Red Auerbach once punched the owner of the St. Louis Hawks. You'd have to say he considered Ben Kerner to be a rival, all right.
John Henry and George Steinbrenner are not at that stage -- yet.
But there is no doubt the man who has the most money tied up in the Boston Red Sox and the famed "principal owner" of the New York Yankees have ratchetted up the rivalry between their respective teams to an unprecedented level, which, in the case of these two, says quite a lot.
We have never seen anything like what's going on now. I have lived here for 39 years, and I honestly believe that since John Henry, Tom Werner, and Larry Lucchino assumed control of the Red Sox there has been more intensity in the rivalry with the Yankees in the last two years than in the first 37 put together, and, no, I haven't forgotten Bucky Dent, the Fisk-Munson-Nettles-Lee brawl, or anything else. It just seems that all those things were mere appetizers in anticipation of what's been going on lately. Wouldn't you agree?
It is a rivalry, for sure, but it is the strangest of its type imaginable. Think of all the great professional or college rivalries. Army beats Navy, and vice versa. Ohio State beats Michigan, and vice versa. UCLA beats USC, and vice versa. The Dodgers have beaten the Giants, and vice versa. The Lakers finally beat the Celtics, not once, but twice. But in terms of direct head-to-head competition in the games and series that have mattered, the Red Sox have not beaten the Yankees in the past 85 years.
As Chris Moore of ESPN Radio once astutely observed, "How can you call the Yankees and Red Sox a rivalry? Do you call the hammer and the nail a rivalry?"
It's not that simple, of course.
This rivalry has a unique texture. It's not just the Yankees and the Red Sox. It's New York and Boston, whose rivalry goes back to colonial times. It's also about a fan intensity that is simply not present in many other areas of the country.
"It's the whole Northeast," says Yankee general manager Brian Cashman. "Philadelphia, Boston, New York . . . The rest of the country isn't like this. There is a special passion for sport. People live and die with it."
He's right. If you're old enough to remember the great Celtics-Philadelphia rivalries (both the Warriors and the 76ers), you know why Philadelphia is an equal player in this general story. It didn't hardly get any better than Wilt vs. Russell in sold-out, cozy (10,000-seat) Convention Hall or before the frenzied 13,909 in the Boston Garden, unless it was Dr. J vs. Larry a decade later.
