How the Boston Red Sox Won the 1975 World Series, Part II

The winningest 3-cushion couch in the majors
(This year marks the 40-year anniversary of the epic clash between the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Red Sox in the 1975 World Series. Since neither team has accepted the invitation for a repeat this October, The Nobby Works commemorates what is often called the greatest World Series ever played with this look back at how one lonely fan tilted the odds in favor his underdog team.)

The World Series of 1975 stacked up as a classic match-up. On the one hand there were the good-fielding, hard-hitting Reds of Cincinnati; on the other hand were the good-fielding, hard-hitting Red Sox of Boston. The only difference between the two teams could be found in my living room. It's not that I have an exclusive monopoly on THE POWER, because I don't. It wouldn't surprise me if variations on my power could be found throughout the American and National Leagues…although not in every city. There are some places--Cincinnati, for instance--that just don't have that mystical quality about them. The nickname “The Big Red Machine,” like “The Bronx Bombers” of old, rings more metallic than magical. Karma simply doesn't mix with machines big, red, or otherwise.'
If the series had matched the Sox with one of the more unearthly teams in the National League, however, we really would've had our hands full. My PC could've been neutralized if the Sox had met, say, the Cubs or the Phillies. Every time I occupied my POWER CENTER, some guy in Chicago or Philadelphia could've checkmated me. Mana a mana, as it were. The entire series then would've been decided by the ephemeral talents of so many infielders and outfielders - naive youngsters and cynical veterans - with no deeper understanding of the transcendent aspects of their calling than the unwitting belief that they should not leave their bats crossed in the on deck circle.
Cincinnati was just arrogant and haughty enough a city, just Aryan enough, to preclude the possibility of any supernatural intervention in the Reds' favor. Therefore the Boston-Cincinnati series shaped up as a good one, with the intangibles clearly on the side of the Sox.
Or were they?
Defying every law of probability known to man, the PC for the first game of the 1975 World Series was, believe it or not, located on my living room floor again! At the moment of what should've been my greatest triumph as a Red Sox fan, I found myself mired in anguish and despair. I looked longingly at my couch. I'd expected to ride it to at least half the post-season victories needed for the World Championship, yet I hadn't watched a game from it in over a week. If my power had indeed come from the gods, I decided in those grim moments before the start of game one, then those gods must surely be Yankee fans. This was just the kind of sick, demented trick I'd come to expect from New Yorkers.
I was all the more determined to stick it out now. Hip in place - arm cocked - head in palm. The clean-up man in the Sox order hadn't even come to the plate when all the hurt from the previous week came driving through my body again, only more wrenching than before. I wanted to scream, to cry, to whimper at least. The slightest hint of a Reds' rally would've broken me. I would've abandoned the floor - PC - TC - the whole POWER trip. But El Tiante was pitching - brilliantly again - and it was evident from the start that to cinch victory in the first game of the 1975 World Series I had to do one simple, solitary thing: endure.
Endure I did, and the Sox humbled the vaunted Big RedMachine, 6-0.
Any jubilation I may have felt over winning game 1 was severely dampened by my deteriorating physical condition. My right arm had become limp and practically useless. My awkward attempts at shaving with my left hand had turned my already ghastly face into a pitiful visage of scar and stubble. Worse still was the wretched condition of my hip. It'd become black and swollen, and I feared that the infection was spreading down to the lower regions of my leg. I shuddered at the thought of gangrene.
Sleep was impossible. A nightmarish vision materialized before my bed. The world had become floor. I could see nothing but linoleum clear to the horizons - no mountains, valleys, or streams - just floor. And I stood on it, trembling and alone, except for a black and white portable Sony, its rabbit ears pointing off in the direction of the eternal ballgame.
Game 2 was scheduled for a Sunday. I stayed in bed through breakfast and church, the Sunday paper and Meet the Press. Hiding under my covers, I wanted nothing more than that the world would pass me by and take its debilitating series of champions with it. But as game time approached, I was seized by a paroxysm of greater terror. If I turned my back on the Sox now, if I gave up on THE POWER now, I'd be making a mockery of my entire life. All the effort, the endless. manipulation of body and furniture, had been in pursuit of one goal: a World Championship for the Boston Red Sox.
I had faltered once before. In '67, after playing the PC flawlessly and guiding the Sox through a four-team scramble for the pennant, I went astray as the Sox met the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. It was a woman, of course, filling my head up with so many crazy ideas that I couldn't achieve TOTAL CONCENTRATION and I stopped caring where I sat and how. By the seventh game of the series, the animal in me completely dominated the spiritual - and the Cards dominated the Sox, 7-2.
