The take.....

Since 2001 NO city, I mean NO city has Come Close To this City's Teams.....

THERE CAN BE NO LEGITIMATE DEBATE ABOUT IT....BOSTON IS TITLETOWN.....

Let's give Detroit it's due...the Red Wings and Pistons are awesome teams....but let's be clear....Detroit has NO claim to being title town....Hockey Town ----probably but that's it....the Tigers suck, the Lions are worse and the Pistons won only one as that team is presently configured....

How about New York....the Giants deservedly won their Superbowl but beyond that let's see....the Yankees are a good team with an aging but still powerful lineup and NO pitching staff. The Spanks have not recovered from the single most humiliating defeat in organized professional sports history....you may remember that 2004 ALCS....I know all of you suddenly quiet Yankee fans remember it don't you?...how about those Knickerbockers.....they may well be the worst franchise in organized team sports given their money and the absolutely horrible teams they have paraded onto the Garden floor...oh wait...how can the Knicks be the worst franchise ever when they play in the same market as those Mets....the second highest payroll in baseball and they lay all of the blame for their '07 colllapse on a manager and not the dipstiick who overpayed Pedro, Santana, Glavine (we know he's gone but he took a lot of $ while he was there and didn't do ####), Beltran, Delgado and that ace Wagner....wanna fire someone who IS to blame....schedule a 3:00 a.m. meeting with Omar while you still have a fan or two left....and then there are the Rangers and who really cares...

How about L.A.?  Well the Lakers had a nice run until they played a complete team and they promptly crapped out....I remember just two short weeks ago a lively interview with Kobe and Stephen A. Smith where Steven A. pressed Kobe as to why it wasn't fair to compare Kobe to MJ and at the time I wrote it off as a good reporter just asking the questions because many many people had started to believe that Bryant deserved such a lofty comparison....and maybe Kobe will still someday be able to be compared to Michael...just not at this time....Kobe was so outplayed by the Celtics trio of Pierce, Allen and Posey that he was barely the best offensive player on his own team....he was clearly out played, out hustled and outschemed by tthe Boston Celtics to the point where his legacy has been tarnished to a great degree..Michael Jordan would have carried his team to a win over Boston this year, there is NO question about that...but back to my point...LA is never really eligible to be Title Town without a real baseball team and without an NFL franchise....Christ even Charlotte and Jacksonville have teams.... what? you say that the Dodgers are a real baseball team because they signed Joe Torre?  To that I say, grow up...as good a manager as there is in the game does not make the Dodgers are real team.  Fans don't care, teams NEVER win (Kirk Gibson ain't coming through that door kids) and did I mention that people in LA have NO passion for sports....How many titles have the Dodgers won?  Nah, LA is not close to a candidate for Title Town USA....and what did Shaq say...."Kobecouldn't do it without me...."  Love it, LA blows.

How about Chicago....although the Blackhawks such #### and the Bulls are a disgrace, and the Bears are moving backwards again.  They do have the White Sox who have won a World Series and the Bulls of Michael and Scottie were all world....but what have done for me lately....you KNOW the Cubs will screw up somehow and someway and while Ozzie will probably get the Southsiders a legitimate playoff shot...even if they win they really don't matter...even in Chicago...what's that old line...."there's nothing lonlier that being a southsider in a city of northsiders"....so The ChiSox are not given any credit here until their own city backs em just a bit....so Nyet to Chicago...and Philly, Saint Louis, Dallas, San Antonio (one team sports towns just don't count), Saint Louis, Baltimore, Tampa Bay, Miami, Cleveland, Cincy, Oakland, KC, New Orleans, Houston or Seattle....nope not one of these cities can say that they have won world champioships in Football (3) Baseballl (2) and Basketball (1) since 2001....only one place on the planet can say that and that's Boston.

Oliver Wendall Holmes once called Boston the "Hub of The Universe" because the city is the eductaional center of the Country with no fewer than 100 colleges in the city and its thriving suburbs....and those colleges include Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Northeastern, Emerson and Boston College to name just a few.  Add to that an extremely low crime rate, a bevy of world class hospitals, four gorgeous seasons and the birthplace of our democracy and you have a city that is truly the best place to live on the East Coast. 

It is almost unfair that the Red Sox are by far the best team in baseballl over the last 5 years, that the Patriots are still the best team in football and that the Celtics have now resumed theiir rightful place atop the NBA and won their 17TH title....a feat that no other team has ever topped....to put that in perspective.....that is 17 more titles than Cleveland, Denver, Charlotte, New Orleans, Dallas,  Utah, LA Clippers and New Jersey Nets have combined to win....

Then there are the Red Sox....again in first place, again with the best rotation in the game, again with out any hole in their entire lineup, great manager, great closer, sold out EVERY game for decades.... wealthy and committed owners and a fan base that dwarfs the Yankees...if you doubt that for one minute try to buy a single game ticket for next season from the Red Sox ticket office....it will take an act of Congress and a great bit of luck.  Then go to Baltimore (AKA Boston South) and see how the BoSox fans outnumber O's fans  ...they have utterly destroyed the Yankees who simply will never recover from the beat down they took in '04....manager's gone, owner's feeble and his nit wit replacement is managing the team, they hired a manager who is so obnoxious that he got himself fired in the same year as he was named Manager of the Year in the NL and then there's the GM who must bear reposnibility for Kevin Brown, Carl Pavano, ElDugue, Alphonso Soriano, Roger Clemons third comeback tour and the whole notion that Ian Kennedy and Phil Hughes were legitimate major leaguers....what you ask have the Red Sox done with young talent????  Jonathan Papelbon, Dustin Pedroia, John Lester, Jacoby Elsbury, Jed Lowrie, Clay Buckholtz, Justin Masterson, Manny DelCarmen, Craig Hansen are ALL playing and the team won last year's Fall Classic by destroying the Rockies....are you kidding me?  It is amost unfair....the Red Sox are still in firts place and Curt Schilling is out, David Ortiz is out, Daisuke Matsuzaka is out...Manny is out...Coco is out....the Cubbies lose Zambrano and they WILL collapse....This is the most talented team of young players to play in 25 years....

