I often get asked, especially when I'm traveling, how someone from Montana becomes a Red Sox fan. I will talk about my fascination with US history when I was little and how I was enamored with the city of Boston, the fact that they were good but cursed when I was first becoming interested in the MLB circa 2003 (similar to my dad's team at the time, the Cubs), or how I went out there for school and got to see them play every once in a while. All that's true of why I like the Red Sox, but when I think about why I love the Red Sox, it has a lot to do with one player- David Ortiz. Of the Red Sox greats, he was the one most relevant to my generation- he came up clutch in the biggest moments and helped a franchise known for their postseason failures win THREE World Series titles. His personality was easy for me to love and relate to: easy-going and happy-go-lucky until he wasn't. He was without a doubt a leader in the clubhouse and his at-bats were a must watch for me. And as if all of that wasn't enough, one of my favorite moments as a sports fan involved him- I went alone (crazy) to the first game at Fenway after the Boston bomber was caught and saw both his infamous speech ("This is our f*cking city") and the win that followed, which included a couple of clutch hits from Mr. Clutch himself. It sounds corny, but I knew during that game that that team was special, and they proved me right by going on to win the World Series that year.
When Ortiz announced that he was retiring following the 2016 season, I knew I had to make it a priority to see my favorite player play as much as possible in his final season. This isn't exactly an easy task living in Montana, but I lucked out and had a business trip that allowed me to see him early in the season in Houston, and Joel and I figured a road trip to Minneapolis during the Red Sox stop there in May wasn't too difficult. We'd driven the 8 hours to Denver several times; what's another 4 hours each way?
0 Comments
The last game of our Denver sports weekend was a matchup of the Rockets and Nuggets. We'd seen the Nuggets play just a year before in LA against the Clippers, but this was already a fairly different team. The biggest name that was playing for them that game was probably Timofey Mozgov, so I was a lot more excited to see what James Harden and Dwight Howard had to show. But this Nuggets team played hard (at least on this night) and surprised us by coming away with the win and throwing in a few SportsCenter top 10 plays for good measure.
Some people can say they were at the first game at a stadium, first game where this that and the other happened, but how many people can say they were at the first game a professional franchise ever played? Our tour guide could. The Rockies haven't been around for too long, but neither that nor the snow detracted from the stadium tour. We got to see lots of cool nooks and crannies from the stadium, and more than any other tour that we've been on, I felt like I found out some areas that I want to try and get tickets to the next time we see a game or a series down in Denver. The stadium definitely puts the fans first, and there are some places where you can sit that aren't like a lot of other stadiums.
|
AuthorJust a couple of sports fans touring the world, one stadium at a time. Archives
March 2023
Categories
All
|
Proudly powered by Weebly