25 Years Ago Today -- You Don't Gotta Believe

Do you remember what you were doing exactly 25 years ago today (October 26)? I can tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing because it was one of the most formative moments, if not the most formative moment, of my life as a sports fan. I was in Queens, New York, in the house owned by my dad's longtime friend John Schunke and his wife, Eileen, watching Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. My brothers were there with me, as were John and Eileen's two young children and a babysitter. My mom and dad, along with John and Eileen, though, were not. They were at the game.

We were all Mets fans, and when the Mets made it to the World Series (for the first time in 13 years), the Schunkes were able to get tickets to Game 6. None of us knew, of course, at the time that this would become one of the most memorable games not just in baseball history, but in U.S. sports history in general.

I'm sure most of you know the story of the game. Tied at 3-3 after nine innings, the Boston Red Sox took the lead with two runs in the top of the tenth. Then, the first two hitters for the Mets in the bottom of the tenth were retired, leaving the team that had won 108 games that season down to one out, and eventually one strike, against one of the most storiedly cursed teams in Major League Baseball history, as the Red Sox had gone 68 years since their last World Series championship. Indeed, the scoreboard at Shea Stadium flashed for a moment "Congratulations, Boston Red Sox, 1986 World Champions." But, that congratulations to the Red Sox would have to wait another 18 years. The Mets rallied back with that one out left to score three runs, with the winning run of Ray Knight scoring as Mookie Wilson's groundball to first base scooted through the legs of Bill Buckner. The Mets would go on to win Game 7 two days later and, of course, take the championship in the process.

I've come to realize in recent years that I think this led me for awhile to believe that destiny exists in sports. It seemed to me, the Mets fan (and I'm sure Red Sox fans have understandably very different feelings), that the Mets deserved to win the championship, having won 108 games that year, tying the 1984 Detroit Tigers (who also won the World Series) for the most wins by any team in the 1980s. And so it was ... they did win, in dramatic fashion. And for years I held on to ideas about sports teams being destined to win, something that I think also for a while influenced my views on the world in general. It was easy for me to believe that people who seemed to deserve success would get success--a firmly entrenched belief in the mythology of the American Dream.

Unfortunately, it doesn't always work that way, and indeed, even determining who is "deserving" and who is not is very much an ideologically loaded judgment (again, just ask Red Sox fans about my idea that the Mets deserved to win). So, as I experienced many disappointments in my life that the 14-year-old me never saw coming, and as I learned much more about the ways in which social structures embedded in discriminations on the basis of race, social class, gender, religion, sexuality, and other identities have worked, I came to understand just how often there is no such thing as destiny and just how often destiny itself is an ideological construction, often built in inequities of power. I mean, just look at the concept of "manifest destiny" that helped fuel 19th century U.S. expansion as an easily recognizable example of exactly how the concept of destiny fueled oppression.

And, so, I still enjoy my memory of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. Identification with the Mets has been a significant part of my immediate family's bond with one another. And this is one of the most important experiences in the history of that bond, with the entire family in New York and my parents at the game. Yet, while at one point in my life (in the late 1980s and early 1990s), I could literally not help but grin ear to ear and start jumping around with excitement at seeing video highlights of the game, my reaction today is much more subdued. I'm sure that part of that is age, as the experiences of adulthood life have for me, as they do for many people, muted the ways of feeling and expressing excitement. Yet part of it (and this part, I think, can be related to those experiences of age) also involves growth. Today, it would seem so much more insensitive to Red Sox fans (pre-2004 Red Sox fans, especially) to jump and down like that and go on and on about my perceived sense of destiny for the Mets.

So, even without consciously thinking about it, I simply don't react like that anymore. Rather, a quiet smile, largely in connection with the family bonding that this event signifies, feels so much more appropriate, for counter to the Mets' longtime slogan "You Gotta Believe," which my dad told me after the game he yelled out when the Mets were down to their last out, and which I'm sure went through the minds and lips of many Mets fans at that moment, I don't have to believe in any sense of destiny in order to find valuable meaning in what happened. And if I believe anything, it's that I think that's the more humane way to remember the event.