Apparently, it wasn’t enough for your Boston Herald employers to antagonize baseball fans everywhere, including the hometown hands that feed them, with that ridiculous “Best Team Ever” headline last week.
Now the tabloid has unleashed this piece of epic ignorance (“Take your talents elsewhere, Lebron”) on the good people of Boston.
Frankly, your misplaced, childish provinciality is puzzling given the fact that you jumped ever so quickly at the chance to report a non-story desperately aimed at deflating the joy of the New England Patriots’ historic 2007 season.
You were naïve then to place your trust in a clearly biased source and you sounded equally as foolish today in bashing Red Sox ownership for making a shrewd business deal that is almost guaranteed to bolster its revenue stream.
Not only does your misunderstanding of relatively standard business leveraging sound like some 14-year-old girl whining on Facebook about her Spanish homework, but you employ a comparable level of vocabulary in summing up your feelings (“Gag”? Seriously?).
To sum up, you’re offended by the Fenway Sports Group’s consummation of a branding deal with Lebron James because it reeks of something Faustian—or worse, of unspoken approval of a basketball player who wears a Yankees hat. Oh yeah, and because the whole “Decision” thing that upset basketball fans everywhere eight months ago should have been a red flag to billionaires everywhere that profiting off his namesake is comparable to trafficking “blood diamonds.”
You also compare the deal as akin to relationships with A-Rod, Peyton Manning, the Montreal Canadiens and the 1986 Chicago Bears. Boy, you could really rile up the regulars at Sullivan’s Tap if you wanted to…
And don’t try to tell us your editors plugged in the Tiger Woods and Charlie Sheen references to improve your column’s Google rank. You wouldn’t want to sell yourself short as being anything but worldly and uber-topical.
But our favorite line has to be this gem: “The Celtics’ first order of business should be opening a Babe Ruth suite at the Garden.”
Dan Shaughnessy is probably pouring sugar in your gas tank as we speak for so boldly shoehorning a Babe Ruth reference into a sports column. Who the hell do you think you are?
Here are the facts: James is now a minority owner of a soccer team that plays on another continent. He’ll probably fly overseas after the season to film some sort of advertisement involving shooting a soccer ball through a basketball net. You act as though the guy will be writing out the Red Sox batting order or making decisions on free agent signings next offseason.
No modern day Carl Bernstein himself, even the Globe’s Nick Cafardo took the time to at least explain the actual nature of the deal between James’ LRMR entity and Fenway Sports Group’s EPL Liverpool soccer affiliation. You’d rather just blurt out a bunch of clichéd buzz words and call it a column. Referencing the “Super Bowl Shuffle” as a means of inciting vitriol would have sounded outdated 15 years ago, let alone in 2011.
Sure, there are questions that need to be asked about how focused Red Sox ownership truly is on developing its most famous brand—or at least the one Bostonians are most interested in protecting. John Henry and Tom Werner’s interests have surely become more diluted over the last year. Like any conglomeration of billionaires, they are certainly no strangers to money grabs and buying low on “stressed” assets such as Lebron’s namesake.
Sorry you have to find out this way, but these guys didn’t make their hay selling “Yankees Suck” shirts in Kenmore Square back in the 1990s.
From now on, just leave the kinda complicated stuff to the adults. In the meantime, why don’t you grab a crayon and scribble all over the file photo your newspaper ran alongside your column of Lebron wearing a NY hat. It’ll make you feel better.
Fenway Pastoral 