The curse of the Bushbino

There’s only one thing John Kerry and I love more than our hair, and that’s the Boston Red Sox.

Forget Fred and Ginger, Bogie and Bacall, Bill and Monica – true romance glistens on the green, green grass of the Olde Towne’s glorious Fenway Park.

The ballpark is a cathedral, the pitcher’s mound a grave, the outfield wall a monster, and the hot dog vendor on Lansdowne Street an A1 public health hazard.

So zealous is my infatuation with all things BoSox, my personal life has often struck out looking. Many a woman has fallen head-over-Manolo Blahniks for my golden locks and sparkling wit, only to find herself relegated to the disabled list, second-best to a bench full of filthy, unshaven, tobacco-chewing, sweaty, overweight macho booze hounds.

They say I’m hung like a Pedro Martinez curveball, but women just don’t seem to go for that sort of thing.

Perhaps John has the same problem, though he never mentions it in his campaign ads.

Still, enough already with the preamble – it’s high time I brought the heat.

Fans, I never thought I’d say this, but gazing like a flame-throwing gypsy into my global crystal-ball, I can’t help thinking there may currently be bigger sporting contests at bat than America’s national pastime.

If the whole sorry business had escaped your notice, don’t fret, I understand – but I fear it is my duty to warn you that a somewhat noteworthy election lurks like Nosferatu just around the corner.

Otherwise your usual circus of fatuous jingles and hollow oaths, this election has a palpably acidic twist: it will determine who gets to be the world’s most powerful man for the next four years – a swaggering Texas Ranger or a card-carrying member of the ardently faithful Red Sox Nation. I don’t wish to preach, but you could do worse than take note – or, if you’re in the neighbourhood and not too busy, vote.

The thing is, and this is strictly between ourselves, I’m starting to suspect the outcome of this gala is already determined – not by Glenda Hood, nor by William Rehnquist, but by the stars, the Gods, and those multitudinous inexplicable phenomena that forever pinch your socks from the airing cupboard.

Never one to scupper my investments on the alignment of the planets, I nevertheless sense something not only bigger than baseball, but bigger than politics, is in play.

Let me explain.

I hardly need enlighten those of you with a millilitre of sporting blood in your veins that, whilst fun to watch on Sunday Night Baseball, for the past 86 years the Boston Red Sox franchise has been operating under the indisputable handicap of a supernatural curse.

It all began in 1918 (2004 minus 86 – neat, huh?). After winning the World Series with a corpulent illiterate on the mound known as “The Babe” (the Red Sox are so cursed they didn’t even realise Ruth, probably the greatest slugger in history, was pretty nifty with the bat), come the year 1920 Boston’s management decided it was time to cash in the potato chips.

They promptly sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees – who at the time were a women’s saloon team with notably ringless fingers. The rest, it pains me to say, is history.

Since that ghastly trade, the Yankees have gone on to become the world’s most successful sporting franchise (or a commercial, corporate bloodsucking Evil Empire, as we Red Sox rooters distinguish them). The Bronx Bombers have won twenty-six (26) World Championships in that eventful span of history. The boys from Boston have won zip.

That’s zip, as in zero, as in a big donut hole (0).

All this is old news, of course, but indulge me a little here, I’m not even a Yank, let alone a Yankee. Since 1918, the Boston Red Sox have been living under what New Yorkers affectionately call “The Curse of the Bambino”. No matter how talented, how brilliant, how thick, a ballplayer on the Red Sox roster has forever been rendered an error-prone, ill-fated, choke machine.

Mitts mysteriously develop holes in the final inning. Inanimate foul poles conspire to deflect balls whichever way best shafts the Sox. Game seven is always lost. There is no end to the trickery of the ghosts that haunt this ball club. You don’t have to be Egon Spengler to calculate that there’s something strange in the Fenway neighbourhood.

And nowhere is the curse more potent than in Yankee stadium. The Yankees-Red Sox rivalry is the most storied in all of sports. But this is the most one-sided rivalry in the history of the universe. The Yankees always beat the Red Sox, and always when it most matters, in the end, just when you thought this might finally be the moment the curse is lifted. Oh, the pride! The pride! The list is endless and too painful to relate. You can look it up.

But… there’s a but.

Wednesday night, the impossible happened. Boston came back from a 0-3 deficit against the Yankees to win the final game of the best-of-seven American League Championship Series (ALCS) and take the AL pennant 4 games to 3. This happened at Yankee Stadium – The House That Ruth Built. No team in the entire history of baseball has ever come back from a 0-3 deficit. Boston achieved the unprecedented, against the Yankees. Four nights previously, they stared a 0-4 sweep in the face. The Yankees were three outs from the World Series in the bottom of the ninth inning, all set once again to wholly humiliate Boston – who the night before they’d thumped 19-8 in front of the agonised Fenway faithful. Mariano Rivera, the greatest closer in the history of postseason baseball, was on the mound for the Yankees. It was over. But somehow, the self-described “idiots” of Boston came back. And then they came back again, and again, and again.

Dare I say it, but the curse might have lifted. Really, it might have.

Last year, the Sox were five outs from beating the Yankees at Yankee stadium, taking the ALCS 4-3, and going to the World Series. Guess what? They blew it. The curse got them. Aaron Boone, newly acquired Yankee third baseman, lifted the ball high into the left field stand. Boston lost their manager. Grown men wept in the streets and in the dugout and locker rooms. The Babe looked on, a wink in his eye.

No longer. 20 October – “Boston Baseball’s Bastille Day,” Dan Shaughnessy opined in the Globe.

The New York Times took a different view: “It was actually happening. The nerd was kissing the homecoming queen. Paper was beating scissors; scissors were beating rock. Charlie Brown was kicking the football.”

So why the sports lesson? I’ll tell you. Because there’s something in the air, folks. Something in the stars and planets, some karma way beyond our control. Now I’ve seen the Red Sox beat the curse, I’m ready to believe anything.

John Kerry, member of the Red Sox Nation who was watching the game on TV Wednesday, beer in hand, feet up on the table, is renowned for being the best closer in politics. A man who fights back to win against the most unlikely odds.

“You’ve got to be a Democrat to love the Red Sox, because they’re the workingman’s team,” says Democratic consultant, Paul Begala. “The Yankees are like General Motors… like Halliburton, and the Red Sox are like the rest of America.”

The only question left in American politics is whether Kerry is as big a man as Curt Schilling, who hurled a heroic and near-perfect game for Boston on Tuesday with a torn ligament that was bleeding through his red stocking. Kerry beating Bush = BoSox beating Yankees. Kerry’s up against more than a wartime president. He’s facing “The Curse of the Bushbino”.

When asked how he accomplished such a gallant pitching feat, Curt Schilling looked to the heavens: “I prayed for the strength to go out there tonight and compete.”

Are the Gods Bostonians this fall? Or have I watched Field of Dreams too many times?

Whichever, I’m willing to make a wager: I’ve tipped Bush all the way in this campaign, but if the Red Sox win the Fall Classic, John Kerry will be the forty-fourth president of the United States.