A Sports Fan Thanks Her Dad Part Three The End

Only a few years later a date took me to my first game at Fenway. Dad had been right, I was in awe. The lush greenness of it; the perfect diamond. It was a closed universe, a paradisiacal light-year away from the crowded city beyond the green wall. When the teams took the field and began to play, I instinctively looked not at the pitcher and batter, but at the outfield. No one had ever described for me that moment when the pitcher goes into his windup and the whole team behind him comes to high alert. "It's beautiful," I cried to my date, and thought of my Dad and got a lump in my throat. I still think that's one of the most beautiful moments in all of sports--whatever else they may have been doing, however nonchalant they had seemed, when the pitcher goes into his windup all of them, infield and outfield, lean forward in a state of deep concentration and readiness. The moment is full of high drama and caught breath. Wonderful.

So now the Patriots have won the Superbowl three times and my Dad would be ecstatic. I just know that throughout the New England region there were fans like me who thought of their dads and had a bittersweet moment of feeling an aching loss along with the jubilation.

And the Red Sox...In New England, we often got into discussions about what we'd do, how we'd feel if they ever won the World Series. Would we be able to live with it? Would it somehow lessen our obsessive love for the team? What, a group of us asked each other a few years ago, would be the first thing you'd do if the Red Sox won it all?

I didn't even have to think about my answer. And when the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, I held true to it. I took a Red Sox t-shirt, hat, and large banner to St. Anne's cemetery in Cranston, RI. I put the shirt over the gravestone marking Joseph Francis F......(it's an Irish name), perched the hat on top, and wrapped the banner over the whole thing. The banner said, "They did it, Dad! Rest in peace."

Sports have been, at various times in my life, distraction, obsession, amusement. Sports have taught me about the human reaction to victory and defeat, made me think about ethical dilemmas; helped me recognize, in other areas of my life, the apparent conflicts between striving for a personal best and sacrificing personal glory for the sake of a group goal. Some people think following sports is a trivial pastime, nothing to do with real life. True sports fans--like the ones who lean out of the way to give a fielder the opportunity to catch the ball and make a play--even if he's on the opposing team--know that sports encompass all the drama and comedy, all the lessons about fair play and living with a bad call, that real life dishes up every day. I'm proud to say I'm a sports fan.

Thanks, Dad.