It took me seven penitent years to find my soul again. If those Yankee gods had designated the floor as the POWER CENTER, then the floor it would be. After all, it was their ballgame.
I dragged my bashed and beaten body out of the bed and down the stairs. I could barely do better than crawl across the room. Indeed, I didn't have to because there on the floor in front of me was the PC again, manifest now as a grinning, hollow-eyed, she-creature who raised a long, crooked finger and beckoned me to her side. Could this alluring lamia be Lady Luck, I asked myself,
She pulled graying, withered hairs from her chin and belched into my face. The lower part of my body from the hip down went numb. Sustained by a slight Red Sox lead, I maintained TOTAL CONCENTRATION as long as I could. Then, in the seventh inning, it started to rain. They held up the game, and I grimaced as I watched them roll the tarp over the diamond. It was the last I would see of any of it that day. I blacked out before the game resumed and the Red Sox lost.
I've seen the hit that beat the Sox a dozen times since then. It was an infield bouncer up the middle that Denny Doyle grabbed behind second but couldn't convert into an out. Doyle can be forgiven. There are limits to what the body can do. As for my own lapse, there can be no forgiveness. A man's spirit should be limitless. Two more innings from me is all they needed and they would've had the Reds on the run. But I cracked. My faith died in a little cloudburst.
But as in all matters of the soul, that which can die can always be reborn. And my faith was reborn for game three. With the loss in game two, the spell on the floor had been broken. Euphoria pulsated through my rejuvenated organs and limbs. I even managed a modified jig around the room when I felt the unmistakable pull of the PC drawing me toward the couch. POWER and couch were united again. Dismantlement to the Big Red Machine! Gloria in Excelsis to the Boston Red Sox!
It was going to be easy. The vibrations were indicating I could take the couch on my back - my very best all-time position. It seemed certain now that the Big Red Machine was doomed to stutter and stop right before its own deluded fans.
The Red Sox took an early lead, and I was ready to takea three-day romp through Cincinnati lying down when, in the fourth, with Rick Wise pitching to Tony Perez, a faint knock-knock-knocking intruded on my chamber door. At first I dismissed it as a local woodpecker or the failing engine of some distant plane. But it persisted, breaking my TC, and Perez walked. I knew I had to find the source of the noise before any more damage was done, so I moved quickly to the door. Perez stole second. I answered the door. Bench hit a two-run homer. The Reds were ahead, 2-1.
She was shorter than I remembered her, older too. A gray ambience hung about her face like a shroud, and the shock of seeing her there in my doorway was given added voltage by the sight of baggage she clutched in her hand. It was my mother.
"It's your father!" she cried. "He's thrown me out at home!"
My dad knew a thing or two about THE POWER himself and taught me everything he'd ever learned about it. He was on the road a great deal selling St. Christopher medals and rabbits' feet, but whenever he was home the two of us worked out together. After supper he would take me down into his den, and we would practice moving furniture around. It was Dad in fact who helped to make me a switch-sitter, teaching me how to shift my weight from one cheek to the other while holding the PC in a particularly uncomfortable chair. He's a clothes man himself and not much into furniture, but he's got good natural instincts for THE POWER. Many evenings after our furniture sessions together he would take me up to his closet and show me some of the clothes in which he found THE POWER during crucial moments in history. There was the tuxedo he wore throughout the Cuban Missile Crisis. "Your mom and I were at the Lions Club Harvest Ball when JFK gave his speech," he told me, "and I just knew that if I took that outfit off the whole world would be a-goner." There was the pork pie hat he wore during Ike's heart attack. "Back then," he'd say, "that hat's the only thing that stood between Nixon and the White House.”  Then there were the Bermuda shorts and the polo shirt he wore while Ted Williams was off fighting the Korean War. "Good thing it was a short war," he confessed, "the winters nearly killed me. "
Dad is a true believer in THE POWER, so it didn't surprise me at all to hear that the falling out between him and Mom was over her meddling in his power. "He said I lost the second game of the World Series," she sobbed into my sweater, "but all I did was wash his underwear. "
"His underwear!" I exclaimed, knowing now what hadshe’d done.
