The Power of Words. Loyalty to the Red Sox is the tie that binds generations

10.17.99
Loyalty to the Red Sox is the tie that binds generations
By Gerald M. Carbone
Journal Staff Writer

BOSTON - In a concrete plaza at the foot of the Prudential Tower there stands a statue called "Quest Eternal." A small plaque on the statue reads, "Cast in Italy, this five-ton bronze figure is a traditional classic form depicting man reaching for the heavens."

The statue is located less than a mile from Fenway Park, an appropriate placement, because "Quest Eternal" perfectly captures the undying optimism of a Boston Red Sox fan.

The plaque draws you in to a point that offers a most unflattering view of the hero. From the base of the statue you look up into the man's colossal rear end; it is as if the five-ton figure is mooning his viewer.

Like the Boston Red Sox, "Quest Eternal" is best viewed from a distance. When you take a few steps back you see that the form is majestic, inspiring. The figure is a classically strong man, stretching his finely muscled left arm skyward. He strikes a pose remarkably similar to Nomar Garciaparra leaping to snare a line drive in Game 1 of the current Red Sox-Yankees series, his left hand stretching to the heavens.

The statue's left hand points to the top of the Prudential Tower, where a glassed-in Sky Walk on the 50th floor affords views of the White Mountains humped up in the north; the Atlantic's blue horizon stretched across the east; and there in the west, almost in the shadow of the Tower, you can peer into Fenway Park.

From above, Fenway Parks's grass and its red seats lend it the look of an emerald and ruby jewel set into blocks of drab brownstones.

John Updike began his classic, New Yorker essay about Ted Williams's last at bat with the sentence: "Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark." I love that sentence for its alliteration and its cadence, but I have no idea what it means.

Updike wrote so well about the Red Sox in 1960, and again for the Boston Globe in 1986, that I tried calling him to hear his observations about the current crop of Red Sox and their battle with their nemesis, the New York Yankees. I also called Stephen King and novelist Tim O'Brien, good writers who have publicly pronounced themselves as Red Sox fans. I called them because I wanted to hear smart, eloquent people attempt to answer a question that an editor put to me: Why do New Englanders care so much about the Red Sox?

Neither Updike, nor King, nor O'Brien would talk to me about this, which neither surprises nor offends. King's publicist said she didn't know why he didn't want to talk, other than that "Maybe the Yankees have him down."

Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, was gracious enough to pick up the phone while I was leaving a message on her answering machine.

She began by saying, "For some people for whom love of the Red Sox stretches across the generations then the team is not only the present group of players, it is a memory" — and then she smoothly segued into the team as a channel between grandparents and children, a reminder of past disappointments and glorious victory.

Kearns Goodwin learned to love baseball through her father. In a piece that she wrote for the Boston Globe to commemorate the 1986 World Series, she said, "The game of baseball has always been linked in my mind with the mystic texture of childhood, with the sounds and smells of summer nights and with the memories of my father."

She has since passed that love of the game to her sons; they never had the chance to meet their grandfather, but they know something of him through stories of baseball relayed through their mother.

"I have a relationship with my sons, through the game, that I had with my father," Kearns Goodwin said. "Part of it, too," she said, "is it's just a way of connecting to the larger community we all live in."

ANOTHER NEW England writer who agreed to talk with me was Andre Dubus III. Dubus, 40, is a lesser-known writer, though that may soon change; his first novel, House of Sand Fog, is a finalist for the National Book Award.

Dubus's father was my writing professor, my friend, and a stoic fan of the Boston Red Sox. When he taught at Bradford College, the elder Andre would cancel his classes on the Opening Day of baseball season so he could go to Fenway Park.

For Andre the elder, Opening Day was a holiday of almost religious significance. He died suddenly last winter, when the ground was too hard to bury him. In the spring, his sons Andre and Jeb dug his grave by hand; they buried him on Opening Day.

"My father was a huge baseball fan, and my brother Jeb and I haven't got a clue," about baseball, Andre III said. "But I'm watching (the playoffs) now, and my sisters are watching it, and my mother's watching it, my kids are watching it. We're all kind of watching it for dad and granddad who we call Pop. We just feel our father's presence."

When he watches the games, Andre III props a photograph of his father on a table, facing the TV. "I point that at the TV and I wish he were here to ask a question to."

ROY PETER Clark, senior scholar at the Poynter Institute of Media Studies, has no use for this business of the Red Sox being somehow larger than life. Clark, a Long Island native who graduated from Providence College, hates the Red Sox, not the players so much as their fans. Clark was raised a Yankees fan; he said his "hatred" of Red Sox fans "is tribal. It's deep-seated. It has to do with language and which Rs" you decide to drop out of a word that you use.

"I derive pleasure in seeing Red Sox fans get their hopes up year after year and with this tremendous pre-maturity get in my face about how this is going to be the year, and we all know there's this sort of inevitability in which the higher the hopes of Red Sox fans are, the more deeply they're dashed. I derive tremendous pleasure from their pain. The feeling I'm describing is a sin, but it feels more like original sin than actual sin."

Because I'm a New Englander and a Red Sox fan, I almost left Clark's comments on my notepad. But silencing him would be a disservice, for he does offer us an important view of ourselves. We are so eager to see that team win, so thirsty to drink of champagne that isn't tainted, that we are easily taken. Red Sox fans are a nation of Charlie Browns; any time that the smell of autumn is in the air, Lucy Van Pelt can cajole us with her football, only to yank the ball away. We reach for it and briefly we soar, like the figure in Quest Eternal, before we crash back to Earth.

LIKE DORIS Kearns Goodwin, I learned a love of the game from my father, Robert A. Carbone. I called him at his home in Venice, Fla., and asked him the question an editor had put to me: Why do the Red Sox matter?

"You know," he said, "I keep saying to myself: 'What am I doing down here watching these guys' " on TV. " 'Why am I so involved in the Boston Red Sox when I live in Venice, Florida?' It's just something that goes back so far and it gets into you."

For my father it goes back to his father, an Italian immigrant whom we called "Nono." My sister likes to visit my house in the summer, because the background noise of the Red Sox on the radio reminds her of going to Nono's. It is a sound as timeless and as soothing as the sound of surf.

"How Nono got to like baseball — it's hard — I have no idea," my father said. "I wish now I had asked him more about it. He used to take us to this cow pasture with rocky dirt and a little grass." And then my father began telling me about the fields of his youth, stories I had never heard about the one-armed farmer who owned the cows and the butcher shop across from the pasture where Nono would hang out with "Milan," a fellow immigrant from Milano.

"Baseball is an amazing thing. A lot of people belittle it because it's slow going," dad said. "But it's got something. It's elegant. A lot of it is that you've got time — everybody gets positioned. You can see the pitcher nibbling at the plate, see what he's trying to do. It is bigger than life, I tell ya. I shouldn't say bigger, but it's like life. Some little thing can mean so much."

And that's why the Red Sox matter.

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