wouldn’t do it. That’s OK. It was still more fun than lying face down on a rug in Okanogan.