Forgiving Bill Buckner

But there was never much of a healing. Boston fans, like their East Coast counterparts in New York and Philly, can be particularly abrasive, and Buckner had enough unpleasant encounters with Red Sox fans, enough stupid questions—"How could you …"—for which he had no answer, that he fled west, 2,600 miles west, to a ranch in Idaho. He would start a car dealership out there and, though he returned to Fenway Park as a coach with the White Sox, it was never comfortable, lacking any sense that he belonged. "I am a little bitter toward some of the things that have happened there," Buckner told ESPN a couple of years ago, which explained why he had not returned to Boston to be part of a Fenway celebration that season honoring that '86 team.

On Tuesday, I joined the Opening Day throngs at Fenway to celebrate the 2007 Red Sox championship, the team's second in four glorious years. The first had broken a curse that had been prolonged another 18 years after Buckner's '86 miscue. Last year confirmed to even the most skeptical Boston fans that the curse was indeed dead and buried and that the Red Sox are a franchise that now stands atop the Major League Baseball world.

The Red Sox do ceremony exceedingly well, and after an hour of buoyant self-congratulation, my hands were feeling almost as bruised as when I popped the wall 22 years ago. Before we fans even got to our current Red Sox heroes, Boston sports legends like Bill Russell, John Havlicek, Bobby Orr and Tedy Bruschi paraded onto the field with their own championship trophies. And then there were the 2007 Red Sox, remarkably almost the same team as the 2008 Red Sox so we got to applaud almost every Sox player twice. Biggest applause went to Manny Ramirez, who would later stun the crowd by uncharacteristically hustling out of the box on a gapper and legging out a triple, to the irrepressible Big Papi, to the captain, Jason Varitek, to pitching ace Josh Beckett and to closer Jonathan Papelbon, who came out of the dugout to an Irish stepdance beat, but discreetly, given the perils of a long season, chose not to dance his way along the field. The Red Sox also boast three players about whom you can say, "The fans are not booing, they are saying …": Youkilis, Drew and Lugo. They were definitely chanting "Youk," but I couldn't swear that the latter two didn't garner some boos. Boston is still, even on glory days, a tough town.

Then came the surprise and what would be the loudest and most prolonged ovation of the afternoon. When it came time for a mystery guest to throw out the first pitch, out of the outfield wall and onto the field strode Buckner—his No. 6 shirttails flopping over his pants, a slightly nervous look on his face, suggesting that the bruising he had received in those years following his error had made him uncertain that he wasn't about to make an equally big error, this one of judgment. It's a bit too facile to say he needn't have worried. But as the crowd recognized Buckner and understood what was about to happen, it erupted in cheers and applause and shouts of welcome without any evidence of a single naysayer. Honestly, it would have been harder to imagine any more enthusiastic response had Ted Williams's head risen from its icy grave and returned to Fenway.

Buckner's response to the welcome fell something short of that. He was a man who had always felt that he had done nothing wrong, that he had done his best and, though he fallen short, had nothing for which to apologize. Though it looked for one moment on the mound like he might be wiping away a nascent tear, his response remained muted—a cautious smile and a wave. There was a palpable tension emanating from him, as if he wasn't sure that something ugly might sneak up on him and ruin the moment. Only after he threw the ball, a nice, gentle strike to his former teammate Dwight Evans behind the plate, and the crowd roared its approval did he finally seem to relax and fully embrace his Fenway moment.

I may be sentimental, but not totally naive. Red Sox Nation didn't even exist 22 years ago—the Sox were strictly a New England passion—so many of the younger fans at the ballpark Tuesday had no visceral recall of Buckner's misplay let alone a broken heirloom sitting in a bureau drawer. And obviously it's far easier to be gracious and forgiving on the heels of triumph than had cursed bad luck continued to plague the Red Sox. Regardless of any caveats, reconciliation turns out to be kind of cool. We don't get to experience much of it in our lives, not in this ever-nastier, ever-more-divided world. So this passion play on a ballfield in Boston, irrelevant as it may be to the greater problems in the larger world, felt really good and sweet. Made me covet some more of it. I'm thinking maybe Bartman at Wrigley for Opening Day 2009.

© 2008