by Jeff Crosby, Oct 16, 2007

The Orioles fan in the next seat turned to me and said, “Good, we’re only down two runs.” I was sitting in Camden Yards, the baseball stadium in Baltimore. I thought he was joking. It was the top of the first inning, and he was glad that his team was only down two runs to the visiting Boston Red Sox. But there was no smile on his face, just visible relief. Down two after half an inning, and he was all but celebrating!

This was a moment to consider just how long I, as a union guy who has supported underdogs all my life, could continue rooting for big-market, big-spending teams that have become the new Evil Empire.

I rooted for the meatpackers in the Midwest and the janitors taking on the industrial cleaning giants. I tasted tear gas in Seattle, Quebec and Miami, fighting mega-corporate neo-liberal globalization. My local union members are fighting to keep the Saugus town library open at a time when public budgets are disappearing and “the public good” sounds quaint. We fight to keep General Electric Co. (GE) hiring when the public thinks products just appear out of the sky or are all made in China. David-against-Goliath political trends at every turn. 

I’ve always been a fan with my heart, not my head. Before I moved to Massachusetts in the late 1970s, I used to follow the Milwaukee Brewers, with lovable players like “Stormin’ ” Gorman Thomas. Thomas famously told the press:

I try to keep the fans entertained. I can usually hit a home run, or maybe run into a wall, or something.

I read Dave Zirin’s edgeofsports.com religiously. I have a righteous union rap for everything I do.

I can’t gamble more than a dollar on a football pool. Otherwise I’ll lose next month’s mortgage betting on whichever team’s city lost the most industrial jobs since NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement]. 

The old guy running the elevator at Camden Yards, who fondly remembered Brooks and Frank Robinson, told me it was 8–1 Red Sox fans that night. The hotels were overrun with people like me, down for a vacation to see the Sox. (You have to know Dan Duquette to get into Boston’s Fenway Park these days.) A hot selling T-shirt proclaimed the beautiful Camden Yards to be “Fenway South.” The most popular shirt for the beleaguered Orioles fan was Cal Ripken—and he has been retired long enough to be in the Hall of Fame.

At one point thousands of Sox fans started chanting, “Yankees Suck.” A weirded-out Orioles fan turned to his friend in wonderment and pointed out:

Will someone tell those guys that the Yankees aren’t even here?

And what about the embarrassing Patriots, New England’s pro football entry. I collected autographs from “Babe” Parilli and Gino Cappelletti when you could stand on the sidelines of the pre-season practice fields and watch for nothing, as long as you didn’t get in the way.  Today the Kraft family is building some kind of Patriot theme park next to the brand-new zillion dollar stadium that will be a year-long Patriot shrine.

The Pats average 35 points a game after importing more stars. They have players suspended for failing drug tests and a coach fined for filming their opponent’s signals. They are favored to win the Super Bowl and are more popular by the day. How excited can you get about a team that is favored to win every game and then proceeds to do just that—methodically? I actually fell asleep on the couch when they were clobbering Cincinnati on Monday Night Football.

I saw Bill Russell and Cousy play in the old Boston Garden, and surfed the ups and downs that followed. I hung in there for the past 10 seasons, rooting for the unknown young players who filed through the revolving door to throw the ball to Paul Pierce at the end of every game. Now the Celtics have Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen to complement Pierce. Last year they didn’t make the playoffs. This year anything less than the Finals will be a disappointment.

Boston College, the only college team in town that plays Division 1 football, is undefeated and fourth ranked in the nation, higher than when quarterback Doug Flutie won the Heisman Trophy there in 1984. 

I never followed the hockey Bruins much. I moved to Pakistan when my Dad was in the service and I was in elementary school . Not a lot of ice in the North West Frontier Province around Peshawar. Loyalties start young, and I have never been a big fan of the recent local soccer entry, the Revolution, although I played when I returned home from Pakistan. So I am stuck with all these winners.

There is always some justification for supporting the Empire (ask any American). Like the players who imagine that they “get no respect” to fire themselves up, I focus on individual stories to justify supporting league bullies. The Sox have baseball’s knuckle-balling Everyman, Tim Wakefield, who is 40 years old and pitches slower than I do—I could run and catch my own ball, and I can’t run much. Plus Wakefield saved neighbors from a housefire and was the union rep for the team for a while.

Yeah, Flutie scabbed on the players’ strike. But Patriots quarterback Tom Brady “spreads the wealth” right, by using all his receivers. Isn’t that what we do in unions? He must be one of us, under the glitter.  New Celtics star Kevin Garnet slipped his security in Rome so he could drop some cash into the hands of a street beggar. 

How good is that?

Yeah, the Sox were the last team in the majors to finally sign black players. But Sox Dominican slugger “Big Papi” Ortiz wore Jackie Robinson’s number this year to commemorate his breakthrough against segregation, saying, “He did it for all of us.” And the Celtics were the first in the NBA to sign black athletes, and as Boston Globe reporter Derrick Jackson pointed out, they hired several black coaches when that was a rarity. The Bruins signed the first black player in the NHL.

There is always a balm for my relentless union underdog conscience.

But if you are looking for the real local feel-good story, there is Everett High School football. The gritty blue-collar town of 33,000 boasts the only New England high school football team ranked nationally in years. Coach John DiBiaso runs a class program, leading a United Nations of tough kids who start gripping a football in the crib and use football to further their education.  While several Everett kids have played in the NFL, even second string players have received college scholarships. The Everett 12-year-old Pop Warner team beat Texas in last year’s national tournament in Florida by thirty points. “Friday Night Lights” got nothing on us. 

The other ranked high school teams are mostly prep or Catholic schools that recruit from a much wider area. And Everett used to have a GE plant, built for them by the government during WWII.  They made parts for my Dad’s B-17 Flying Fortress bomber when he was navigator in the Army Air Corps. The plant is closed, the work consolidated into Lynn, so the school also warms my foolish rust-belt heart. Go Everett, beat yuppies.

A few weeks after my trip to Camden Yards, I was back on the couch watching the Sox. Down the Yankees, 4–3. Two out in the ninth, Big Papi facing Mariano Rivera. Hanging on every pitch.  Big Papi popped out.

A few weeks after that, I parked myself on a couch at my son’s place in Vermont.  He and my wife and I watched the Patriots win, then the Red Sox win, then the Yankees lose. An eight-hour trifecta. (And yet next week at the Union Hall I’ll be adding my voice to the “busier than thou” chorus, wondering where the time went.)

I could get used to this.  I’ll work on the political rationale for my devotion later.

Note: Thanks for Tony Dunn, North Shore Labor Council United Way Labor Liaison, and Fred Merchant, Local 201 Executive Board member, and Everett fan-atic, for fact checking the work of this casual fan.

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