Exorcising the demons Sox fans, novelists King, O’Nan follow championship season from start to end

loading...

Some addictions are earned. Some are thrust upon us.

I was born in Kenmore Square, a long foul from Fenway Park. I was raised in Irish Catholic West Roxbury, where the first religion was practiced at St. Theresa’s Church and the second at Fenway Park.

I went to my first game at Fenway with my father when I was 8 and I can still remember walking out of that dank dungeon into the sunshine and seeing that impossibly green, green grass.

I never had a chance.

I became a lifelong Red Sox fan, with all that that entails. I was too young for the 1946 series when they lost to the Cardinals when Pesky might have held the ball.

But I was (I swear) there for Ted Williams’ last home run. I was there for the pennant-winning game in 1967. On television, I grieved in 1986 when Buckner lost the grounder (after Gedman let the Mets tie it), when Jim Lonborg lost the seventh game to Bob Gibson. All right, I cheered when Bucky (damn him) Dent hit the homer in 1978, but that was different because of heavy betting. I was shocked when Pedro Martinez was left in against the Yankees in 2003.

It was a culture of consistent losing, especially to the Damn Yankees.

It was nothing short of a baseball miracle when the Red Sox finally actually beat the Yankees, then won the World Series against the Cardinals. I am still shocked. I never thought I would live long enough.

I bought the Globe commemorative edition. Then the Boston Herald’s. Then Sports Illustrated. I watched all the television shows. I did not believe it, not completely.

Now I do.

I finally got an advance copy of “Faithful,” the opus by horrormeister Stephen King and pal-novelist Stewart O’Nan. King and O’Nan were lucky enough to get hired by Scribner to chronicle the Sox season from Fort Myers to (no one really believed it) the World Series.

I will be reading this book for the rest of my life because I believe firmly that the Red Sox will never, ever, ever do this again.

King and O’Nan are a perfect pair, with the latter setting the beat with daily entries, nuts and bolts reporting, and then King sweeping onto the stage with Eddie Van Halen solos. They do not possess the Cadillac, lyrical quality of baseball scribe Roger Angell. But then again, no one else does, either. In a surprise, the book is very funny, often as lewd as you like it.

If there is a criticism, and there must be, the book could have a lot less June, when the team struggled despite their $100-plus-million payroll, and a lot more October, when they beat New York, then St. Louis.

Initially, O’Nan is easy to hate, since he doesn’t hesitate to tell us he was “a born world champion” since he was a Pittsburgh Pirates fan in 1961 when Bill (bless him) Mazeroski hit a walk-off home run in 1961 against the Yankees, a team he then considered “hard luck losers.”

But he is sucked in, with the rest of us, when he is exposed to the Red Sox mystique. Two whiffs of that perfume and he was a gone goose.

In an April 8 e-mail to his co-author, O’Nan complains, “How about Damon’s catch last night? I saw it on tape. Dinner with friends. Isn’t it annoying, the way life keeps intruding on baseball?”

He joins in the mass baseball execution of last year’s manager Grady Little, dismissed as “Chauncy Gardner” from Jerzy Kosinski’s masterpiece “Being There,” then adds, “Little didn’t exactly strike me as a Stephen Hawking figure.”

Welcome aboard, O’Nan.

King, of course, was to the curse born. He even shared my passion for Fort Myers, a drab Florida west coast town brightened only by the presence of Red Sox spring training. Why else would anyone go there? The Ford Museum?

O’Nan agrees. “Fort Myers is an endless grid of strip malls and stoplights and everyone drives like they’re having a heart attack or trying to find an emergency room for someone who is. We fly past Mattress World, Bath World, Rug World. It’s Hicksville, Long Island with palm trees and pelicans.”

But spring training is the resurrection.

“But it can’t hurt to say that being here – especially after a serious bout of pneumonia – feels pretty wonderful. It’s like putting your hand out and touching a live thing – another season when great things may happen. Miracles even. And if that isn’t touching grace, it’s pretty close,” King adds. The 60-degree difference from Maine doesn’t hurt, either.

King tells us he has been looking for the baseball promised land “ever since my Uncle Oren bought me my first Red Sox cap and stuck it on my head in 1954.

“‘There, Stevie,’ he said, blowing the scent of Narragansett Beer into the face of a big-eyed seven-year-old looking up at him. ‘They ain’t much, but they’re the best we got.'”

God, he has it bad.

If you have bothered to read this far, then you know all about the regular season games, the June and July swoon, the “hottest August on record” and “hanging’ tough” in September and October. Forget the Angels. Fast-forward to Yankee Stadium on Oct. 17. The Yankees have taken a 3-0 playoff lead with a 19-8 pasting of the Sox.

Some of us took to our beds with the 300-count covers pulled tightly over our heads.

Not this pair. King: “We tell ourselves it’s just one game at a time. We tell ourselves the impossible can start tonight.”

It does. In one of the most amazing, dramatic turnarounds in sports or life or literature or medicine or physics or anything else you care to name, the Sox do not lose another game.

“Faithful” has become invaluable to me since all of the damn games have somehow blurred into one, with Johnny “Caveman” Damon, Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz, even Mark Bellhorn blasting home run after home run. This opus gives us the bare bones details, with a few flourishes.

O’Nan on Yankee Stadium after Game Seven: “It’s as if the Red Sox walked through Yankee Stadium, driving stakes through every single ghost’s, vampire’s and Yankee fan’s rotten, cobwebby heart. It’s quiet and the upper deck is half empty. The Yankees are cooked and their fans can’t believe it. In the biggest game ever played in this rivalry, the Red Sox have beaten the Yankees at home by a touchdown, on Mickey Mantle’s birthday.”

“Who’s your daddy?” he asked. After that, the World Series (can you believe it?) is actually anti-climactic.

King says the country is at war, with troops dying every day. “We are fighting a war on terrorism. We are electing a president in two weeks and the dialogue between the two candidates has never been hotter. In light of those things, does winning the pennant even matter?

“You bet your ass it does,” King wrote.

On to the World Series.

The Red Sox win Game 1 despite making four colossal errors and Tim Wakefield (my least-favorite player) walking four Cards in a single inning. The series is over.

Curt Schilling comes out bleeding through his Red Sox red socks, Cardinal pitcher Jeff Suppan does the boogaloo off third base until he is thrown out. “As frantic and disoriented as a bird trapped in a garage,” King says. (He should write more books.)

Hell freezes over. The curse is over. Both King and O’Nan agreed that they didn’t really believe any of this until they saw it on the morning broadcast on NESN. Me neither.

Lets close with O’Nan. “It did happen. It was no dream. We’re the World Champions, finally and there’s that freeing feeling of redemption and fulfillment I expected – The same cleansing feeling I had after the Pat’s first Super Bowl win. The day is bright and blue, the leaves are brilliant and blowing. It’s a beautiful day in the Nation, maybe the best ever.”

Amen.

It really happened.

Send complaints and compliments to Emmet Meara at emmetmeara@msn.com.