Wustest to Fustest

I'm a sports fan. In this era of overpaid athletes -- even athletes in sports like swimming and track and field -- it's hard to revel in the purity of sport for purely the sake of competition, but I try. I'm fascinated by golf, but I also think to myself now "how hard can it be to live like that when you go home with $100,000 or so for finishing sixth?" I think that the rewards vs. effort equation is much tougher for tennis -- those men and women work hard for their money. (Just look at the injuries they go through.) But yet, I like sports. I like tension, games coming down to the final seconds, the to-and-fro, ebb-and-flow, mano-a-mano: you name it, there's hardly anything as exciting as watching a great competition except for the even rarer thrill of being able to actually compete in one.

For me, there are two ultimately exciting events in sports. One is the big upset, the hungry upstart defeating the cagey veteran. Rarely are such upsets blow-outs; usually (like Nadal over Federer in this year's Wimbledon), it "goes the distance". The other is the big comeback, when a person or team looking down-and-out rallies against pain and fatigue and injury and odds and manages to win. Andre Agassi in tennis had a number of major comebacks from two sets down; even his personal comeback from double wrist surgery where his ranking dropped into the 100s, and he came back to win the U.S. Open, was exciting. Football is famous for sudden turnarounds and lightning-strike comebacks; baseball fans yearn for the rally.

So I was enthralled by the Tampa Bay Rays vs. the Red Sox in the just-completed American League Championship Series. It had all those elements; Tampa Bay is a team (and a municipal region) with very little championship history, despite hosting a number of spring training baseball teams. They got excited back when Steve Spurrier was coaching the Bandits. (Think hard now; what league and what sport was that?) Oh YEAH -- the Tampa Bay Lightning did win a Stanley Cup. Hockey in Florida? But anyway: the Tampa Bay Devil Rays were awful. There biggest moment prior to this year was in a Dennis Quaid movie. But change the name and get young hungry upstarts on the team, and they made the playoffs. And came up against the Red Sox, now become the Evil Horde from the North with two championships in this decade, as the former Empire has faded (the Yankees, dontcha know).

So Tampa Bay takes the lead in the series,and then in Game 5, and Boston looks done; cooked; over. Until Dustin Pedroia, who is nearly impossible to get out, got a two-out, two-strike hit. Boston came back big time, with homers and long flies and basically destroyed Tampa's momentum. And it looked like, their will to win. Then Boston won game 6, with more clutch, and the Tampa Bay team needed a lot of Pepto-Bismol. Everything was going Boston's way.

Until it wasn't. Upsets are close, and game 7 was very close. The big event was phenom David Price striking out J.D. Drew with bases loaded in the eighth and Tampa only leading 3-1. But it was even closer than that; Coco Crisp was out when he should have been safe trying to break up a double play that probably wouldn't have happened, and Pedroia just missed on a long fly to left field that with a few more yards would have put Boston in the lead. In almost every upset, the winner has to have a little luck. The Rays did.

Unfortunately in sports that have playoffs leading to a championship, its hard to remember the "semi-finals". Vitas Gerulaitis took Bjorn Borg to five sets in 1977 ( 6-4, 3-6, 6-3, 3-6, 8-6), and even had a match point winner on his racket, but lost (still, it was a classic match -- Google "Gerulaitis Borg" and you'll see). But we much more readily remember Borg-McEnroe than Borg-Gerulaitis, and Borg's five straight Wimbledons.

The Phillies-Rays World Series could be a classic or a bust. But I hope we don't forget the "semi-finals", the 2008 ALCS.