"His underwear," she repeated tearfully, "his unsightly tops and bottoms which he hadn't taken off in over a week. He called them his lucky undies, but they were making me gag. So I took them and washed them last Sunday while he showered, and he went out of his mind. He called me a debunker and an iconoclast and told me to get out of the house. 'You did it!' he screamed for all the neighbors to hear. 'You lost the second game of the World Series and I won't have you in my bed another night!' " She choked back another flood of tears and raised her baleful eyes to mine. "How could he say that? How could he say I lost the second game of the World Series?"
How indeed.
I looked over at my TV screen and the how was most clear. The Reds had gone ahead 5-1 since she had crossed my threshold with her tale of woe. I staggered against the wall, weakened by the score. My mother, meanwhile, unloaded herself and her sorrow right in the middle of my POWER CENTER.
"You can't sit there!" I blurted out. "That's my lucky spot." At that she began rocking back and forth, bewailing and bemoaning as only she could. "Oh my, my. Oh my, my. This can't be. This can't be. First my husband and now my son - my only begotten son, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood." She stopped shaking long enough to cast a cold, hard look in my direction. "I endured a C-section for you, ingrate."
She had me. She had the couch as well. You can't throw a mother off your couch after she's gone and done something like that for you.
"Wanna beer?" I asked, resigning myself to the fact thatthe Reds were about to be up in the series two games to one.
She blew her nose and nodded yes.
As I reached in the fridge for a couple of brews, however, the bracing chill of inspiration blew over me. It was a million-to-one shot, but the Sox were down by four runs anyway and I had nothing to lose. It seemed slightly crazy at the time, but if I could get into TOTAL CONCENTRATION and if the POWER CENTER would accept my mother's body in place of my own, I just might pull off a baseball first - a cross-body transference.
The beer was the vital element in my scheme. I had to mellow my mother out so that she wasn't disturbing the PC, dusting things with her forefinger and whatnot. When I got back to the living room, she was arranging my magazines in chronological order. "Here, Mom, drink this," I said, trying to conceal the sense of urgency, "it'll make you feel better. "
Two swigs into her Gansett and she started to calm down; halfway through the bottle and she stopped muttering about my father and kicked off her shoes; a couple of inches short of empty and her eyes were sagging to a close and her head was sinking to repose. She was out, and the Sox were up!
Two walks, a wild pitch, and a fly to center got them one run. A pinch-hit homer got them another. It wasn't the Miracle of Coogan's Bluff, but it was a rally just the same and the cross-body transference was working! The PC was operating at full capacity in the ninth when Dwight Evans rocketed a two-run homer over the left-field fence to tie the score. Delirium swept through my parlor. I shot out of my chair with a mighty, joyous whoop!
Mom stirred. I eased myself back down into my chair.Polyester to Herculon, I hardly made a sound. If she awoke, the whole psyche-sphere would be upset. The game would fall out of control again. We'd come too far for that.
I maintained TC through the ninth and into the tenth. I was milking her recumbent body for all it was worth while keeping the Sox even with the Reds. It was remarkable.
And then, as the Reds came to bat in the bottom of the tenth, she stirred again. "Where am I?" she mumbled.
"Sleep," I intoned softly. "Sleep. You are very, very sleepy."
A deep, violent burp broke the hypnotic spell of my voice and she sat up.
Geronimo of the Reds singled.
"I must relieve myself," she said, rising. "Not now!" I begged.
"Yes, now," she said, as Armbrister turned to bunt.
"Get back!" I shouted.
"I must relieve myself, " she said, as Fisk went for Armbrister's bunt.
I dove for the POWER CENTER. Collision!
Kubek beat the rulebook crying foul from the broadcast booth and NBC replayed the Fisk-Armbrister collision as America, land of the grassy knoll and home of the Zapruder film, looked in vain for the interference call from Umpire Barnett. Controversy swirled around Riverfront Stadium, but it was misplaced. The instant replay should've been of my living room, of my mother teetering toward the toilet, of my diving headlong across the room, belly-flopping down on the glass-topped table, bashing my jaw off the wrought-iron hassock legs, crashing my head against a collapsing Tiffany lamp, and mashing my nose beneath the tumbling weight of a 176-pound, hysterical mother.
When I regained consciousness, I was in a local hospital, wrapped in bandages from head to foot. Time had become a blur. Months may have passed since the third game of the World Series. Years, even. I didn't know.
I peeked through the eye-hole of my bandages and saw a lanky lefthander in aviator glasses approach. He shoved a cigarette through the slit that led to my mouth. I choked on it. "Don't smoke, " I coughed.
"Sorry, sport," he said, "don't want to lose you now.
