By Jonathan Dyer, Managing Editor, Boston, 16 November 2004

Boston is a baseball city.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the only sport popular here. The local American football team, the New England Patriots, have won the Super Bowl twice in the past three years. They have also won more consecutive games than any other team in American football history.

But nothing stirs the soul of a Bostonian quite like their baseball team, the Boston Red Sox. Many fans trace their passion back to a curse allegedly put on the Red Sox by Babe Ruth. He was the Red Sox star pitcher when Boston won the World Series in 1918.

(I know it’s typically American that they call it the World Series when only North American teams take part but, in the interest of sticking to the plot, let’s just overlook that for the time being.)

Just over a year after their World Series success Boston sold Babe Ruth to their arch rivals, the New York Yankees. Since then the Yankees (known to Red Sox fans as ‘the Evil Empire’) have gone on to win the World Series 26 times.

Reverse the Curse

While they notched up those victories, Boston failed to win the World Series even once. Many fans blame Babe Ruth for this. They are convinced that the Bambino, as he was known, was so angered at being sold to the Yankees that he laid a curse on the Boston team, thereafter known as ‘the curse of the Bambino’.

Each morning, as I drive to work along the bank of the winding Charles River, I pass a sign suspended above the highway that originally read ‘reverse curve’ (strange American-speak for an S-bend).

The sign is decades old and every few months someone carefully takes a can of spray paint to it to make it read ‘Reverse the Curse’. It’s a Boston tradition.

My drive to work ends at the studios of WGBH, a Boston TV and radio station. Here, six BBC staff work alongside WGBH colleagues to produce a one-hour daily international news programme for United States public radio stations that we modestly call The World.

As co-productions go, we are highly integrated. We all work together in one cramped open-plan office, our PCs all use the BBC desktop and our scripts are written in ENPS.

Celebrations for days

WGBH producers accept me as their manager, while BBC producers take their daily assignments from WGBH editors. The shared commitment to the programme is enormous.

There is just one thing that divides us though. It’s that language barrier.

One of my American colleagues has been known to hold his head in hands when looking at a story written by a British producer and utter: ‘From the land that gave us Shakespeare, what is a lorry/petrol pump/sticky wicket, etc?’

But that hasn’t managed to get in the way of the continued success of The World in the US. We can now be heard on more than 184 local radio stations across the country and our audience has grown to two million. To us that feels like a huge achievement.

I’ll admit it’s not as big an achievement though, as that of the Boston Red Sox. As baseball fans will know, this year they finally won the World Series, for the first time in 86 years.

The celebrations went on for days. That sign I pass on the way to work was taken down by a highway maintenance crew within 24 hours. The curse of the Bambino is no more.

^

Back to top