Word: sox
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Frustration is the foundation of sports in Boston. Sure, the Hub is treated to an occasional championship team, but the famous losses are what stand out most in local memories: the seventh games of the '67 and '75 World Series, the '78 Red Sox playoff, the Bruins' seventh-game overtime loss to Montreal...
What's really amazing is how Boston teams stay close at all, since they're relatively underfinanced operations, using old, undersized arenas and usually avoiding high-priced superstars. When the Red Sox, relying on hustle and enthusiasm, take on the Yankees, relying on a big payroll, there's probably no more obvious case in sports of good guys versus bad guys...
...Fate has sometimes kissed him. Once, on a fall day in 1960, he was "falling in love and away from marriage." He went down to Boston to visit a woman friend on Beacon Hill. She was not home. Disappointed, Updike wandered off and remembered that the Red Sox had a game scheduled at Fenway Park that afternoon. He went and saw Ted Williams hit a home run in his final at-bat, during what turned out to be the last game of his splendid career. Inspired, Updike wrote an instantly recognized classic of sports reporting: "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu...
DIED. Monty Stratton, 70, "aw shucks" Texas farm boy who inspired The Stratton Story, a bathetic Hollywood biography starring James Stewart as the White Sox pitching ace whose career seemingly ended when his leg was amputated after a hunting accident in 1938, but who strapped on an artificial limb and returned eight years later as a winning minor-league pitcher; of lung cancer; in Greenville, Texas. When the film debuted in 1949, Stratton drawled: "It's my life, all right. I'll just hope folks will think it was worth making into a movie...
Eliot donates funds raised by the show to the Boston-based Jimmy Fund, which was established in 1947 to benefit the Children's Hospital. In addition to Eliot House the Boston Red Sox and the New England Chiefs of Police have regularly raised money for the Jimmy Fund...