popular thinking

GAME 6: SO WHERE WERE YOU?

How audacious is a new movie that revolves around the day and night of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series? Wait, don't answer that. It was a rhetorical question. Ready or not, here comes Game 6, at least in limited release this weekend in Boston and New York. I met director Mike Hoffman earlier today. He seemed like an OK fella. A St. Louis Cardinals fan, too, which means he had his own Game 6 haunting memory a year before me and my fellow Red Sox fans. But that's not important right now. What's important right now is this, is it safe to go back into the murky waters of 1986? I asked around, and here is what some knowledgeable sorts, including Red Sox PR guru Dr. Charles Steinberg, told me. Dr. Charles also acknowledged that at the time, he was an Orioles fan, and that for him, Game 5 of the 1986 ALCS was "the most exciting game I've ever seen." That is, until 2004.

At the movie's site (see above link), producers held a contest asking people to submit short essays about where they were Oct. 25, 1986, when the entire baseball worldview shifted and fell off of its axis. I didn't submit an essay. But Bruce Allen of Boston Sports Media Watch and I did exchange stories...

BRUCE:
My very first thoughts when I heard about the movie were "Oh god, I thought all this crap was in the past."
I guess I thought that once 2004 happened, Red Sox fans would never have to revisit their painful past in the same way again.
Then I went and checked out the website for the movie, and watched the trailer, and came to a somewhat different view of what the movie could be. Could it be that now with the safety net of 2004 to fall back on, we can revisit, perhaps for the first time really, what that day was like for all of us? I was 15 years old at the time, and I remember many excruciating details about that day. It was the first sports event that made me cry. Now, in the movie, we can see and share the character's life as it happened that exact day, presumably at the same time we were suffering wherever we were at. I have no doubt that it will be an (at times) painful experience for many moviegoers. We know how it ends, and if Michael Keaton's character has a day in which Game 6 is the capper, then he truly is in a role with which viewers from this area can sympathize. We can relate.
Now that we do have that elusive World Series championship, perhaps looking back at that day won't be quite so bad. It's like having a nightmare, but being aware subconsciously that it is just a dream and that you can wake up and things will be fine.
I've not seen the movie yet of course, (scheduled for a screening Wednesday) so perhaps I'll change my opinion later, but I think there's a chance for some serious introspection on the part of fans who have blocked that day out of their mind. It could actually be healthy.
But I swear, if there are any references to the "curse of the bambino," I'm walking out.

ME:
We're the same age.
Sophomore year in prep school in Connecticut, there were a handful of us in the school's auditorium watching Game 6 on the big-screen while a floor above us, the school was holding its annual dance marathon. Me, a big dummy, also was videotaping the game at home for posterity so I could always remember the night the Red Sox won the World Series -- the tape also had the first game of the regular season, in which Dewey hits a home-run on the first pitch of the first game of the day in Detroit, and the Sox still manage to lose. But back to Oct. 25, 1986. In the 10th inning, we all noticed that the loud music above us had stopped. I ran upstairs to the library (why a marathon in the library? I don't know) and found someone had hooked up a TV and everyone was gathered around to watch the Sox after Hendu's home-run and then tack on the 5th run. Of course, we all stood around and watched the painful bottom of the 10th, and I couldn't bear to look at my videotape ever again. And did I really need to? TV has been more than willing to replay those images so often over the years, and then 2003 happened (not that 1999 or 1995 or 1990 or 1988 were any easier), and by the time 2004's miracle comeback happened, still I had become so paranoid that I couldn't pick up the phone to call my dad until AFTER the final pitch of Game 4 of the Series. There was still some little piece of shrapnel left in me from 1986.

About the movie, though. I thought it dabbled in a bit of revisionist history. Michael Keaton's character already acts as though the Red Sox will blow both Games 6 and 7 earlier that day, and chats up strangers about the Boston nine's tendency to collapse in tragic Greek fashion. He doesn't mention the words "curse" or "bambino," but he sure sounds like a guy who already believes in it, and mutters Pesky's name more than once. That's not how I remember it. My friends and I fully believed that the Red Sox would win Game 6 in 1986, especially after their comeback against the Angels in the championship series (down to their last strike in the Game 5 that caught Dr. Steinberg's attention), and it was the utterly shocking way they lost that changed our psyches and made those future woulda coulda shouldas so heartbreaking October after October for the 18 years until 2004. And it also allowed for the rise of the CHB. Ugh. That said, Game 6 is no Fever Pitch.