Azzi: Red Sox, baseball and the ties that bind us all

We took our daughter to her first Boston Red Sox game when she was six weeks old. Her mother had sewn a Red Sox patch on a Snugglie and she rested on my chest for nine innings. She woke up when fans cheered or got raucous, slept whenever Roger Clemens leaned in to get a sign from catcher Rich Gedman.

She's been a Red Sox fan since.

My old leather baseball glove - a Bobby Avila model made by Rawlings - hangs on a hook in my back hall. Nostalgically, I occasionally oil it, usually when players begin to gather for spring training, but most often when Boston has a home opener at Fenway Park.

Growing up in Manchester, New Hampshire, primarily meant three things every summer: more bus trips to the library with my younger brother and mother, that in August Daddy would be home on vacation from the factory where he worked and, throughout the summer, listening to Boston Red Sox baseball on the radio.

I don't know what introduced my mother to America's favorite pastime, but she was hooked. When Boston was on the field the radio was on in our house. We had two radios, one a console that didn't move and a small one she could balance in a window so she didn't miss anything while hanging laundry or working in the garden.

I never learned how she, raised to age 14 in Marjayoun, Lebanon before coming to America, came to love baseball - I regret never having asked her - but it was one of the gifts she passed to me.

I did learn, at an early age, that vacuuming, if necessary, was never done while a game was being broadcast.

I grew up with Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky, and Dom DiMaggio; grew up with the memory of some baseball players who returned to their teams after serving in either WWII or the Korean War: some, like Ted Williams, served in both.

I grew up, too, learning that athletes were more complex than just being sports heroes. I remember learning about aerophobia from Jackie Jensen, who retired from baseball mostly because of his fear of flying; remember learning, for a book report, about bipolar disease from my favorite center fielder, Jimmy Piersall, when I read his story in Fear Strikes Out.

I grew up learning, as Saul Steinberg wrote, that "Baseball is an allegorical play about America, a poetic, complex, and subtle play of courage, fear, good luck, mistakes, patience about fate, and sober self-esteem."

Growing up as I did in New Hampshire I never really thought about what it meant in 1959 for the Red Sox to be the last MLB team to racially integrate, to sign “Pumpsie” Green.

I never thought about the National Hockey League being all white, about the FBI keeping a file on Bill Russell, describing him as “an arrogant Negro who won’t sign autographs for white children."

I never considered the possibility that in 1967 Jackie Robinson would write, "I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.”

I never thought about whiteness - everyone around me was white. In fact, until I left New Hampshire in the '60s, I was the most exotic person I knew.

I remember thinking of my mother when in the '60s and '70s, 1000s of miles away in the Middle East, I would find myself sitting on a rooftop somewhere fine-tuning a short-wave radio so I could pick up Red Sox games.

In 2004, in the 12th inning of a game where Boston was in danger of being swept by the Yankees in the ALCS, David Ortiz, "Big Papi," hit a walk-off 2-

run homer beating the Yankees, going on to win seven games straight and finally, on Oct 27, 2004, winning their first World Series since 1918.

I thankfully grew up knowing that most players were more complex than just being sports heroes.

Last week, in his induction speech at Baseball's Hall of Fame, Ortiz concluded: "I always try to live my life in a way that supports others. That makes a positive influence in the world. And if my story can remind of anything, let it remind you that when you believe in someone, you can change their world. You can change their future. Just like so many people who believed in me ..."

Growing up a Red Sox fan in New England I never considered, as I consider today, the intersectionality of the talents and experiences that bind America today; an understanding that without my mother, without Big Papi, without Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson, Jim Plunkett, Colin Kaepernick, Megan Rapinoe, Bill Russell, Brittney Griner, LeBron James, and so many others - without a diverse America of so many colors, faiths, identities, and ethnicities we would not be One Nation, Indivisible.

We would not be America.

Robert Azzi, a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter, can be reached at theother.azzi@gmail.com. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Azzi: Red Sox, baseball and the ties that bind us all