Bottom of the Barrel

Every great hero could not exist without their accompanying villain. Batman had the Joker. Dudley Do-Right had Snidely Whiplash. The 1997 Chicago Bulls had the 1998 Chicago Bulls. Yes, no great good can exist without its great evil, no positivity without its accompanying negativity, and no success without failure.

A little while ago, I wrote about the top five sports memories of my life--but that was only half the story. The truth is that those moments would not have been as sweet without the bottom five, and therefore those moments, as painful as they may have been, were instrumental in propelling me to the highest heights of sports enjoymeny. At least, that's what I tell myself when I wake up in a cold sweat with the Red Sox' 1995 ALDS loss to the Indians replaying in my head. Anyway, for better or for worse, here they are, the other piece of the puzzle. As we Bostonians like to do, the list is organized by singling out the pivotal figure in each moment and inserting a swear word into their name.

THE BOTTOM FIVE SPORTS MEMORIES OF D.R.W.'S LIFE:

5. 1999 ALCS, GAME 4 (TIM F@&%ING TSCHIDA)

A little bit of a wild card choice. Sure, it was the playoffs, and it was the Yankees, but even at 13, I was a little too young to fully realize the implications of a Red Sox-Yankees playoff series. Also, the Red Sox probably would have lost the series anyway, and even if they hadn't wound up on the bad end of one of the worst calls in sports history, they probably would have lost the game anyway. All in all, relatively inconsequential, for what I'm declaring to be a bottom-five moment. But, I mean, holy hell, does he look out to you?

4. 2007 AFC CHAMPIONSHIP GAME (MARLIN F@&%ING JACKSON)

If a theme is going to develop over the course of this list (and if I can help it, it never will), it's how some of the worst sports moments in my life came as the Patriots were repeatedly denied as they attempted to make the leap from the great team of their decade to one of the truly transcendent teams in football history. This was one of those times. The Pats were on the way to their fourth Super Bowl of the decade, and it was going to be oh so sweet. They were going to beat their hated rival to do it, and everything was lining up perfectly for Tom Brady to direct one of his patented humiliating, backbreaking, heroic game-winning drives. Then he was intercepted by Marlin Jackson. Who? Exactly.

Oh yeah, and Manning and the Colts went on to win their first Super Bowl. Peyton was MVP. I need to take a five-minute break.

...

3. 2006 NFL PLAYOFFS: PATRIOTS-BRONCOS (CHAMP F@&%KING BAILEY)

I'm back, but it's not going to get any easier. This game was actually very similar to the last one--big playoff loss, huge interception, doomed season, aborted dynasty. So what makes it worse than the Colts game, if that one involved a rivalry and this one didn't? It's pretty simple--this one came first, and this one derailed a run at three Super Bowls in a row. If any game did the most to prevent the Patriots from taking their place among the greatest NFL teams of all time, it was this one. I'm not going to complain too much, since I've been more than content following a three-Super-Bowls-in-a-decade team. But unlike, say, the 1999 ALCS, I fully understood the significance of this loss as I watched it unfold, and that was tough.

2. SUPER BOWL XLII (ELI F@&%KING MANNING/DAVID F@&%KING TYREE)

I'll never experience a defeat quite like this one, because I've never felt more of a need for my team to win. There was the mounting burden of 19-0, combined with the fact that, for a variety of reasons, the 44 other states were all rooting for New England to go down in flames. As every game passed, the pressure on the Patriots to lose intensified, but they were just one game away from emerging safely from all of it, and forcing the Patriots-hating world to respect them, if not like them.

But when Eli Manning wriggled free from about nine pass rushers, when David Tyree made the most improbable catch I've ever seen, when Asante Samuel mistimed his leap for a potential game-ending pick--it gave the world the opportunity to label the Pats chokers as well as cheaters. In one game, what should have been the greatest achievement in NFL history became the catalyst for an offseason of mockery. As a sports fan, you're prepared to see your team lose big games every now and then, but I've never seen so high and mighty a team brought down so low in the course of one game, and I never will again.

1. 2003 ALCS, GAME 7 (AARON F@&%KING BOONE)

I spent the better part of an hour trying to write this paragraph, and I couldn't do it. Really. Five years later, and I still couldn't. That's how bad it was.