GREAT MOMENTS IN RED SOX HISTORY #5 - 4/16/07

Ladies and Gentlemen, I realize that it's been a long, long time since I last posted one of these Great Moments in Red Sox History. But there really wasn't a lot I could do with the events that unfolded at the end of last season. The moments were either too insignificant or too catastrophic for me to mock. But that all changed on Patriots Day.

For the past year, I have portrayed Red Sox fans as a tribe of slackjawed morons, hypocrites and tools. And two fans sitting in the grandstand on the left field foul line decided they had to live up to all of the negative characteristics of Red Sox fandom in one shining moment of childish behavior. I'm sure you've seen this highlight a thousand times by now, but it's still worth watching again and again and again and maybe a fourth time.



So here it is, the triumph of Red Sox fan sophistication with the added benefit of Jerry Remy's keen analytical mind. One grown man took issue with another grown man eating a full pizza at a baseball game. In a free country. So the other grown man looked deep within his soul and summoned up every ounce of maturity he possessed. He took that maturity compressed it into a ball of fury, waited until his adversary was distracted by a foul ball and the opposing left fielder and lobbed a slice of the aforementioned pizza at the back of his antagonist's head.

It was a proud moment for Red Sox Nation. I have seen monkeys at the zoo comport themselves with a higher standard of decorum than these men exhibited. Of course when the monkeys are riled up what they tend to throw is a bit more unpleasant than cold pizza, but on the whole they're still better behaved than their less advanced cousins at Fenway.

I wonder what business is it of any fan's if a paying customer wants to eat pizza at a game. When a person goes to a game he or she tends to overindulge in unhealthy food and adult beverages. If the unhealthy food of choice happens to be pizza as opposed to the more traditional hot dogs or peanuts, so what? It's the same problem I have with people who decide that they and they alone are the arbiter of what potable can and cannot be consumed with a given food.

If I order a steak at a restaurant and I choose to have a Miller High Life with it, it isn't because I'm blundering along in the metaphorical darkness just waiting for some superior being to enlighten me as though I were one of the damn apemen from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's because I like steak and I like High Life. I am what Charles Barkley would call a grown-ass man. I can make my own decisions. People should leave each other the hell alone, that way they wouldn't get a piece of pizza whipped off the back of their domes.

That said, people really hadn't ought to settle their differences by throwing pizza off the back of people's domes either. But what can you do if you happen to be a Red Sox fan and as such only discover your courage when an adversary is outnumbered or has his/her back turned?

To give credit where credit is due, I have to thank the man I go to for my Red Sox info and the man I go to for my Chicago (the sports scene, the city and the band of the same name) information, both of whom sent me the youtube clip first thing this morning. Keep up the good work.

And if that's not enough, Mitt Romney wants you to be his friend. On myspace, if not in real life. If only he'd explain what Elvis ever did to deserve such shabby treatment.

Today is Muhammad Ali's 65th birthday. Watching the various retrospective on his career as a boxer, a champion, an athletic icon and social activist made me sad. Not just to see what age, a genetic disease and too many rounds in the ring have done to him, but to remember that boxing was once a great sport. Perhaps it could be great again, but I'm not holding my breath.

Now the 17 governing bodies award 35 title belts, the three or four uber-promoters that cripple the sport, the two cable conglomerates that own any fight worth watching and charge ridiculous sums for the right to watch a meaningful fight have all but crushed boxing. But people still like boxing. That's why recent movies like Rocky Balboa, Undisputed and Cinderella Man do so well at the box office.

Boxing, when it's done right, is the most compelling sport. It's so compelling that a boxing movie that is even remotely well done is all but guaranteed to become an instant classic. More great movies have been made about boxing than any other sport. Raging Bull, Rocky, Rocky II, Rocky Balboa, Somebody Up There Likes Me, The Great White Hope, The Champ, Cinderella Man, Undisputed and others are among best sports films ever. People who never saw LaMotta, Graziano, Marciano, Braddock, Louis, Baer, Ali, Frasier or Foreman fight live still watch these movies and remember the fighters they featured. Rocky is one of the great iconic characters of all time.

Undisputed might have had potential as a franchise had they not gone the straight to video kick boxing champ goes to prison controlled by Eastern European organized crime ring route. Seeing a heavyweight champ played by Ving Rhames imprisoned for sexual assault did not require much suspension of belief, since it happened to Mike Tyson. While it seems unlikely that an elderly organized crime figure in prison for life could wield enough influence to set up the climactic bout, it's still a damn sight more likely than the factors which had to be set in place for the second film to happen. But back to boxing in the real world...

