Identity Crisis

I’m not a big fan of sports columnists. I find that many of them bring little to the table. In New York especially, they take a “Chicken Little” approach to every loss that is both unwarranted and not a particularly compelling read. Plus, there seems to be a lack of homer-ism in these parts. How many times is the Daily News’ Mike Lupica going to write a column about the Yankees payroll? He dusts that topic off at least once a month, whether or not it’s baseball season.

So it was with trepidation that I listened to Bill Simmons discuss soccer on the World Soccer Daily podcast. Simmons works for ESPN, or NESPN as Yankee fans have come to call it thanks to its preponderance of Red Sox-loving pundits. The WSD hosts kept referring to a feature Simmons wrote a few years back for his ESPN Page 2 column on how he went about deciding on an English Premier League team to support. He chose Tottenham Hotspurs but started backtracking while on air. He thought he made a mistake and that Liverpool was his team.

Then Simmons started making an analogy that revealed both his ignorance of soccer and delusions about baseball. He was a Red Sox fan (shocking!) and he thought Liverpool was like the Red Sox, gritty underdogs that hadn’t had a lot of success, especially recently. For the record, Liverpool has won more trophies than any other English football club (congrats Simmons, you unwittingly chose the Yankees), including a European Cup in 2005, which one could argue makes them closer to the Red Sox, who won their last World Series in 2007. As the hosts pointed out Liverpool’s triumphs, Simmons stammered that Liverpool had “cool” uniforms. They are red so that may have been the appeal.

I thought, only a Red Sox fan could think he roots for a gritty underdog. They lost that loveable (although they never really were) loser status back in 2004 when they broke the supposed Curse of the Bambino. Winning again in 2007 just punctuated it. However, their fans don’t seem to get that they are now almost as universally despised as their hated New York rivals. The difference being while we Yankee fans revel in being dubbed The Evil Empire (yeah, that’s right, we snatch up all the good players and have 26 titles to show for it), members of Red Sox Nation (I despise that term, btw) haven’t quite figured out how to cheer on a winning franchise.

Many Sox fans have emerged as sore winners, obsessed beyond reason with the Yankees, more content to see New York lose than Boston win. Trust me, in ’96, ’98, ’99 and ’00 Yankee fans could not have cared less about the Red Sox. No one was carrying signs during the championship parades declaring: “Manny is playing golf right now.” (Actually Manny is at the gynecologist right now, but that’s a whole other topic.)

I suppose what’s really going on with Red Sox fans is an identity crisis of sorts. They are no longer the perennial also-rans. They are winners. They are going to have to embrace their status as favorites, who spend a lot more than just about any other team in baseball (besides the Yankees, of course). The die-hards are going to have to learn to deal with the bandwagon jumpers (you know, the ones who can barely name a single starting player and have girlfriends who wear pink caps).

They need to recognize they are already on the dark side. Come. Take a seat in the Death Star. We’ve been waiting for you…