for those about to rock

there's a story

about david ortiz that has always moved me.

what got me to thinking on ortiz was a recent globe feature i read about his charity work. i haven't thought much about the red sox in general since they started coming undone last season.

try as i might, the best i could do with the razor sharp internet research instincts i've honed on the job was to find what i THINK is a pretty accurate account of the events surrounding that story, the core of which which i feel i originally learned about on a post-game tv interview.

the spot-on particulars are probably unimportant. at the very least, you could find a comfy home for the story in that area that shitty sportwriters allude to clumsily (and which i'll try to lay out explicitly here, albeit even more clumsily), placing it somewhere on the crossroads where history remembered and myth believed in the heart tango with one another.

what i think was important about the story is contained in this piece of the account i've referenced above:

"But whenever I think of David Ortiz, I think first not of his great homers or his many clutch hits(although they spring quickly to mind as well) or his gap-toothed grin but of the stories his teammates told after the 2004 comeback against the Yankees--that Papi had seen fans in tears in the stands the night before during the Yankees' 19-8 Game 3 rout, and remembered the fans' heartbreak in 2003, and it had touched him enough to comment to teammates that he wanted to find a way to turn things around, even if he had to do it by himself."

i feel i remember it a little differently, though this account doesn't seem to mess with essential details; it just might've missed one. i believe those tears -- the ones that are important to the story, anyways -- were shed on the cheeks of one red sox fan ortiz happened to notice in the stands at yankee stadium in the immediate aftermath of game 7 of the 2003 alcs.

i think it was a woman, not that the detail is objectively important. in spite of the damon-mania that would've made her unremarkable (yes, pink red sox hats, ok?), i think it just struck me somehow at the time that it was "her" tears ... perhaps it jostled some definitive sense of classic chivalry in my mind. anyways, it's that gender distinction that makes me think i probably have my memory right.

so. just, the bond. just, the sense that there was a pact that pure, elemental empathy asserted into existence.

ortiz found his fire in her eyes. that's the important part. that's what i want to think (and think i CAN think) he tapped into when he surveyed the disasterous scene after game 3 of the 2004 alcs, the memory flaring to life like the chunky embers of fireplace logs shedding ash to reveal that there's more to burn.

fuck this. i'll will it to happen. if the others fail, i will still make sure we succeed.

maybe the late inning heroics that papi engineered to do just that, leading his team on to an unprecedented 4 game comeback sweep against their historical rivals, had more to do with the fact that he's a record-breaking hitter. maybe it's more that he has fate on speed dial.

whatever the case, the truth lies somewhere on that crossroads of sports and what it is to be human, and everyone is free to lay claim on a spot of that generous interpretive turf.

and, being human, i'll go and chalk it up to the latter.

posted by jomilkman @ 11:04 PM