Game Six Read Free Page B

that night, but he pondered the curious lack of excitement he felt about the prospect.
    Like we’re going to be playing any other regular season game.
    He wasn’t the only one who felt it that morning; players, coaches, journalists, and fans all over Boston agreed that this delay—tied now for the second longest in World Series history—had really taken the edge off the game.
    Well, that’ll probably change when we get to the park.
     
    AT THE BOSTON GLOBE on Morrissey Boulevard, the sports department staff slowly rolled in around nine, more than a few ofthem the worse for wear. Editor Tom Winship called their morning meeting to order and began to divvy up the day’s assignments on Game Six story lines. They had written themselves cross-eyed trying to wring angles and fill columns out of the three-day delay—a few had finally thrown up their hands and written about how little they had to write about—and with no small relief they welcomed the chance to process and package the meat of a real game again. Bob Ryan, Bud Collins, Cliff Keane, Will McDonough, Leigh Montville, Ray Fitzgerald, Peter Gammons—old-school newspapermen, self-styled sentimental cynics covering the most literate sports-mad town since Athens. While the Celtics and Bruins routinely won championships and their fans’ dogged admiration, the Red Sox remained the region’s more inconstant and elusive muse; a beautiful, terrible object of obsession, blind faith, and reliably unhappy endings.
    Globe staffers would all pursue variations on the same themes that day: After a valiant, uplifting pennant-winning season and their first postseason series victory in fifty-seven years—a commanding three-game sweep over Oakland in the American League Championship—Boston’s beloved, star-crossed Sox found themselves down three games to two in the World Series against Cincinnati’s indomitable Big Red Machine. Here we go again: The bastards had raised their hopes all summer then delivered them once again to the brink of heartbreak, and for the past few days a damned nor’easter wouldn’t even let them get it over with. Would the old funereal dirge play again at Fenway tonight, or could this unlikeliest collection of local heroes mount one last stand and extend the Series to a seventh and deciding game?
    Lesley Visser, twenty-two, Quincy native, recent graduate of Boston College, former cheerleader—and every man on staff’s favorite cub reporter—hovered on the margins and kept quiet whenever this formidable group gathered. Sportswriting had for a century been exclusively a male fraternity; Visser wasn’t just a pioneer, she was nearly Jackie Robinson. Following the unlikely dream she’d had since the age of ten had brought her inside the doors of her favoritenewspaper, but just by inches; only patience, sustained excellence, and quiet persistence would take her any further. When the meeting broke at ten, once again without a Series-related assignment sent her way, and the tribe’s elders dispersed to begin tapping sources, Lesley walked back to patrol her bottom-rung beat, checking the schedule of high school football games she’d be covering that weekend.
    Disappointment must have shown on her face—she hadn’t even been able to finagle a ticket to any of the three Series games at Fenway yet—because Peter Gammons suddenly appeared over her desk, holding up a small green tag in his hand, saying he had called in a favor. She didn’t initially realize what she was looking at, and then noticed the word “PRESS.” And someone had scrawled across it with a felt-tip pen: “Game Six.”
    A press pass.
    Peter got a hug. The pass went into Lesley’s purse.
     
    ALONE ON THE DIAMOND at Fenway early that morning, Joe Mooney stood out near second base, waiting for the helicopters. If they’d held a contest for “grumpiest and most exhausted man in New England,” Mooney would’ve won by acclamation. The park’s head groundskeeper had manned his post