As the Philadelphia Phillies moved—somehow, I’m still not sure how—closer to a World Series title last night, an unexpected thought popped into my head: What will I do if they win? Let’s face it, like all Philly sports fans, I was rusty. The last time I celebrated a team from the city winning a championship, I was 14. I watched as the Sixers, up 3-0 on the Lakers in the 1983 NBA Finals, went down by 10 points at halftime. My dad said I should go to bed, they would win it another night. When I woke up the next morning, he walked into my room and told me they’d won it that night, while I was asleep. I sat on my bed and threw my hands in the air. It was a great feeling, and I still remember it well, but it wasn’t a good guide for how to react when you’re actually watching your team win. I would need to do more.
I tried a few scenarios in my head, but the only thing I could imagine doing was bolting straight out of my apartment in my socks and sprinting around the block. I thought about an article that the once humble Boston Red Sox fan (and now smug Red Sox and Patriots fan) Charles Pierce wrote for Slate about what he did when the Sox ended their curse in 2004:
I went out into the yard, out into what Faulkner called the "iron New England dark." I heard them yelling in the distance a town away, behind the trees and over the hill. I stood there and listened to the rolling chorus of distant joy. I raised a glass to the shaded moon.
I raised it for the old sign-painter, my grandfather, who'd been there with his father the last time this happened, when that fat slug Ruth beat the Chicagos, and to whom I was one of two regular companions on a lot of Sundays past, watching an endless parade of awful Boston Red Sox teams. The other one was a quart bottle of Narragansett Lager. I raised the glass to my friend, the editor, who did so love baseball and who left us, damn it, a month ago, and missed every wonderful moment. God, John, you would have loved it so.
I remembered thinking that that sounded like a pretty civilized thing to do. I had a beer next to me, so maybe I could do the same and raise a glass for my grandmother, a devoted Jimmy Rollins fan who died last year (more on her at another time). But something told me I wasn’t going to have Pierce’s presence of mind. Plus, there would be no "rolling chorus of distant joy." I was in Brooklyn, hundreds of miles from Philly. The sports bar across the street had a college football game on.
No, I was in this by myself. Being a fan of a team from another town is a lonely battle, but it also makes the heart grow fonder. It’s easy to romanticize any place from a distance, and that goes double for the City of Brotherly Love and its ever-losing sports teams. There is a “Philly bar” in Manhattan, called Wogies, which shows the Phils, Iggles, Sixers, and Flyers and serves a passable cheesesteak (though it doesn’t hold even the tiniest candle to Voltacos’ in Ocean City, N.J.; there’s something about that PA/Jersey bread). But Wogies is always jammed for playoff games. I have one Philly-fan friend in the area, Pat, and he came over to watch the first version of the fifth game on Monday. But that was such a painful and nerve-wracking—sodden—experience that we decided just to watch this one in our respective places, by ourselves, pacing our respective floors.
Sometimes I DVR these things, so I can speed up the action when it gets too tense. Sometimes I can’t take it and just go online and find out how it ended. But I was determined to experience this game with the rest of the world—or at least the very small portion tuning in. Either way, I had to watch every pitch. The one pitch I wasn’t watching last night—I went into the kitchen to make the necessary upgrade to hard liquor; beer just wasn’t going to cut it this time—was the pitch that Rocco Baldelli hit for a home run to tie the score for the Rays. Naturally, I couldn’t risk that kind of thing happening again, so there were no more trips anywhere while the game was being played. (This kind of bizarre, deluded, even pathetic superstition is well known among all sports fans. I seem to remember watching most of the 1980 World Series with my family on the tiny, 10-inch black-and-white TV in our kitchen rather than on the big color one in the living room. I even think my mom, for some unknown reason, wasn't allowed to be in the room when second baseman Manny Trillo came to bat. Hey, the Phillies won. You can’t argue with success.)
To keep the nerves at bay, there was a lot of texting with my friend Pat—hitting the tiny keys felt good. Here is a sample of our elevated repartee:
“Do it, Shane.”
“Chase Utley. Sounds like the world’s richest dog.”
“Let me just say one thing. Pedro Feliz is a great, great man.”
“Is the bridge [to Lidge] sturdy?
“Oh yes it is.”
“How do you know?
“I just know.”
“Dude, Upton. Look out.”
“Heeeeuuuuge!”
“I can’t watch Lidge with a one-run lead. I just can’t.”
“Here we go…”
“Gonna puke.”
“They -----ing did it!”
“Tears”
“They’re still booing Selig. Philly is awesome.”
“The world champion Philadelphia Phillies. Is that even possible?”
“Nope. That’s why it’s so great.”
So what did I do when a team from Philadelphia finally won? As reliever Brad Lidge prepared to throw the final pitch, I stood straight up, as close I could get to the TV screen. As the ball dove and the Ray at the plate whiffed at it helplessly, I felt like the floor dropped out from under my feet—no exaggeration, it was a physical reaction. I fell down, vehemently whispering “Yes!” I laid down flat on the floor. I got up. I checked the screen to make sure the Phillies really had won the game. When I was sure they had, and it couldn't be called back, and Lidge was on his knees screaming at God, I pushed downward three or four times with both arms, like a child having a fit. I whispered, more loudly and more vehemently, like Molly Bloom if she’d been from Manayunk instead of Dublin, “Yes!”
That’s what I did. Charles Pierce would not be proud. Like I said, I was rusty.
Why am I telling you this? Am I trying to embarrass myself and make sports-fandom sound absurd? The opposite, in fact. Nick Hornby, novelist and soccer obsessive, says that fans of any team are members of that team the same way the players are—there’s no difference. I’ve always loved that idea in theory, but couldn’t quite but into it in practice. But this time I felt it in my gut as that last ball went in for a strike. I did virtually the same thing, with the same kind of involuntary, absurd, inexplicable emotion, that Brad Lidge did at the exact same moment. Now I know it's true. We're on the same team. Somehow, I'm still not sure how, it's a winning team.
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Click here to see the final out, as called by the voice of my, and every other Phillies fan’s youth, Harry Kalas, whose greatest gifts to mankind are, "Swing and a miss, STRUCK HIM OUT" and "That ball is outta here." I recently read this little anecdote about Harry the K, a man who apparently likes his drinks and his stories:
"My old boss told me a story about Harry Kalas walking into his dad's bar about 20 years ago. Put away a few drinks, told stories to the guys, charmed the ladies, and stayed until just before closing. Then, without a word to anyone, he got up, walked to the door, spun around, and said:
"Attention Ev-e-Re-Bo-dy..."
"I am Outta Heeeerrreeee!"
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Paris post tomorrow.