Fenway West

Wanna-be New Englanders celebrate at Chase Field after Red Sox player Julio Lugo's first inning home run. By the way, my guess is 1/3 of the people cheering on the Sox in Phoenix yesterday are bandwagoners that have never set foot in Massachusetts.

Photo Credit: David Kadlubowski/The Arizona Republic.

Sports teams are sources of civic pride and help foster a sense of community. People's love for their cities is often reflected in their love of the local sports team-- look at Chicago with the Cubs or D.C. with the Redskins, for instance.

That's why it bugs me to attend sporting events in Phoenix. Fans of the home team in every sport are sometimes outnumbered and frequently outshouted by fans of the opposing teams. And, for the most part, the people cheering for the visiting teams are residents of the Phoenix area.

The scene was no different yesterday at Chase Field, where in my estimation at least half of the 40,000 fans on hand were there to cheer on the Boston Red Sox against the Diamondbacks. To me, this just shows that many of the people who move here never really see Phoenix as "home," and that their loyalties continue to lie elsewhere even when they moved here to escape some frigid place back east.

Having half the (local) fans cheering against the home team would be unthinkable in places like Chicago, D.C., New York, and of course Boston. Maybe someday I'll get to see the same thing happen here. In the meantime, go Diamondbacks (and Sun Devils, Suns, Coyotes, Sting, and yeah I guess even the Cardinals).

Where was my byline?

Maybe I'm seeing something that wasn't there, but the opening paragraphs of the Arizona Republic's cover story on downtown sounded a lot like something I wrote about six weeks ago. Here's what I mean:

On February 25, in my post 'The Old Guard Reacts in the Wake of CityScape,' I wrote, '...Every few years some developer comes along with a project that is going to "save" downtown but fails in that colossal task. In the seventies, it was the civic plaza convention center. In the late 1980's, after the Boston Globe called downtown Phoenix a "surreal nightmare," we tried to save it with the Mercado and Arizona Center. In the nineties, it was US Airways Arena and Chase Field...CityScape is just the latest variation in a series of megaprojects billed as the downtown savior.'

On April 8, the Republic ran a story called 'Multiple projects key to downtown's revival.' It opens like this: 'First it was the Phoenix Civic Plaza. Then it was the Arizona Center. Later it was the sporting venues - America West Arena and Bank One Ballpark - that were to provide the spark. More recently, it was a new Arizona State University campus that was ballyhooed. It seems every few years - for the past three or four decades - city boosters anointed one venture or another as the savior of downtown Phoenix. But each time, the project's actual impact has fallen far short of the lofty projections.'

Maybe I'm mistaken-- but it seems like there are a lot of similarities here-- the use of a list that names the civic plaza, the Arizona Center, the arena and ballpark; the use of the same word, "savior," to describe the projects; and of course the overall thesis are pretty much the same.

Anyway, I'm not mad. The notion that downtown Phoenix tries to reinvent itself every so often through some "silver bullet" megaproject was hardly novel when I wrote it. And I also know that someone can read something, forget it, and then weeks or months later, the subject of the reading comes back into one's mind and the person innocently uses it as their own thoughts. My only beef is, hey, if you liked the concept, give me a byline, or quote me!