Rollie mentioned the Boston sports culture in this way well before yesterday in a comment on Isaiah. Boston players who excel end up owning this city and New England. They get coaching jobs or end up on radio and t.v.. Look at Scal. He wasn't even that good at basketball. McCarty was extremely underwhelming as a pro. Yet, there he is on the bench.
Pierce is obviously coming back here at some point. Maybe Bird would be here today if we hadn't ended up buying into Rick Pitino's slimy fool's gold.
Boston is clearly a sports heaven. Even before the Patriots beat the Rams in 2001 and the Red Sox broke the curse in 2004, this was already one of the most fanatical sports bases. We were lovable losers. We were good job, good effort.
What are we up to, 11 or 12 sports titles since 2001? It's impossible to keep track. Many years of my life were spent wondering if the Red Sox were truly cursed by the Babe Ruth trade. The Bruins were always second best to Montreal. The Patriots were a big joke and almost left for Connecticut. There was the Michael Jackson music tour debacle. The Celtics. We were cursed by Bias and Lewis, although those two gentlemen were the true victims of bad luck, and I don't mean to understate that they died painfully too young. It stunk for us, but it was much worse for them and their families.
People around the country never seemed to hate us until we started piling up titles in all four sports.
The Patriots. Wow. They must be one title away from the Steelers for all time best team if winning it all is the true stat. No one saw that coming, even after we upset the Rams which got everything rolling in the Title Town direction.
I personally lost something from all these ultimate wins. I stopped being fanatical. I still love basketball because of the pace and it's just very graceful a lot of the time. I'm not a fair-weather fan, but life is the biggest mystery of all, and one wouldn't want to spend too much of their time obsessing over something that is ultimately leisure and just doesn't matter.