You've made quite a comeback. When your mom brought you in, you weren't much more than a shaky combination of contusions and lacerations but you're doing just fine now. We'll have you out of here before you can say 'Pinky Higgins.' By the way," he added, reaching into his pocket, "got this postcard from your mother this morning. 'Say goodbye to the lunatic for me,' she says. It's postmarked Cincinnati." He turned to leave, but the sound of Cincinnati had jarred my memory.
"Doc," I implored in a low, raspy voice, "the World Series, Doc. Who won the '75 Series?"
"Who won it?"  he beamed broadly. "Why no one's won it. The Reds lead three games to two. It's been raining in Boston for almost a week now. You'll be able to see the sixth game for yourself tonight. We'll roll a TV in here for you." And with that he turned on his heel and vanished.
I could hardly believe my ears. We were still in it. The Series wasn't over. The Sox still had a chance. Rain, he'd said. Rain in Boston. Rain from Providence no doubt had given me one more chance to muster THE POWER together and destroy the Big Red' Machine.
Could it be done, though? That was the question. My range was limited to a hospital bed. The odds against finding the POWER CENTER there were prohibitive. And even if I found it, the cocoon of bandages wrapped around me strictly constrained lateral as well as anterior and posterior movements. I wouldn't have the agility needed for occupying any but the most orthodox positions. The obstacles were damn near overwhelming, but I knew that I'd practically pulled off a successful cross-body transference in game three. Who could tell what might happen in game six?
Who indeed?
Seventy million Americans could tell, that's who. Seventy million Americans watched Bernie Carbo clout a three-run homer to tie for the Sox in the eighth; seventy million Americans saw Dwight Evans make a spectacular catch to save it in the eleventh; seventy million Americans looked on as Pudge Fisk lofted one in the screen in left to win it in the twelfth. Seventy million Americans enjoyed the greatest game ever played, all thanks to a semi-invalid in a hospital bed a hundred miles away.
It was a feat unparalleled in the annals of sports phenomenology, and I'd done it under the direst conditions. For hours I just lay there savoring it all, replaying the Fisk home again and again off the ceiling--until the doctor broke my revelry. "Pinky Higgins," he said, twinkling.
"Huh?" I said.
"Time to take those bandages off and go home," he an- nounced.
I took it as a joke and muffled a chuckle or two beneath my wrappings. Then he produced a shining set of shears, and I realized how serious he was. My eyeballs dilated to painful proportions and I yelled, "Can't do it, Doc! The seventh game of the Series is on tonight. I gotta see it. . . ."
"Sure you do," he said with maddening calm, "and you shall see it - at home on your own TV." And he began snipping away.
"No, here!" I squealed. "This is the POWER CENTER ... this bed ... these bandages ... I need them…the Sox need them . . . Yaz and Rico . . . EI Tiante…they're counting on me!"
He continued to cut. I struggled to get free. Two grim nurses arrived to hold me down. One looked like my mother. I howled. They stripped me bare, stripped the POWER off my body like it was so much useless adhesive, and rolled me out of the bed. I leaped to my feet, and in one last, inspired moment I hurled my body through the wire mesh and glass to the shrubs and pavement three stories below.
I knew on impact that the Reds were dead. As they gathered my shattered body onto the stretcher and carried it away, I knew I was on my way back to bed and bandages - back to the POWER CENTER and onto the Championship of the World for the Boston Red Sox.
And I made it happen - me - the best 26th man in baseball. I made it happen just by being the right man in the right place at the right time. It didn't matter that I couldn't see it or hear it. I felt it and that's enough. But try telling that to some of these doctors around here.  What do they know about baseball? All they care about are dreams and childhood traumas. Baseball--POWER CENTERS, TOTAL CONCENTRATION, the old cross-body transference--none of it means baked beans to these guys and gals.
Dad still understands though. He drops by every once in while to show off a pair of lucky slippers or something. And sometimes when he wheels me around the room I can still pick up a good vibration or two. Dad says that when I get better and out of here I ought to start thinking beyond baseball. He says that if I can win the World Series for the Boston Red Sox there's probably lots more good I can do for mankind. So I'm thinking about writing a letter to the President and telling him about my power. Who knows? Maybe rearranging the White House furniture is just what this country needs.
How the Boston Red Sox Won the 1975 World Series first appeared in The Red Sox Reader, edited by Dan Riley and published by Houghton Mifflin in 1992  (Please note: that’s 40 years before Silver Linings Playbook)