Leave It to Buckner

Thanks for the Memories

As much as we’d like to forget, we all remember exactly where we were on October 25, 1986.
By Rebecca G. Dorr

“I was watching at my girlfriend’s house—she’s now my wife. The Sox were winning, and her stepfather, who wasn’t a baseball fan, said, ‘I wish they would just lose and get the World Series over with.’ I was so mad that I left the house and went home. So I was sitting at the end of my bed, alone, when they lost. It was an absolute shock. I just started crying. I’ve never forgiven that man for saying that.”
—Dana Van Fleet, whose family has owned the Cask ’n Flagon since 1969

“I was debating my [gubernatorial] opponent at Faneuil Hall that night. During the debate, someone handed me a piece of paper that said Red Sox 3, Mets nothing, and I announced it with great fanfare. After, I got home around the sixth or seventh inning, and Kitty and I settled down to watch them win. Of all the painful Red Sox moments, I’ll never understand it. Buckner was a hell of a ballplayer. Gutsy. But he could barely run. And we had an excellent defensive first baseman named Dave Stapleton. Why McNamara didn’t put him in for the 10th inning…”
—Governor Mike Dukakis

“I was living in New York City. I was in agony because my parents were visiting, and we went out to a play. During intermission, we went outside and all the limos in the theater district had the game on. My mother, in an act of great charity, said, ‘You look miserable. Why don’t you go back to our hotel and watch the game?’ I wasn’t really willing to be optimistic until there were two out and two strikes on the third batter, and I said to my father—their play had finished—‘I actually think they’re going to win.’ It was at that moment they got the first base hit and the sequence of events that followed. New York erupted, and you could hear people shouting and cheering, car horns blasting, bells ringing, and I’m sitting there forced to endure this celebration.”
—Paul Grogan, CEO of the Boston Foundation

“I was right there at Shea Stadium. I was in the Red Sox dugout with Mrs. Yawkey. When Buckner came off the field that night, I shook his hand, patted his back, and said, ‘You’re the person who brought the Red Sox to this point.’”
—Boston Mayor Ray Flynn

“I was at a high school dance in East Boston with a cute boy. A group of people were just standing around his car with the radio blasting, and when the ball went under Buckner’s legs, we were all like, ‘WHAT?!? No fucking way!’ We weren’t going to riot or anything, but we sort of shared in the misery and made quite a bit of noise.”
—Kay Hanley, musician

“I was in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, at my daughter’s freshman parents’ weekend. We were watching the game in a hotel room. As the ball went through Buckner’s legs, we all went speechless. After that, there was nothing to say. It was very depressing. My wife is convinced I didn’t speak for three months.”
—Ron Druker, president of the Druker Company

“My wife and I were at a big dinner party thrown by non–baseball friends, Anna and David Kanarek. At the party, a small group kept padding upstairs to the Kanareks’ auxiliary set. This group became so large that Anna actually sent her son Denny up to the roof to cut the antenna wire. Denny, however, climbed through the second-story window and joined us. The ball went through Buckner’s legs. ‘What’s wrong? Where is everybody?’ asked Anna. Two of her guests, I can tell you, were already trudging home, where our sons, Paul and Theo, sat frozen on our couch, a place they symbolically remained, in some sense, until October of 2004.”
—Leslie Epstein, director of the BU creative writing program and father of Sox GM Theo Epstein