roachboy

i am not a particularly avid sports fan generally, but there are three moments i remember:

france beating brazil 3-0 in the 1998 world cup finals.

the red sox world series win in 04.

but for some reason, the new england patriots winning their first super bowl is a particularly strong memory. i remember watching the game in a shitty sports bar in philadelphia on a wall of monitors and thinking i never thought i would see this, that it was the most implausible thing i had experienced sports-wise. for years, in us football, there was bad, there was really bad and there was the patriots. the only football game i have been to featured the patriots against the houston oilers during the babe parelli period, and even though i was at the time a little kid, i knew i was watching a game that was almost unimaginably bad that day.

now that i think about it, the red sox had more impact on me, even though i remember it less well---after they won a world series, it seemed like the map of sports i had carried around in my head the whole of my life had been messed up. the red sox existed to break your heart. that is what they did. you learned certain things from this--like nothing that happened before the all star break meant anything because afterward, the red sox would start to implode. and even if the sox made it into the playoffs, you knew--you just knew--that something was going to go horribly wrong and that the sox would loose. nothing sums all this up better than buckner's ground ball.

after the sox actually won, i didn't watch sports at all for a couple years. nothing made sense any more.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite