Forgiving Bill Buckner

In October 1986, when the baseball rolled through Bill Buckner's legs, fool that I was I already had a bottle of Champagne in my hand ready to pop and pour in celebration of the first Red Sox World Series championship in 68 years.

I was watching with my upstairs neighbors Ben and Mardi as well as with Ben's parents, in from Los Angeles for a visit, which constrained what would have been my normal response to that extraordinary gaffe. Though I was ostensibly a grown-up, almost two score years, I remained old school, well-mannered, at least in the presence of my elders, and didn't feel comfortable unleashing the appropriate string of profanities that would represent my outrage and heartbreak.

So instead I smashed my hand into the wall. I was probably more stunned by that gesture than anyone else, given that I seldom displayed much temper let alone any trace of a violent one. I was also very lucky that I didn't break my hand, though I did break a treasured watch that my father had passed on to me and also punctured an expensive hole in my living-room wall.

It was guys like me—overfed on Boston lore of disappointment after disappointment until this whole baseball thing here bordered on tragedy—that made Buckner's name another curse word in our community. There was a certain familiar ring to it: in the span of a decade, from BUCKY Dent to Bill BUCKNER, it spelled doom. There is just something in those names—I'm not sure exactly what it is—that pair so nicely with a common vulgarity.

Personally I forgave Buckner long ago. As any real baseball fan knows, when you parse that fatal sixth-game fold against the New York Mets, there are so many folks who could wear the goat's horns—Roger Clemens, Calvin Schiraldi, Bob Stanley, Rich Gedman, manager John McNamara—that Buckner's climactic, through-the-wickets moment was only the most stunning and theatrical. (Of course, the real climax came in Game 7 when the Sox blew a 3-0 lead—Billy Buck was a steady 2-4 in that game—to assure Buckner's decades of Boston ignominy.)

Still, I never gave much thought to the toll the city's rage took on Buckner, a terrific player—a gamer who never gave less than his all while playing on knees that are worse than mine today (and that's bad). Never gave any thought to how it impacted his family, especially his three kids, who saw their father transformed in a split second from local hero to forever a pariah. Buckner actually played some more games for the Red Sox, a half season the next year before he was released, and then a surprising, if brief, return engagement in his final season—he got a reasonably warm Opening Day reception—in 1990 before he retired in midseason.