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.

Greatest Hits

It's been a tough week. And, since I'm in need of a pick-me-up, and because my posts seem to tilt inevitably towards Boston homerism so I may as well stop resisting and embrace it, I've decided to list, in descending order, the top five sports memories of my life. I invite my colleagues, if they're interested, to do the same, since I'd be interested to hear their stories, and because it will delay the inevitable "worst five memories of my life" follow-up post that will depress me for weeks.

Without further ado:

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

5. 2008 ALCS, GAME 5

This one can't go any higher than number 5--when you don't go on to win the championship, and when you in fact don't even wind up winning the series, it's tough to remember this game without thinking about what could have been. Still, it has a legacy--from now on, I can never give up on an important game, no matter how painful a bludgeoning it's become, because the 2008 Red Sox forced me to admit that there's always a chance. Yes, it's going to be a painful existence, thanks to this game--but it will all be worth it if I can ever even come close to replicating the moment when I collapsed on the floor after J.D. Drew's walkoff liner and had absolutely no way to process what I'd just seen. God, I love sports--and we're only on Number 5. The list is working its magic already.

4. 2008 NBA FINALS, GAME 6

So tempting to pick a different game--maybe the night that Pierce and LeBron channelled Bird and Wilkins as my friends and I watched, incredulously, in our college dorm, or the 24-point comeback that we took in at a bar off of Boylston Street. But those experiences were all about us, and what set the 2008 Celtics apart was that it was all about them. Just when I worried that I might grow desensitized after so many Boston championships, along came a team that wanted to win more than anyone else I'd ever seen. Sure, Kevin Garnett's post-victory interview is undeniably funny--but it's also one of the greatest expressions of pure emotion you'll find anywhere in sports. I'm happy when my teams win, but when the 2008 Celtics won, I was happy for them. And, you know, for myself too.

3. SUPER BOWL XXXVI

Without a doubt, the worst actual championship you'll find anywhere on this list. Sure, the Pats were huge underdogs, and that made it a hugely exciting game--but it can't compare to the raw emotionality of the Celtics win, or the sheer magnitude of any championships that may or may not be coming farther down in this list. But still, it was a great game, it was the rise of Tom Brady, and, most importantly, it was the first championship any of my teams had ever won on my watch.* To put that moment any lower than third would be criminal.

2. 2004 WORLD SERIES

I can't pick a specific game, because--let's face it--the actual games were, objectively, terribly boring. The 2004 World Series wasn't about great comebacks or heroic moments, or even individual games at all--it was about optimism. Even after the Sox-Yankees ALCS, Boston fans couldn't shake the feeling that there was always a way not to win. How awful would it be if the Red Sox completed the most incredible comeback in baseball history--and then lost? It would, in fact, have been so terrible that I honestly believed it would happen. That was the mindset in Boston--until it didn't happen, and things were never the same again. Optimism. It's a beautiful thing.

1. 2004 ALCS

Which game do you want me to pick? Should I choose the one where, facing elimination the night after losing 19-8, the Red Sox countered with the most famous stolen base in team history and a clutch RBI single off of the greatest closer that ever was, followed by a David Ortiz walkoff home run in extra innings? Or maybe the one that went 14 innings and six hours, featuring a miraculously bizarre hop that prevented Tony Clark's liner to right from winning the series for the Yankees, as well as the most exruciatingly tense inning in baseball history, when, in the 13th, Varitek ended up catching Wakefield (to which he was not accustomed), and surrendered three (!) passed balls and was just one away from losing the entire series? Followed by yet another Ortiz walk-off hit? Or maybe I should pick the one where Curt Schilling shut down Yankee Stadium while actively bleeding from the ankle, because his tendon was scraping against the bone due to surgery that the team doctor had only ever performed on a cadaver, and A-Rod was called out at first after the glove-slapping incident, causing fans to throw baseballs and debris onto the field to the point that the game was stopped and riot police were stationed along the warning track as A-Rod looked on the verge of tears for the remainder of the game?

There's no way. If I made myself pick one game for each item on this list, those would be 1, 2, and 3 in some order or another, and Game 7 would be Number 4 for good measure. It was that good. It was the greatest professional sports victory of all time, anywhere, and you'll never convince me otherwise. It transformed a town, a team, and a rivalry forever. I will never have a better sports memory for the rest of my life, and I am entirely OK with that. I have every game on DVD.

*Unless you count the 1986 Celtics title, which they won when I was two months old. I like to think I contributed.