I will not offer any excuses for the Patriots....they lost and they deserved to lose to a team that is now a long shot to return to the playoffs.  The Pats are again favored to return to the Superbowl and only a fool like Tom Jackson would seriously question that...they have quietly reloaded a secondary that was not very good last year and they picked up three solid linebackers in the off season...anybody wanna wager with me?  I say they win 12-14 games and retuirn to the ALCS where they will beat Indy, or Jacksonville....as usual.

Now there are the Celtics who have a real small window because they have not shown that they can figureout how to draft NBA players from the lower end of the first round....but...for noow they will likely return to the Conference finals next year and unless Cleveland can figure out how to win on the road the C's should return to the finalls to face NO, Utah or San Antonion...it won't be the Lakers...Kobe will see a lot of Tom Thibodeau's defense next year the way that Kurt Warner got figured out after Bellichik figured him out in 01....Let's face facts...Luke Walton, Vukocic, and Radmanovic are not legitimate NBA players....they were useless in the Finals and then their is the quickly aging and slowing Dereck Fisher and the riddle that is Lamar Odom....plus can someone tell me why Pau Gasol gets such high praise....he's is everything we expect from a European player...he no like hitting...him no like physical ball....him no play defense.....so the Lakers won't be having to worry about another Boston Beat down next year....if New Orleans gets a better 2 they will be the team....or at least I hope they will.....

So my little pinheads....Boston simply rules the sport's universe and yes I did not mention College sports because there is not a single college team that can beat even the weakest professional team at anything so it don't count.....

I say this as a lifelong Resident of Boston....But If I have to hear one more time that Boston is a Basketball Town I'm Gonna Scream.

I am 50 years old, as a young kid I watched the Russell and Havlicek teams and I was in my 20's for the Bird, Parrish, McHale years and yes when things are good here in Beantown the Celtics are a hard ticket to get....but since Bird retired this town has not been a basketballl town.....Boston is a funny place when it comes to its basketball.  There is no college team that gets any support unless the team is super hot ala Marcus Camby's UMass squads or the occasional BC team that gets warm but never truly hot.  Nobody except committed alumni bleeds BC or UMass hoops and there are far fewer Celtics fans than most people would believe. Sure there was a buzz when Pitino rolled through but that story has more to do with the fact that sports radio still plays Pitino sound bytes about how the "Negativity in this town Sucks".  Trutth is the Celtic were horrible for two decades and NOBODY was standing on line to see Antoine Walker and Paul Pierce play together with an assortment of scrubs.  Enter KG and Ray Alllen and alll of a sudden this is Chapel Hill.....

In a city where Carl Yastremski, Dwight Evans and Steve Grogan are Gods...it is shocking that Bill Russell is an after thought.  We can all debate who was the greatest but most Bostonians would argue that Larry Bird deserves to be considered on a par with the greats and that is true to a degree but you almost never hear the name of Bill Russell and that is sad. As great as Bird was he did not hold a candle to Russell and I think you could make an argument that nobody was better. I personally think MJ was the best ever but I would certainly concede that Russell deserves consideratyion and here's why:

Is it racism?  That is a very good question and it is certainly a plausible one but I think the answer is more than just a rascist environmment.  Russell, like Chamberlain, Willis Reed and the Big O played at a time when the media was not nearly as pervasive as it is today.  Today these players are identified and hyped while they are in high school, they earn millions in advertising deals, we see them on ESPN every day, the game is more exciting so highlights tend to be spectactular...hell one King James slam is more fun to watch than anything Russell did shown on a black and white newsreel film. 

But back to my point about Boston, if the Red Sox were to put together 5 losing seasons the fair weather fans, the yuppies willing to spend $3,000.00 for monster seats to watch the Texas Rangers, would disappear as fast as they have appeared but the die hard Red Sox fan would still sell out Fenway.  They have done that over the years when the BoSox have struggled.  When the Patriots under Victor Kiam were hapless and losing 12-14 games a year they still managed to draw 70-80% attendance at a stadium that was little more than a huge concrete urinal.  The Bruins are deplorably bad and haven't carried a cup for 35 years, they are the cheapest team in organized sports  and one of the highest priced tickets in sports and yet they still draw crowds and are a prt of the city's sports culture even as they continue nearly four decades of utter futility. 

After Bird (AB) the Celtics went from bad to worst, and they had to offer $10.00 tickets and nobody was interested.  Most Boston fans can tell you the names of the Patriots and Red Sox coaches/managers and General Managers for the past 20 years but I'll bet that the average Boston fan could not name the Celtics starting center from 2 seasons ago. 

I hope the Celts make it to the Finals and I hope that Garnett, Allen and Pierce win that ring, not because Boston fans have long suffered but because these players are great and they are all great role models.