My name is Tom Sullivan and I am a senior at UC Berkeley. For my personal reflection essay, I wrote about growing up outside of the United States as an avid Red Sox fan. I gained my love for the team from my father, who grew up in New England, and I religiously followed the team while living abroad in Mexico City and London. Much of sports-fanship is belonging to a greater identity and community, and I quickly felt as if I did not have the same “claim” to being a Red Sox fan as my father and other New Englanders. In this essay I tried to expand on those sentiments, and delve deeper into what truly belonging to a fanbase entails.
In New England, baseball is religion, Fenway Park is its shrine, and the players wearing Boston Red Sox uniforms are Gods. My dad grew up in a small working class town in Maine and came to accept this conclusion as quickly and naturally as he learned how to walk. His mother virtually didn’t miss a single Red Sox game in the last fifty years of her life. She was either watching on the television in the living room or listeningxn in while working on a crossword puzzle from the day’s newspaper. When she was inconvenienced by being away from home during a game—which was avoided at all costs—she listened to her radio on the go. She would listen anywhere— dinner parties, school events, the grocery store. She was tuned in whether it was a night game on the West Coast or a noon first pitch in Boston, a beautiful skyless day or gloomy rainy one that caused a delay. Not only did she profusely watch games, she played catch with her sons for countless hours until snow started showing up in their backyard, when they painted the baseball orange to see distinguish it from the Maine snow. One of those sons she threw the ball to, my dad, became hooked, and the Red Sox subsequently came to dominate his childhood years.
My dad used to always tell me about being in attendance at Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, where Carlton Fisk “waved” a home run deep into the Boston night in a moment that forever lives on in New England sports lore. He stormed the field with thousands of New Englanders that brisk Boston October night. Baseball has left its imprint on him— he associates the Red Sox with his parents, his hometown, high school friends, childhood sports memories. There’s no real separation between what is his fan-ship and what is his childhood— what is his upbringing and what is his identity. But this fan-ship— this deep love for the Red Sox that affected both my father and his mother, was not by any means an anomaly in their neighborhood, but rather the norm. Baseball was just a part of life in Brunswick, Maine, the way it was in towns across New England. The same way that you went to church on Sunday, you watched Red Sox games on summer nights. At face value, my relationship with baseball during my childhood was no different than that of my fathers. We both spent hours on end playing catch in the backyard pretending we were at Fenway Park and both felt the devastation of Boston playoff loses. But my passion from the team did not derive from being born in Red Sox territory, my passion was passed down from my father. I grew up abroad in Tokyo, Mexico City, and London and did not live in the United States until I was twelve, when I moved to Washington DC. I did not grow up where I could walk down the street and be passed by a slew of Boston Red Sox hats and jerseys, where everyone was talking about last nights game. Instead, I grew up where Major League Baseball was an afterthought. I could never buy baseball cards at a corner store, or walk to a local field to take batting practice with friends. However, my dad made sure that I knew who Carlton Fisk and Carl Yastrzemski (and how to spell it) were, and most importantly that the New York Yankees were my mortal enemy. Fully converted by my father, I was an isolated creature— an admirer of both the Red Sox and New England culture, but growing up an ocean away in London, where pretty much anything except for Tony Blair is more popular than baseball. Full Piece: https://tomsullivan4.wixsite.com/website |
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