It's Saturday night, and I can feel the glow of satisfaction warming over me, for I have just witnessed my beloved Boston Red Sox win Game 1 of the World Series. Perhaps some of you on campus have noticed that Massholes can overreact to Boston victories, but today I would rather just sit back and hope for three more wins.
Of course, after Wednesday's 10-3 drubbing of the New York Yankees, I was in the mood to celebrate. I ran from my apartment in the Berkshires carrying a bottle of $5 champagne to the LA Quad. You see, after the 2003 Yankees-Red Sox series, when the Yankees defeated the Red Sox in seven games, there was a collection of Yankee fans chanting the usual "1918" and "Boston Sucks" stuff. It made me mad. Even though I lived off campus, I wanted to see the shoe on the other foot.
(Oh, I give a big journalistic thumbs down to The Washington Post for noting that Johnny Damon hit a grand slam at exactly 9:11 EDT. Is there an implication here that the Red Sox are on the side of terrorists? Weirdly enough, the Red Sox just beat the St. Louis Cardinals by a score of, you guessed it, 9-11! Take that New York! What a stupid thing to put in a sports column. It doesn't matter if the Red Sox hit a grand slam at 9:11 or at 10:24 because we still kicked their stupid Yankee fair-weather fannies.)
Oh, boy. What an event. There were three times as many fans celebrating the Red Sox victory than the year before. The biggest difference between 2003 and 2004 was the ominous presence of Public Safety. They were none too pleased that the success-starved Red Sox fans would be having a good time after 11 p.m. If you need the rest of the story, I direct you to the front page of Thursday's Eagle. Though everyone has a different version of the events (I, for one, did not see Public Safety swinging at people with nightsticks), that seems like a fair enough account.
Something in that Eagle article really got my attention though. The Anderson Hall resident director was "mad." How dare sports fans disrupt study sessions? Absolutely ridiculous. She thinks this is anger-inducing? Perhaps she didn't see the cover of the Boston Herald featuring the bloodied corpse of an Emerson student in Kenmore Square. That would make me mad. All the RDs have to be angry about here are loud students celebrating. We weren't lighting fires and we weren't tossing cars. One idiot threw a cup of beer or soda at a Public Safety SUV, and he was booed. That was the extent of the problem.
If happy students get the RDs mad, then what makes them content? Could it be the perpetually broken vending machines that constantly take money from cash-strapped students? What about dirty showers and alcohol transports? All these things are accepted at AU, but damn those happy Red Sox fans. They are the ones bringing down the quality of life.
All I can say to the Anderson RD is that you better hope that the Red Sox don't win the World Series. The pandemonium would be both horrifying and wonderful. The whole country would be celebrating. Like it or not, Yankees fans, the Red Sox are truly America's team. People like us. And people will celebrate if they break that mystic curse that has been plaguing us since Frazee sold the Babe to the Yanks.
No RD will stop us from celebrating something that hasn't happened since the birth of my grandfather. If AU can't understand, it really needs to get back in touch with the pulse of the sports fan. It needs to let people celebrate. In return, I, on the behalf of Red Sox Nation, promise not to destroy any property. That seems like a fair compromise to me.
GO SOX!
Lester Russell Allen IV is a senior CLEG major and history minor. The Rusty Nail runs every Monday.
