Backstage @ New Rep

ACCORDING TO TIP

The baseball season is in full swing and that would have made Tip o'Neill a happy man. He was a life-long fan of the game in general and of the Red Sox in particular. He loved telling the story of how, at the age of seven, he was taken by his father to his first game at Fenway Park. He'd always take care to give the exact date, July 1, 1920. The reason he remembered it so clearly was that Walter Johnson, the legendary Washington Senators pitcher, threw a no-hitter that day. Young Tom O'Neill was transfixed, and hooked on baseball for life. Having seen only one big league game he assumed that no-hitters were common-place. As it turned out, though, it was the only no-hitter Johnson ever pitched and, in more than seventy years of watching, the only one that Tip O'Neill would ever see.
He was a regular at Fenway Park and later, when congress was in session, he and his pals would often make the drive from Washington to Baltimore when the Red Sox were in town to play the Orioles.
Although he was rightly renowned as a great story teller and conversationalist, at ballgames those stories were mostly confined to the down time between innings. He'd score the games on his scorecard and pay close attention to everything that was going on. As an avid card player he had developed the habit of counting in his head which cards had been played. He also counted pitches the same way, this was long before pitch-counts were in vogue. Today the number a pitcher has thrown are tabulated on the scoreboard. for everyone to see. But in those days late in a game he might remark, "This fellow's got to be tiring, he's already thrown a hundred twenty three pitches." Those with him would look around in wonderment at how he knew that.
Meanwhile, he was wondering why nobody else had been paying attention.
He was five years old when the Red Sox won the 1918 World Series, too young to know or appreciate what had happened, and through all the years of his rooting for the team, he never saw a championship flag fly over Fenway. But he got a lifetime of enjoyment out of the game and out of the team, and even became great friends with some of the players, like Carl Yastrzemski, so he'd be the first to say he got his money's worth out of being a Red Sox fan.
But, boy, would he have loved to see those flags flying over Fenway today.