Name your game — Fenway’s the place
He is a legend, arguably the greatest ever to play his sport. Performing at Fenway Park, he said, “was one of my life’s all-time highlights.’’
This was not Ted Williams talking. Not Yaz or Jim Rice, Nomar or Pedro, or even David Ortiz. This wasn’t about the Red Sox, Fenway’s permanent tenants.
This was Bobby Orr, a hockey player, who on skate guards walked up the same dugout steps as Boston’s boys of summer for the ceremonial faceoff at the 2010 Winter Classic, when a baseball diamond was transformed into a hockey rink and nearly 40,000 fans saw the hometown Bruins of the National Hockey League beat the Philadelphia Flyers in overtime. On New Year’s Day. Definitely not baseball season.
“It’s one of those things,’’ Bruins defenseman Zdeno Chara said afterward, “that you experience once in a lifetime. An overtime goal, and it happened right in front of me. The way they all got up and danced and chanted. When you’re playing in front of 35,000, 40,000 fans, it makes a big difference, it’s so much bigger, so massive, to hear so much noise is incredible. To experience what the Red Sox experience was awesome.’’
So now you know: They play more than just baseball in that lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Hockey, football, soccer, lacrosse, Irish hurling, boxing, wrestling and the Harlem Globetrotters. And just when you’re about to ask, ‘What haven’t they played there?’, they built a ski jump that loomed above the Fenway light towers for something called “Big Air,” a ski jumping and snowboarding extravaganza held here in 2016.
And this has been happening, almost from the day they first threw open the doors in 1912. Less than a couple of months after the Red Sox beat the Giants in what some still argue was the greatest World Series ever played, they laid down a gridiron on the field for a football game — a mythical national high school championship tilt between local powerhouse Everett and Oak Park (Ill.), whose coach, Robert Zuppke, was one of the first practitioners of a new strategem, the forward pass. Oak Park rolled, 32–14.
High school football games Thanksgiving week became a tradition, which was revisited a year ago with four games played over a two-day span. The colleges soon joined in — between them, Boston College and Boston University played 145 times at Fenway, most recently with BC losing narrowly to nationally ranked Notre Dame in 2015. In the ’60s, the Boston Patriots of the upstart American Football League claimed Fenway as home, where a future Hall of Fame linebacker named Nick Buoniconti roamed and took aim at such visitors as Joe Namath.
The Red Sox went 86 years between winning a World Series, but no shortage of champions passed through Fenway’s gates. Boxers like James J. Braddock and Tony “The Boston Bomber” DeMarco, and the lightweight Cuban sensation Kid Chocolate. Soccer immortal Pele played an exhibition here, as did legendary teams like Liverpool and AC Roma. For the wrestling fans, there was George “The Animal” Steele, and a double card of Killer Kowalski and Bruno Sammartino. Mercy, as legendary Red Sox broadcaster Ned Martin would say.
For history and spectacle, unbeatable atmosphere and unforgettable memories, Fenway Park has proven irresistible. And since 2010, when the first sheet of ice was laid across the infield, hockey teams have thrilled to playing outdoors, the way so many kids first learned to skate. College teams and high school teams, both men and women, have joined the pros in experiencing the rush of streaking down the ice, wind at their backs, and sometimes even with a backdrop of falling snow.
“It’s unreal stepping out on the ice,” said Casey Pickett, who was a freshman on the Northeastern women’s team when she scored a goal in the game against the University of New Hampshire in the first-ever women’s college game played outdoors. “Especially growing up around Boston, coming to a game at Fenway, it’s something that you’d never think would happen to you. It’s definitely been surreal.”
By the conclusion of January’s Capital One Frozen Fenway, all 12 teams in Hockey East will have laced up their skates at Fenway. “Everybody in the stands, everybody on the ice, coaches, referees — it’s something we’ll all remember as long as we live,’’ said former Boston University coach Jack Parker. “It was quite a show.”
For a high school senior, Latin Academy’s Kevin Moran, who scored a hat trick in a 2012 win over East Boston, it was no less exhilarating.
“I was amped beyond belief,” Moran said. “It was such a privilege. I had to take a last skate around the ice to take it in.”
Bats and balls, spirals and slapshots, left hooks and scissor holds, corner kicks and sliotars, great oratory and magical music making, Fenway has seen them all, a field of endless dreams.
