America at Large: Each of the six New England States voted for John Kerry on Tuesday night, but it's as if we'd made a pact with Lucifer: let the Boston Red Sox win a World Series and we'll accept as our part of the Faustian bargain four more years of rule by the former president of the Texas Rangers.
Just a week ago the Red Sox ended an 86-year famine when they reversed the "Curse" and won their first World Series since 1918 - the year the team's owner famously peddled Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for $100,000. Nearly three million New Englanders lined both banks of the Charles River for a waterborne parade on Saturday.
The exhilaration lasted six days. Nobody I know feels like celebrating today. The Curse of the Bambino might have been exorcised, but the events of Tuesday brought a more sobering reality. It's hard to know who is to blame - Osama Bin Laden or Curt Schilling - but it makes you want to follow the advice of Red Sox first baseman Kevin Millar to buy a big bottle of Jack Daniel's Sour Mash. Pick up any newspaper this morning and the electoral graphic of the United States might be a 50-year-old, pre-Bangladesh map of the Indian subcontinent.
The nation's heartland which thoroughly embraced George W Bush and, by inference, his adventure in Iraq, is flanked by pockets of sanity on the east and west coasts, with the Northern Rust Belt. Not even in the Vietnam era was the country so thoroughly - and so geographically - polarised. In Massachusetts, where I live, Kerry captured 62 per cent of the vote. In New York he commanded 58 per cent of the electorate. The bottom line is: every state in which it is permissible to not only wear cowboy hats and baseball caps with business suits, but to keep them on during dinner, voted for Bush.
Schilling might not have been named the Most Valuable Player of the American League Championship Series or the four-game sweep of the St Louis Cardinals in the World Series which followed, but his courageous performance in both was emblematic of the Boston team's resilience. Hampered by an ankle injury so severe it will require surgery next week and a three-month rehabilitation process, he submitted to a procedure so radically experimental doctors wouldn't even perform it until they tried it out first on a cadaver.
Using sutures, the surgeons essentially stapled Schilling's tendon to his leg, sent him out to pitch, and then, after he had beaten the Yankees to initiate the team's comeback from a 3-0 deficit in the best-of-seven ALCS, went out and did it all over again for Game Two of the World Series. The blood oozing from the stigmata was clearly visible to the television cameras. It was a dramatic performance that turned his Sox Red for the entire country to see.
His status as an icon thus confirmed, Schilling set about doing what pretty much any other 38-year-old American who earns $14 million a year might do: protecting his pocketbook by hitting the campaign trail as the sporting world's most enthusiastic Bush supporter this side of Don King. He skipped a scheduled Bush rally in New Hampshire to participate in the Duck-Boat procession down the Charles, but in the days following the World Series Schilling turned up in several battleground states.
Schilling recorded a phone message to New England voters in which he said, in part: "These past couple of weeks, Red Sox fans trusted me when it was my turn on the mound. Now you can trust me on this: President Bush is the right leader for our country." At a Pennsylvania political rally, Schilling limped out onto the stage and said: "I'm proud to be on a team with a more important mission - the team that's going to get George Bush re-elected. We need to get your friends and neighbours out to vote . . . I know everybody wants to be on a winning team out there, and there's plenty of room on this bandwagon."
And he showed up in Ohio to say "He's (Bush) a leader who is giving our troops everything they need to get the job done, a leader who believes in their mission and honours their service, a leader who has the courage and the character to stay on the offensive against terrorism until the war is won."
Perhaps in an attempt to counterbalance the influence of their star pitcher, the Boston team's ownership and management stumped for Kerry. Red Sox owner John Henry, chairman Tom Werner, and general manager Theo Epstein (30) - the baseball wunderkind who not only engineered the trade which brought Schilling to Boston, but got him to approve the deal by throwing in a $2 million bonus if the Red Sox won a World Series during the life of his contract - appeared at a Democratic rally in New Hampshire. "It's only been four years," Epstein told the crowd, "but it feels like 86."
Bush carried Ohio, and with it, the nation. It's difficult to gauge Schilling's influence but it's probably safe to say he didn't sway as many voters as did Bin Laden, who released an ill-timed pre-election video in which he specifically attacked Bush, but stopped just short of declaring himself a Red Sox fan. Many undecided voters may well have reconsidered their posture by deciding if Bin Laden was against Bush's re-election, they must be for it.
While all of this was going on, the fun-loving Millar revealed on a nationally televised sports programme it had been so cold before Game Six of the play-offs at Yankee Stadium he and team-mates had primed themselves for impending extinction by swilling from a bottle of Jack Daniel's. Having won, they repeated the ritual before the seventh and deciding game, and, having won that one, could hardly go back on the wagon for the World Series.
Millar claimed the tradition continued through the Fall Classic. He said outfielder Trot Nixon had been so impaired he missed a "take" sign from the third-base coach and swung at a 3-0 pitch. (Nixon wasn't so drunk that he didn't hit a two-run double.) "I'm just glad we won (the World Series) in four games," said Millar, "before those Crown Royal and Jack Daniel's shots started to kill me." "The (whiskey) story is nice, but it didn't happen," Red Sox centre-field Johnny Damon said on Late Night With David Letterman a few nights later.
Manager Terry Francona, implicated by Millar as a participant in the booze ritual, said: "I talked to Kevin. It's such an embellishment. He's a real idiot."
Right. So what was Curt Schilling's excuse?
