Eric Wilbur On The Adam Jones Show: Boston Sports Forever A Strong Point For The City
This week, Vice Magazine published an article that celebrated the positives of Boston's terrible sports week, saying the city can focus on better things outside of sports.
Boston.com's Eric Wilbur didn't agree with the story and wrote his own retort, titled, "The week that was doesn't define Boston." Wilbur joined Adam Jones on Monday night to discuss it.
"It doesn't make a lot of sense to me because the writer, his premise was basically that Boston was better when no one cared about sports teams, which ... I don't really know when that was. I've been here for 39 years, I don't know when Boston fans didn't really care about sports teams," Wilbur said. "[The writer argued that] he counter-culture of nightclubs, and rock clubs, and comedy clubs really came to fruition in the '90s, when Boston teams weren't at their best. OK, great, that's a premise you have but it doesn't make much sense. It doesn't have to be one or the other. You can can enjoy sports, you can enjoy comedy, you can enjoy music. I think my problem with it was that he doesn't understand, you look back at the night, a few nights after the bombing, when Boston sports fans gathered at the Garden and Rene Rancourt started the national anthem and then let the entire stadium finish it off. That doesn't happen at Nick's Comedy Stop. That doesn't happen at Symphony Hall. It doesn't happen anywhere else besides our sports stadiums."
"It's not being a sports snob. It's just that those are the places where people of common denominators come together and want to celebrate or want to be angry or want to just do whatever. It's unlike anything else that we have in this city. You can go to the Museum of Science, and you're not going to feel that kind of energy that you will feel at a sports games. And I think in those types of situations, when you want to feel the entire heartbeat of a city, nothing beats a sports stadium. It just doesn't."
"God bless the Middle East [Nightclub], and God bless T.T. The Bear's, I love thosep laces. But you just can't feel that energy that you felt in that place at that time in that situation. And I think that was really missing from that column."