Part of boxing's demise has to be attributed to the increased popularity and expansion of the professional sports leagues. If some one had two avenues to wealth and success, but one of which entailed getting punched in the face and gut for a living, who would take the punching option? To choose getting punched in the face over playing basketball or football or baseball one would have to be dumb enough to think that Adult Swim on Cartoon Network presents keen satire and not something that a middle schooler place in a flaming bag and leave on the teacher's doorstep (the lone exception is Venture Brothers, but Assy McGee and Moral Orel are two of the worst shows that have ever been on the air).

I think Ali is another part of boxing's demise. He was too big a star for the sport, if that makes any sense. He was too good, too charismatic. Maybe that's what made him hang on too long and take some vicious beatings from Larry Holmes and Ken Norton. The Rope-a-Dope was a brilliant ploy, but taking everything George Foreman had to dish out, he probably shortened his career, at least as far as his best years were concerned. But more importantly, he set a standard that no successor could live up to.

Now that boxing is terrible and, for the most part, not accessible to the average sports fan, what has taken it's place? For the most part, the casual fan has gone over to the NFL, or one of the other sports leagues. Some have gone to the WWE, which enjoyed a resurgence in the last decade, which led to the ill-fated XFL. But as soon as any wrestler builds up a following these days, he ends up making terrible action movies like the Marine. I mist say, I liked the Rundown and Scorpion King, so the Rock is forgiven.

Then there is cage fighting. Some people seem to enjoy it. I've never been all that impressed by it. Maybe because the scrawny wuss of an older brother from Napoleon Dynamite was training to be a cage fighter. Maybe because I am not all that interested in watching two men in their drawers roll around in a cage. Maybe because Joe Rogan is involved. Life without News Radio has not been easy for him and Andy Dick. Yeah, he was hosted Fear Factor, but he was also part of the team that forever killed the Man Show (not that it deserved to live).

I think the main reason I don't like UFC is that I miss boxing. There was a comforting sameness to boxing. No matter who is fighting whom, there is one set of rules by which both combatants compete. In cage fighting, almost anything goes. By that rationale, one might as well have the Cleveland Cavaliers show up to run the pick and roll against the Bears defense this Sunday. Or Burger King might run horrible commercials in which the whoppers are portrayed as a human family. I keep hoping that one day I'll wake up and those commercials will just have been a nightmare.

I know it's a strange thing to write on Muhammad Ali's birthday, but I've been wanting to go on about this stuff for a little while now, and I'm still trying to face the reality of a Pats-Colts showdown for the right to play in the Super Bowl. Would that there were a way for them to tie and the Bears and Saints play for all the marbles.And there's the Jason Kidd divorce situation. I find it amusing that he has accused his wife of intolerable cruelty when he pled out on charges of punching her in the face. But there will, I think, be a whole series of amusing revelations emerging in that divorce.

But we have a moral quandary in the tool of the week award. First because there is a tie. This nitwit on YouTube is certainly worthy of mention. As impressive as it is to sink trick shots on a pool table, the accomplishment loses a little bit of luster as soon as you videotape it. But when you sync it up to a little teen angst music and post it on YouTube, you just cry out to the world that you are a guy who never moved on emotionally from the days when you ruled the pool hall in the mean streets of the suburbs and all the overweight women thought you would be the ideal father for illegitimate child 3.

I feel a little bit bad about it, but this guy deserves it too. He might not deserve it as much, since he didn't go into all the effort that our trick shot artist did. Plus the guy's audience was tooling on him already. But the fact still remains that he was drawing freehand circles, and he just wasn't very cool.I don't know if one can look cool drawing freehand circles, but I'm willing to bet that this particular person couldn't look cool, no matter what he did.

But the moral quandary, aside from mocking total strangers who may possess strange ass-kicking powers, is that it isn't much cooler to link to these videos and make my snappy comments than it is to make them in the first place. After all, I watched these videos. I feel a little better that I found these videos through a friend rather than searching for them myself. He sent me the link to the freehand circle guy because I had an algebra teacher who used to draw perfect freehand circle. I wouldn't say he looked cool doing it, but it was a damn sight cooler than the video from YouTube. But the fact remains that these tools made their videos and I looked at them, so who is the real tool here?