Sports Watch
IT'S no coincidence that the length of my sabbatical leave in being a Red Sox fan has been as long as Roger Clemens' exile from Boston. I’ve given up Red Sox
for the ‘Rocket’The very reason I stopped rooting for the Red Sox - my team since 1946 - was because they let 'The Rocket' go. Not re-signing Carlton Fisk was bad enough. But not giving Clemens anything he wanted after all he did for the Red Sox was the straw that stirred my hackles.
We're talking a future Hall of Famer, a guy who won three of his five American League Cy Young awards pitching for the Red Sox.
Still, you don't easily give up a team that you've suffered with through the years. Personally watching the Red Sox lose the seventh games of the 1967 and 1975 World Series has been hell on earth.
I'll return to being a Red Sox fan one of these years. At least I hope before the Great Scorekeeper in the Sky punches me out or the 'Green Monster' in Fenway Park collapses.
But I don't think it will be anytime soon after the way I felt the other day when Clemens beat the Red Sox for the first time while wearing Yankee pinstripes.
I was elated for Clemens. He might have said it was just another game, but knowing Clemens, you know he didn't mean it.
IT doesn't take much to motivate Clemens. I know, having talked to him over the many years during his golf vacations at Kapalua Bay. He gets pumped even about his golf game.
He certainly was jacked against the Red Sox on Thursday night, stopping them on two hits - one a single off Derek Jeter's glove, which the Yankee shortstop said should have been ruled an error.
Clemens repeatedly pumped his fist during the game. Just another game? Hardly.
He's still miffed at the brush-off by the Red Sox front office. Every victory's nice, but beating Boston is nice with an oak-leaf cluster.
The other thing that's obviously motivating Clemens is the chance to set a major league record for consecutive victories. He holds the American League record with 19 in a row.
How good is that? Just to give you an idea, the last time he lost a game was a year ago on this very day - May 29 - against Cleveland. Clemens was 5-6 and stormed back to win the Cy Young Award an unprecedented fifth time.
The major league record is 24 victories in a row set by Carl Hubbell of the New York Giants during the 1936-37 seasons. Hubbell's nickname was 'Meal Ticket' and Clemens is now the Yankees' 'Meal Ticket,' much to the chagrin of Red Sox fans.
NOT bad for someone Red Sox general manager Dan Duquette said was "at the twilight of his career" when he didn't re-sign Clemens after the 1996 season.
With back-to-back Cy Young Awards since leaving the Red Sox, it's obvious that 'The Rocket' is still blazing.
Fisk, a New England native who hit Boston's most fabled home run, disdained his former team so much that he wanted his Chicago White Sox, not the Red Sox uniform, in baseball's Hall of Fame.
Will Clemens, when he's inducted, opt for Yankee pinstripes despite having pitched 13 years for the Red Sox?
If he does, it'll be just another act in the continuing saga called the 'Curse of the Bambino.'
Dan Shaughnessy, the Boston Globe sportswriter who chronicled the team's bad karma in a book by that name, noted that Clemens made it part of his routine to visit Babe Ruth's plaque at Yankee Stadium when he was with the Red Sox, trying to break that curse.
"Now his job is to perpetuate the Curse," Shaughnessy said.