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.

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.