drawtheline

The St. John Community is really into sports. You’ll find all kinds of sports fans around
here. Surfers, runners and cyclists, flag football, basketball and softball players, pool shooters,
hikers and sailors. You’ll find cricket bats, soccer balls and hackysacks. We’ve been
represented at the Olympic Games in fencing, pole vaulting and skeleton. And, of course,
there’s that most popular of all sports: watching it on TV.

It doesn’t take strong legs, quick reflexes or steady eyes to watch sports on TV. It takes a TV.
Who isn’t instantly transported to another world when the players, resplendent in their
uniforms, take the field? There’s the World Series, the World Cup and the World Federation of
Wrestling. There’s Nascar (yeah, right!), PGA and NFL. There’s ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPN
Classic. And, there’s the trusty remote control to seamlessly surf between events.

It’s an innate human trait to be competitive. Survival on the field of battle, and all that. Have
you ever watched two men in gladiatorial combat? I mean, come on! From the time of the first
Olympiad in ancient Greece, there have been bitter rivalries. The Spartans were always kicking
those Athenian butts, and boy, the fans went wild.

Competition is what makes sports worthwhile. And, there’s no greater rivalry than that between
the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. Since the time of the Babe (George Herman
Ruth, not Jessica Simpson) these two teams have battled one another for supremacy on the
diamond. Yankee fans will talk about Pride and Tradition and all those Championship
pennants. Sox fans remind you of tradition, too: of lousy pitching, choking and, oh yeah,
having won the very first World Series in 1901, a few of the following ones and, most recently,
in 2004.

Now these two teams, whose home cities are only a couple hundred miles apart, have
entertained fans for decades with this rivalry of which I speak. In fact, families have been torn
apart by it. Parking lot rumbles have started over it. Friendships have been sacrificed.

Let’s examine this situation. Both cities are in the Northeast of the United States. New York, the
great melting pot, calls itself the “city that never sleeps”, but that could be because of all the
bragging. Boston, on the other hand, is the “Birthplace of Freedom”, where America was
hatched. The Yankees wear pinstriped uniforms. The Red Sox wear… well, you get the picture.
The Yankees have the biggest budget in baseball, if not all sports. The Boys from Beantown
have a farm system that allows a young player “to make it to the Bigs.”

Connecticut (the Nutmeg State, for you nickname buffs) is trapped right between New York and
Boston. People from Connecticut, by the way, are smarter than everybody else and don’t
speak with an accent. Some say they’re better looking, too. Anyhow, even these obvious
attributes are not enough to prevent the Yankee/Red Sox rivalry from causing problems. So,
the ingenious inhabitants of the Constitution State (they even have two nicknames!) drew a
line down the middle of the state to separate the Red Sox Nation from the boorishness of
Yankee Territory. It’s a crooked line that winds through valley and over picturesque rolling hill.
It starts, of course in Fairfield, which is actually a legal possession of New York State. It runs
through Torrington and Bloomfield. It splits up some of the loveliest countryside in America.

The question for us is: where do we draw the line here on St. John? Robert Frost said, “Good
fences make good neighbors”, so we’d better give this some thought before we degenerate
into Civil War (or Hatfields and McCoys). Should the aptly named, Centerline Road be the
demarcation line? Where does that leave Gifft Hill? Should Fish Bay be on one side and
Chocolate Hole on the other? Where does that leave Rich Meyer?

Mason and Dixon drew a line that divided a nation. The 38th parallel pitted Truman against
Mao. As I write this, the Sox are 8 1/2 games back, Yankee fans are smug but polite and I’m
looking forward to football season.

- Jeff Smith