The first part of the story is not one that many of you have heard before except in passing; I only trot it out when people challenge me on just how much I actually hate the Yankees (with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns). While most people assume from my sports teams (Sox, Celtics and Bruins) – and occasionally, strangely enough, my accent – that I’m from Massachusetts, that’s not actually the case. My parents, alone amongst their respective siblings, settled in the NY/NJ area before I was born. In a true triumph over my environment, however, I was raised as one of the Good Guys, a Sox fan, from birth. My earliest hats all had B’s on them, and my first ever baseball game was at Fenway during a summer vacation at my grandparents place on the North Shore [1]. And so it was that while we were back at home in NJ, my Dad happened to take me to a Sox/Yankees game at Yankees Stadium when I was maybe five years old, which in and of itself would have been fine. The issue was that as an innocent little five year old, I had no idea just how evil the Yankees fans were and therefore insisted on wearing my little Red Sox batting helmet to the game. To make a long and potentially boring story short, the very classy Yankees fans poured beer on me. When I was five.
In the years that have passed since that early childhood trauma, not much has changed regarding my distaste for the Evil Empire and its fans (although somehow a couple of them have managed to become friends of mine over the years). The rapturous events of last October have certainly soothed much of the pain of past Sox losses, as well as given me new ammunition to use against the Bad Guys, but overall I’m no fonder of Yankees fans than I was that afternoon at Yankee Stadium.
So imagine how I felt late last week when I was attempting to arrange a hotel room for this coming Thursday in Boston for a client engagement, only to discover that there were no available hotels in Cambridge. Nor in the North End. Nor in Back Bay. Nor indeed anywhere downtown. The closet hotels I could get, according to the travel agency, were all well out of the city, thus forcing me to take the red eye in that morning.
Who’s taking these hotels, you might ask? Who else? It was the damn Yankees fans. For those that are unaware, the Sox and Yankees are currently tied atop the American League East (after a big win earlier today), and it’s looking increasingly like this weekend’s Sox/Yankees showdown at Fenway Park could be a winner goes to the playoffs and the loser goes home proposition. In response, Yankees fans are reportedly flooding into the city to invade our park, snapping up all the hotel rooms in the bargain.
Anyway, I thought it was important to let you all know that the next five days might feature a few wild mood swings and some irrational behavior on my part, for which I’d ask your indulgence. In the meantime, I’m going to keep hating the Yankees fans; first for pouring beer on me, and then taking my hotel room.
[1] During this game, a kid sitting right next to me got hit in the stomach by a line drive off the bat of Jim Rice and had to be taken out on a stretcher.
