My wife had zero interest in going, even though it was the fifth game of the World Series with the Mets and Sox tied at two apiece. Just this once, I pleaded. I desperately wanted to expose my unborn child to the lullaby of Fenway, much as some deranged parents lay Mozart on the pregnant mom’s belly. I hoped the good vibes would work their magic and that someday he or she might regard Fenway and me as an unbeatable parlay.
I am not much for America’s synthetic holidays. As you can tell, I like to manufacture my own. But the marketing of Father’s Day is so powerful that I inevitably wind up spending a fair amount of time thinking about fatherhood and, of course, my own father. My dad bestowed many gifts on me in his lifetime, but the gift of baseball surely ranks near the top. He took me to Fenway for my first game, making me sit to the very end of a Yankee slaughter because baseball was a nine-inning game and, well, you never knew. At the same time, he taught me that, deep down, with the Sox you in fact always knew–and that rooting for the Sox was good training for life’s assortment of bitter disappointments. The Red Sox legacy back then and, he somehow knew, in the future–from Frazee to Slaughter to Galehouse to Gibson to Burton to Dent to Buckner–would be one that makes grown men weep.
During the years when we found it impossible to talk about other stuff–politics, the Vietnam War, drugs, the length of my hair–we could always talk about the Red Sox. One time, late in the summer of ‘67, Boston’s “Impossible Dream” season, I remember dining with my father at The Rib Room, a stolid bastion of beef-eaters just around the corner from Fenway. The Red Sox were locked–with Minnesota, Detroit and Chicago–in one of the greatest pennant races in history, and I was reluctant, even for some prime rib, to miss a minute. I didn’t. My father, normally a stickler for restaurant propriety, pulled out a transistor radio, placed it on the table and turned on the ballgame. It occurred to me that maybe he was smarter than I thought.
I left Boston in 1965 and didn’t return to live there for another 20 years. Dad and I talked frequently. He was principally interested in just touching base to ascertain that I was alive and well. (A couple of tours in war-torn trouble spots made that more than a specious concern.) After that, we could crunch our conversation into, at most, two minutes. It was a lot of, “Didja see that?”, “What on earth was he thinking?”, “What a bum!” And the one that I recited years later at his funeral, his eternal Red Sox epitaph, always uttered with equal parts sorrow and pity: “You just knew that was going to happen.” Well, if I didn’t back then when I was a kid, I surely do by now.
I can’t claim that my Fenway fetal experiment generated quite the same fervor in my daughter. Still, I continued to work at it after she was born. I would sit her on my lap in front of the ballgame on TV, at least until her wailing interfered with my enjoyment. And when she was a little older, I could amuse her by chanting, cartoon fashion, “Dew-ey! Dew-ey!” when Dwight Evans came to bat. But I didn’t overdo it. And I didn’t rush her back to Fenway until I thought she was ready to go the distance. Baseball, as my Dad once told me, is a nine-inning game.
It was seven years between her first and second ballgames. And while I couldn’t arrange another World Series game at Fenway (her first remains the Red Sox’ last), I still came up with a doozy. It was a perfect summer day, sunny and 75 degrees, the world-champion Blue Jays were in town, and the formidable Dave Stewart was on the mound for Toronto.
We live within walking distance of the ballpark so I timed our arrival to eliminate potential squirm time in the seat before play began. As we settled down after the anthem, I was literally pulsating with excitement at the prospect of our first game side-by-side. My daughter looked up at me, devotion in her eyes, and said, “Daddy?” There was that pregnant pause as I wondered what pearl she might utter. Probably something sophisticated about the impending stardom of Mo Vaughn or about the dim prospects of a Sox team that had replaced Evans with Bob Zupcic in right field. “Daddy,” she said, pulling out a coloring book from her little knapsack, “Do you mind if I don’t watch?”
“Do I mind? Do I mind?!” We were home by the third inning. OK, so maybe I should have taken my brother to that World Series game. But my daughter and I still go to at least one game every year, and she has come to enjoy baseball and Fenway in her own fashion. I can accept that, even if it means she might actually join in the wave and sometimes fails to note when an outfielder misses the cutoff man. A few weeks ago we went to the ballpark–“On a school night?” her mother said, shaking her head–and saw the Red Sox rally to beat the Yankees. My daughter watched the game quite intently. And when David Ortiz capped the comeback with a bases-loaded gapper that drove in three runs, she and I rose in unison with the crowd, jumping up and down, pumping our fists and shrieking with delight. She may even have yelled a little louder than I did. It was just about the happiest double of my life.
