A couple of weeks ago, I was up at my parents' house in the Boston area, digging through their bookshelves for new reading material, when I came across the 1990 edition of The Red Sox Reader, a collection of writings on the Sox by a number of famous journalists and authors who are either Red Sox fans or fans of one particular player (mainly Williams or Yaz). Intrigued (it was the same day as the Fenway Tour, so I was in the perfect nostalgic mood), I dug in to immediate reward: pages of excellent writing on all of the noble heartbreaks of the past 100 years of Red Sox history, palatable without pain (I realized) only because of the fortunate combination of 2004 and the unbounded hope of spring. Not all of the selections are gems, but the inclusion of selections like John Updike's farewell to Ted Williams, Roger Angell's deconstruction of the 1978 season and David Halberstam's epitaph to the final fateful game of 1949 make this book a winner and well worth the read.A couple of days ago, I reached Thomas Boswell's piece, "The Greatest Game Ever Played," a blow-by-blow coverage of every up-and-down moment of the one game playoff on October 1, 1978. All of the sudden, one page jumped off the page and hit me square between the eyes:
The Keep Your Sox On faithful sat silent in their fireman caps decorated with the names of their undependable deities: Boomer and Butch, Soup and Scooter, Rooster and Pudge, Eck and Louie, Big Foot and Spaceman, Dewey and Yaz.
Half an hour later, after an untold number of fevered Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia searches covering every combination of Keep Your Sox On, rooting group and fireman helmets I could think of, I was still puzzled. Who were these fans in their helmets, sporting the same moniker as my blog 26 years before the name popped into my head? Was this coincidence a case of Jungian collective unconsciousness, or had I encountered the phrase earlier in my life as a fan and buried it in my subconscious, where it waited for the right moment to bubble to the surface? More importantly, does anyone out there know anything about this group of fans? If so, put it in the comments section; I want to know the deal.
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