When did you first hear "the chant"?

[ctan]

Okay, I'm finally starting the research project I've been talking about for a while now, to try to answer the question, which came first, Yankees Suck or Boston Sucks?

When was the first time you heard either one? When was the first time you saw a t-shirt that said it? How old were you when you bought your first one and what year was that?

Memories from before 1978 are especially crucial! But heck, tell me about whenever you first heard it!

As for me, I think the first time I heard "Boston Sucks" was at the Stadium in 1978. Sparky Lyle even mentions it in his book "The Bronx Zoo" which was done during the 1978 season. I was only a kid at the time...

-ctan

[Slippery Elm]

Yea, it must have been in the late Seventies following the famous brawl in '76 when Nettles ended the bigmouth Spaceman's (Bill Lee) career with a punch, and then there was the legendary fight at Fenway when Munson tried to rearrange Fisk's features with his fists.

Lee had won 17 games three straight years coming into 1976. Early that year he started coming towards Nettles flapping his big mouth, and WHAM, end of Spaceman. He never won 17 again, hehehe.

So '78 is as good a guess as any.

Why don't you go on the Blow Sox forum and ask them? Those cretins would likely be proud to admit it.

I'm pretty sure they started it first, and they have made a sick obsession and cult of it.

[Sixty one]

Maybe I'm too old to appreciate this topic, but can anyone tell me what historical significance this has? Why do Yankee fans have to get caught up in something that only generates negative responses and does nothing for the good of promoting baseball or any other sport for that matter?

[LouGehrig]

The first time I saw "Boston Sucks" shirts was in September, 1978.

To show how times, values, and I have changed, I was amazed and upset that a shirt with such a statement was allowed at Yankee Stadium.

The first time I saw "Boston Sucks" shirts being BANNED was in April, 2002. I was amazed and upset that a shirt with such a statement was NOT allowed at Yankee Stadium.

[WCNYY]

Definately started by a Boston Fan. Yankee fans are way too mature to start somthing like that because we're just like our team we finish it

[Slippery Elm]

Originally posted by Sixty one
Maybe I'm too old to appreciate this topic, but can anyone tell me what historical significance this has?

I find it very significant:

Another manifestation of the coarsening of language, the demise of civility, and the decline of society, along with the pathetic frustrations of Blow Sox fans who started it.

I remember when you couldn't say "pissed off" on television.

[ctan]

Originally posted by Sixty one
Maybe I'm too old to appreciate this topic, but can anyone tell me what historical significance this has? Why do Yankee fans have to get caught up in something that only generates negative responses and does nothing for the good of promoting baseball or any other sport for that matter?

One of my areas of research in baseball history is the history of fan participation with the sport. The Yankees/Red Sox rivalry, as the greatest rivalry in sports, has been written about and chronicled voluminously as far as the on-field portion goes, but really doesn't the "rivalry" exist mostly in the minds of the fans?

In the 1920s, fans used to line up at the train stations (now we'd call them Amtrak stations...) to cheer the Red Sox on their way to New York. That's pretty extraordinary. I think the fact that people will print up customized t-shirts with slogans on them (and then make a cottage industry out of it) is also pretty significant. But I'm also pretty sure that "the chant"(s) came before the shirts. Looking back to the 1920s, it's obvious the fan loyalties and rivalries go back multiple generations. The history of "the chant" is only one significant thread in this story, and I am trying to determine how many generations back does it go? Who started it?

It was a determined historian and linguist who spent a good part of his life tracking down where the expression "okay" came from. (It comes from piece in a Boston-area newspaper of the Victorian era, when using odd misspellings was all the rage, and stands for O.K., "oll korrect" -- that is, "all right.") I can do no less in my obsessive love of the Yankees and their history.

-ctan