World Series Title Is Returned to Philly
Once on a television show I was working on, Philly writer Joe Queenan was a guest speaking on the anniversary of the Phils’ World Series victory in 1980. The host asked him, “Philadelphia sports fans have a reputation for being very angry and bitter … why is that?” Queenan’s reply was so beautifully succinct that it was almost a haiku. “Well,” he said, “Philadelphia teams don’t win very much, and that makes us angry.” Growing up in suburban Philly, I was ten years old in 1980, and in the sweet but ignorant way of a child I thought our sports teams always won. The Stanley Cup victories of the Broad Street Bullies were very recent memories. The Eagles had been knocking on the door the past few years and were about to make their first Super Bowl appearance. The Sixers were a national powerhouse, finalists in 1980, a Moses Malone and an Andrew Toney away from perfection. And of course, there were the Phillies, World Champions with a roster stacked with star-power that made it seem to my uninformed brain that acquiring more world titles was only a matter of time passing.
If you’d told me, after the fo’, fo’, fo’ title of the mighty Sixers in ’83, that the next time there would be a championship parade in the city of Philadelphia, I would be 38 years old, I certainly wouldn’t have believed you and neither would anyone else at the time. The Phillies headed back to the Fall Classic later that same year, and the Sixers, well, at that moment it seemed that they, and not the Lakers or the Celtics, were on track to become the team of the 80’s.
It didn’t happen, though. Something went awry. I’ve always wondered if it was partially the fault of my own innocent hubris. Either way, 25 years is a long time for a city like Philly to endure without a chance to celebrate anything. We live in the shadow of New York and Boston and their epic propensity for bombast and self-love, New Yorkers who have so many teams that they can’t help but win a title every few years or so, and Bostonians who, as we all know, have had no shortage of success over the years, except for that one team that suffered deprivation, a suffering they so fetishized as to make it into some kind of proud sporting noblesse oblige.
We Philadelphians have not been so inclined. Noblesse has never obliged us to do jack-squat, because if there’s one thing we know about ourselves, it’s that we are not noblesse. All the suffering did for us was make us bitter and angry, which slowly turned us into the butt of many a national joke, which only made us angrier. It was a vicious cycle that tailspinned on and on, and before we knew it, we were Gollum chasing the Ring. “We loves the Ring ... we HATES the RING…”
Today it’s all over. The wicked witch has left the building, Mordor is up in flames, Darth Vader is dead. Honestly, I hardly even know how to begin to think about that other than to say that it feels not so much like something has been given to me as that something has been returned to me. I woke up this morning with a feeling of possibility that I haven’t felt in a long, long time. To paraphrase that great Boston poet Robert Lowell (Mr. Noblesse Oblige himself), it’s pleasant enough and now my life is in my hands. That something so trivial as baseball has the power to affect such transformations is utterly baffling to me, but then it’s often been observed that what we really want from sports is nothing so much as a constant reminder that we are all children at heart.
↵
This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.
See More:
