Word: reds
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There is the story of one Gene Conley, pitcher for the '62 Sox and forward for the Celtics during the off-season, who left the Red Sox for 68 hours, contemplating the possibility of going "to Bethlehem, Israel," to get "nearer to God." He was drunk and tired, they said. But Conley was sick of his two-sport grind, and he admitted later that "religion saved me. I became a Seventh Day Adventist. I would have been a first-class drunk. I would have blown everything. I was going pretty fast for a lot of years. So I've kind...
These are the people who leer through the history of the Red Sox. Like Bill Lee lighting a candle and leaving it on Don Zimmer's desk in memory of friend Bernie Carbo, on the day of Carbo's importation to Cleveland. Like Jimmy Piersall walking up to the pitcher's mound one afternoon during batting practice and firing a limp stream of water at homeplate with a squirt...
THESE ARE the memories Sullivan recounts, not with the detached hindsight of recent interviews, or with the purpose of a sportswriter trying to find the real reason why the Red Sox blew it this year, but with the eye of the media, and mostly, the eye of those who have followed the Red Sox, and come back for more...
Sullivan--a former sports columnist for the old Boston Herald-Traveler, offers his most insightful writing in an appraisal of Fenway's fans: How do you describe Red Sox fans? Devoted. Patient. Long-suffering. And perhaps a little masochistic, always coming back for more frustration after having their hearts broken. They have even been rooting for the Red Sox at some road games and you wonder which is the visiting team...Fenway's fans--they're a rare species, some of the world's best...and a few of the worst...
...Ahhhhhhhhh, the Duke's dead." Dead indeed. And dead are the old heroes and fools, the pictures and the stories that live on in books like this, like a Bible to the Red Sox and the people who go to worship all summer long...