Date: Thu 13-Jul-1995

Author: KIMH

Illustration: I

Full Text:

Kim Column: She Never Saw A Championship

Kim Harmon/On Sports

She Never Saw

A Championship

She grew up a fan of the New York/San Francisco Giants - of guys like Willie

Mays and Willie McCovey and Sam Jones - but became, almost by necessity, it

seems, a fan of the Boston Red Sox.

It might have been as early as 1972. The Sox started out the season at 8-0 and

my brother, only seven at the time, decided, hey, he was going to follow the

front-runners (he used a similar strategy later that year when he grew fond of

the Miami Dolphins . . . who would go on to finish the 1972-73 season

unbeaten). It wasn't soon after that my mom became a Sox fan, too.

It wasn't hard to understand why, though. I was a fan of the New York Yankees

- I don't remember why, perhaps because they had the history of the major

leagues woven through every team they ever fielded, or more likely because I

wanted to be different from my brother - but my brother followed his teams

harder than I did. He wore the hats and recounted the stats and listened to

every game that was on the radio.

My mom kind of got swept up in all of that. So she converted.

On the face of it, it didn't look like a bad idea. When she was 15, the Giants

won a World Series championship while they were still in New York, four years

away from the moment they packed their bags and left for the Gold Coast and 19

years since the last time they had won it. The Giants didn't get to the World

Series again until 1962, losing to the New York Yankees in seven games, and it

took them another 27 years to make it back another time, this time losing to

the Oakland Athletics in four straight.

But by then, my mom didn't care. She had had almost 17 years to get firmly in

tune with the vagaries of being a Boston Red Sox supporter . . . getting to

know the likes of Carl Yastrzemski, Luis Tiant, Carlton Fisk, George " Boomer

" Scott, and Jim Rice, while also getting to know what it was like to be

constantly, almost perpetually, disappointed.

The Red Sox made it to the World Series in 1975, her first real trip back

since the Giants lost in '62, and she felt the agony of the seven-game loss to

the Cincinnati Reds.

But it got worse for her three years later, in 1978.

You know, I could have talked with my mom about 33 pennants and 22 World

Series championships (the numbers the Yankees have accumulated up until now)

since the dawn of the American League (in which time the Red Sox had only won

five times, the last in 1918), but the arguments, especially with Boston fans

like her, just don't carry any weight unless there is some fresh physical

evidence to support it.

Yankee fans remember 1978, I am sure. A lot of Red Sox fans do, too, although

not as fondly.

It came down to an October night, although the story actually began three

months earlier, near the All Star break, when the Yankees were looking up at

the Red Sox from 13 games back. What commenced, of course, was one of the most

dramatic pennant runs in baseball history, finishing with the Red Sox and

Yankees tied at the end of the regular season.

Setting up The Playoff.

Bucky Dent homered into the screen above the Green Monster in Fenway Park in

the fifth inning of that game and Carl Yastrzemski popped up the Graig Nettles

at third base to end it in the ninth and I will never forget the look I got

from my mom, as if it were me who hit that homer, me who stole the World

Series chance away from the Red Sox for yet another year.

But it got even worse and I don't think I have to explain - or open some old

and still painful wounds - by saying a few words like 1986 . . . Game 6 . . .

Bill Buckner . . . Calvin Schiraldi.

That was bad, because even I, a most hated enemy of the Red Sox, was rooting

for them in '86. I wanted them to win. I really did. The Yankees were in a

deep decline and, darn it all, I was tired of seeing my mother get all fired

up in the spring, all excited over that fast start, all tense over that

mid-season hump, and all disappointed over that late-season swoon.

I wanted the Sox to win for her . . . because she was a fan. .

I remember she had this radio, a donut-shaped thing, that twisted open to show

these little dials for volume control and tuning. Every day she brought that

radio to the pool to listen to the game. It always worked, despite getting

kicked, dropped on the pavement, banged around and punished as if it were a

puck in a street hockey game.

If there was ever a testament to my mom's unceasing devotion to a team, no

matter the suffering, it was that indestructible radio.

And it's too bad we don't still have that radio somewhere, because it would be

as fitting a memory of my mother as anything she left behind when she died

last week at the age of 56.

There are more than enough reasons why her death will hurt for a long time to

come, a lot of issues that will take some time for me to understand and deal

with, but there is one thing that will truly hurt more than most of those

other things come some future October.

I know there will be a time when the Red Sox finally win the World Series

again, but my mom, a better baseball fan than me, won't be there to see it.

And she won't have a chance to gloat, like I did in '78.