Somebody Call The Wambulance!
Thanks to Repoz for a tip on the link that leads to Steve Ouellette’s lamenting, as a Red Sox fan, over the fact that his 6-year-old son is playing for a T-ball team named “Yankees.” Ouellette writes:
Recently, my now 6-year-old son came home from T-ball picture day sporting his new jersey.
It was spiffy and professional-looking, with the sponsor’s name on the back.
On the front were the letters Y-a-n-k-e-e-s.
When I came to, the name on the front was still the same, and my wife handed me a paper bag to hyperventilate into.
“We won’t be buying any T-ball pictures this year,” I told my wife.
“Too late, we already have,” she said.
“I’ll just burn them. Every single one of them.”
I find myself withholding fatherly baseball activities. No, sorry, I can’t play catch. No, I can’t help you with your swing. I fear that if he improves, he’ll just keep playing next year and might be placed with the Yankees again.
When games start, I guess I’ll go and watch, but I’ll have to sit on the opposition’s side, and root for my son to strike out — a difficult feat in T-ball.
Somehow, I believe, if Ouellette’s kid grows up to be a great college baseball player, and is drafted by the Yankees, and is then subsequently offered $2.5 million to sign with New York, that Steve Ouellette will be singing a different tune.
Ouellette is joking, obviously, but it’s a joke that illustrates exactly what I hate most about Red Sox fans. It seems as if every Red Sox fan who writes about the team assumes that their readers actually care about the intensity of the writer’s love for the Red Sox. (News flash: most don’t.)
This whole writerly tick strikes me as preciously phony and it is exactly what made the movie “Fever Pitch” insufferably unwatchable.
I love the Yankees intensely and get choked up during “Pride of the Yankees” or the occasional Yankeeography, but I expect no one else to care about this fact.
I’m surprised the guy hasn’t filed suit, claiming emotional distress over it.
jon, that self-absorption is indeed the worst thing about many Red Sox fans and media types. But, I can see where it logically follows from 86 years of helplessly hoping for a WS championship that wouldn’t materialize. I have heard many a Red Sox fan equate their team with God and Country, for pete’s sake. Seriously. Maybe it’s the peculiar cast of the New England mind? You’re right, very few Yankees fans would go that far.