Why Not Us?: The 86-Year Journey of the Boston Red Sox Fans from Unparalleled Suffering to the Promised Land of the 2004 World Series - Tapa dura

For 86 years, Red Sox fans have been hungry. Generation after generation has watched and hoped and prayed for victory. And generation after generation has turned away utterly despondent-after the crushing near-misses of 1946 (when the Sox lost the World Series in 7 games), '48 (lost a one game play-off to Cleveland), '49 (heartbreak to the Yankees), '67 (again, lost the World Series in 7), '75 (and again, lost the World Series in 7), Bucky in '78, Buckner in '86, Boone in 2003-then come back the next spring, wounded, yet hopeful again. The losing, the angst, the self-flagellation became so codified that it had even developed marketing names. The suffering was called "The Curse of the Bambino. " The sufferers were called "Red Sox Nation" -- the ultimate underdogs. Would it ever end? And then it did. Why Not Us? is not a book about how the Red Sox achieved their amazing victory in the 2004 World Series -- an avalanche of books, and time, will take care of that nicely. It is a book about what that victory meant to the fans. It's a book about how it felt to be a Red Sox fan - not only at 20 minutes to midnight on October 27, 2004, but decades before. Leigh Montville has interviewed dozens of fans: friends, friends of friends, old sportswriters, ball-players, public figures, and plain folk. The resulting book is their stories - bittersweet stories of passion and pain, eternal hope and crushing despair, the seemingly endless agony and the strange ecstasy of being a Red Sox fan.

Leigh Montville, former sports columnist at the Boston Globe and former senior writer at Sports Illustrated, is the best-selling author of Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero and At the Altar of Speed: The Fast Life and Tragic Death of Dale Earnhardt. He lives near Fenway Park.