Curse of Babe still a red rag to the Sox

SIDELINE CUT: Some cities define themselves by their native sports but Boston takes it to a dangerous edge, writes Keith Duggan.

In case you didn't hear, the town's beloved Red Sox have just managed the greatest comeback in the history of baseball by winning four games in a row against the New York Yankees, who baited and bettered them through the 20th century.

Last Wednesday night, game seven for the AL pennant took place at Yankee Stadium, the most fearsome of all the baseball theatres and somewhere in which home fans are so lofty that seventh games are regarded as their entitlement. The Red Sox bucked history and superstition and all probability with this autumn winning streak, which has been greeted by Bostonians as a kind of cosmic miracle, leaving them with a giddy and nervous feeling.

It is nigh impossible to live in Boston for any length of time without becoming aware of what the Red Sox mean to locals. Although the New England Patriots are the reigning Superbowl champions and although Danny Ainge, a sidekick of the revered Larry Bird back in the Celtics halcyon days of the 1980s, is in charge of restoring Boston's basketball dynasty, Fenway Park is the only glory box that really counts.

In the last days of the Boston Garden, fans would run around the decrepit aisles brandishing white sheets that bore a green-painted legend: Mystique. The Garden was a dump but it was glorious, a dark and ramshackle building located right on the North Station and even its last days devoid of anything approaching luxury or entertainment. No dancing girls or half-time shows or music sounds other than a tinny organ that sounded out classic ditties redolent of the Depression era.

Sport, be it the Red Auerbach's Celtics or the Bruins of the ice-hockey league, was all that mattered. In 1995, the building was razed and replaced with a modern, air-conditioned arena named after a local bank. Now, the baseball park is the last soulful sports arena in the city and, indeed, the country.

Fenway Park is not as dingy as people remember the torn-down Garden but is as curious and atmospheric. It has changed little since it was built in 1912, defined by the blank, verdure-covered, vertical wall known as the Green Monster and having the smallest capacity - just over 33,000 - in the league.

Like the Garden did, Fenway sits cosily among the museums and colleges and bars in downtown Boston. Its players' entrance is virtually unchanged from the distant days when Babe Ruth was the most stellar Red Sox player in Boston society, a lover and a boozer and a slugger. Its turnstiles are as dark and rackety as they were in that era and run flush along the roadside, a forbidding, old-fashioned, wire-mesh fence cutting the ground off from the outside world.

It is a real sports stadium, modest and proud and quaint in its dimensions. The best thing about it is, without even trying, it seems to hold much of the charm and atmosphere and timeless appeal that has made baseball America's enshrined sport. It breathes history.

And what history! If you take the T out to the lavish suburban areas like Brookline or Newton, you are transported, for $1.20 straight into Wonder Years country: lit pumpkins on whitewashed porches at Hallowe'en, carol singers at Christmas, and all through the summer months privileged children playing junior league baseball under lights and the famous New England foliage. It is the same in the blue-collar enclaves to the south and north of the city. Baseball is a rites of passage and with it comes the unavoidable lore of the Boston Red Sox, the most luckless team to grace any sport.

The legend of the hex Babe Ruth declared upon the Red Sox after the new owner and theatre impresario Harry Frazee sold him to the Yankees in 1919 has become such an overblown myth that locals are tired of it. Yet the unlikely mishaps that have afflicted the team in the decades since - they lost four World Series in the seventh game - have added a spooky substance to the apocryphal story. The Red Sox provide the chorus to summers and autumns in Boston, showing in every bar and many restaurants each evening, the volume never insistent but the audience nonetheless rapt as the pennant race begins to intensify. It is mind boggling that a franchise as consistently good as the Red Sox are should run towards a full century without a World Series title.

Of all the last-hour catastrophes that have befallen them, the image of their third baseman Bill Buckner spilling a ball through his legs in the last inning of game six is the most exquisitely torturous. It was a child's play and coming when the Red Sox needed just one strike to become champions, it was unforgettable. It crops up in screen and print week in, week out in all kinds of contexts and sounds like the beginning of a nursery rhyme: Bill Buckner, Boston's third baseman. That was in 1986. The Red Sox have not been to a World Series since.

The only way that man will ever get some peace is if the Red Sox go the whole way.

Which brings us along to this evening, when they host the St Louis Cardinals - another distinguished, old-world, city club in search of a bit of sporting posterity - in game one.

Beating the Yankees in such spectacular fashion was all very well but it means Red Sox fans have to renew their delicate relationship with the World Series. None of Boston's great players from previous eras, not even the brilliant and temperamental Ted Williams, could deliver on that. Games one, two, and, if required (and be certain they will), six and seven take place in Fenway. All are sold out. The present group of players are steadfastly holding onto the line that they are oblivious to history.

But in Boston for the past few days, they cannot but be aware that for locals, Red Sox history borders on hysteria. Culturally, Boston is a curious mix of working class and intellectual elite, an alliance between brawn and establishment snobbery, each with a cemented set of values. It is, by nature, a conservative city but where baseball is concerned, it foams at the mouth. Already, the celebrations of the comeback against the Yankees turned rowdy and violent, with late-night revellers going on the rampage on the streets around Fenway.

Located far up in the northeast of the US, Boston has a superior history and pretty buildings and its shining fall season but it also has to live with the fact it is not New York. Not in glamour, not in architecture, not in attitude or lustre, and certainly not in baseball. Worst of all, it presented the slickest city of them all with baseball's greatest icon. The Red Sox are loved but what they crave most, respect from the Yankees, has eluded them.

Although the Ruth incantation - dubbed the Curse of the Bambino - is fantastic in every sense, it is also precious in an era when so much of professional sport seems jaded and all rather pointless: a Playstation series made of flesh and blood. Babe Ruth died over half a century ago and yet an alleged oath he may have uttered in the first months of the Roaring Twenties will prey on the minds of an entire city this evening.

Recalling the man on the 25th anniversary of his death, Red Smith wrote in 1973: "The man was a boy, simple, artless, genuine and unabashed. This explains his rapport with children, whom he met as intellectual equals. Probably his natural liking for people communicated itself to the public to help make him an idol."

He was buried on a sweltering day in August 1948. In the pallbearer's pew, Waite Hoyt sat beside Joe Dugan, the third baseman. "I'd give 100 dollars for a cold beer," Dugan whispered. "So would the Babe," Hoyt said.

Ruth certainly drank enough of them in the ale houses around Fenway all those decades ago and tonight, his name will still be the talk of the town.