Halberstam on Red Sox conversion

David Halberstam (whose The Best and the Brightest I'm now reading) has a nice piece on the Red Sox Nation in the Boston Globe today. I think back on how I became a Red Sox convert - a citizen not by birth (having been born half a world away, and in a country without any baseball) but by naturalisation. I suppose "convert" isn't the right word, given that not knowing any baseball in Singapore I was unlikely to start following any team (having said that, I do remember seeing the Skydome when I was in Toronto in 1993... but that hardly counts). I became a Sox convert through osmosis: I think it was the constant feed of Sox news from boston.com (then my home page) and from TV, as I whiled away my Sunday afternoons in college doing work and watching the Sox on Fox 25. And then came the 1999 ALDS - my roommate had taken the term off, I had the room all to myself, and so to add some semblance of noise I left the TV on constantly - and then I saw Game 5, Pedro coming on in relief, the Troy O'Leary grand slam. It was an epiphany. It felt like Boston's heart was pounding collectively, and I don't think I've ever felt the collective will of a city for a sport outside of football, or "soccer" as some people seem to like to call it (mmm - watching World Cup 1998 in England!), and I was hooked... a late convert, then, but with the usual fervour of the convert...

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