Welcome to Massholeland

Let me start off by saying that I'm honored to have been selected as a blogger for this prestigious East Coast Bias blog group. I'm a 23-year old lifelong resident of New England, who grew up and currently resides in Beverly, MA. I graduated from Providence College in May 2006.
But enough about me personally, I'd like to use this forum to shed some further light into what it means to be a true Boston fan. Sure New York and Philadelphia each get a bad rap for fan-bases (which are both totally justified) but I think one group is currently very misunderstood, the Massholes from Massholeland. Or New Englanders as you outsiders would like to catergorize us.
As I recently came to realize, for the younger generations (teenagers to late-20 somethings) being a Boston fan has been a mostly beautiful thing. The Pats won three Super Bowls in four years and the Sox finally won a World Series in 2004. The only sense of the torture and hell that our parents and older relatives had to live with are the currently listless franchises known as the Celtics and Bruins. Both had their moment in the sun (the Celts from the 60's-to mid-90's and the Bruins in the 70's) but they've each fallen on hard times in recent memory. The fact that the NBA is a terribly flawed product and the NHL is completely irrelevant are topics for another day and time. What it boils down to is we've been spoiled. The Pats have been a DYNASTY and the Sox have spent the dough to match everyone (even the dreaded Yankees) meaning they've consistently fielded good but rarely great teams. If you're in said age-range, you can't help that you struck the local sports lottery and have witnessed great sucess in recent memory. I just hope that everyone enjoys it. As the Celts and the Bruins-to a much lesser degree-have shown us, you can go from the top draw in the city to a team that you can find FREE tickets for on Craig's List (true story).
A corrolary to the great teams has been the standard bandwagon fans. And while I'd like to make some snide remark about how great a fan I am, I feel like you can't let stuff like that get to you too much. Nothing brings people together like sports and it doesn't bother me too much when people jump aboard later than others. With that being said, bandwagon fans should take some of The Rock's (circa 1999) advice: "know your roll and shut you're damn mouth." If you're wearing the Dice-K t-shirt, cheering when Ortiz hits a pop-up (which you're convinced is a home-run off the bat) or have a brand-new Sox hat (the rule is only one new one every two seasons minimum) then you should probably reevaluate who you are and what you're doing with your life.



Peace