Ray Bourque is on the first day of the annual Jimmy Fund telethon (donate! They want to raise $4 million over the next two days.) right now, in a roundtable with the Celtics’ Glen “Big Baby” Davis and the Red Sox’ Curt Schilling (who says he’s heavily leaning toward retirement), and he was just asked a question about the support he got from Boston fans after he got traded to Colorado.
The above quote was part of his response. Now here’s something I have to say about that, because this is my blog and I get to bitch about things if I want to.
That’s one of the things I’ve always greatly disliked about that whole situation, and subsequently the dishonesty put forth by Bourque on this subject. A guy requests a trade out of town because he wants to win a Stanley Cup, which is understandable. But then his long-time team’s fans cheer for him over their home team despite the fact that he basically sold the team and city out.
Look, he was obviously never going to win in Boston, but he requested a trade out of town. Ray Bourque is obviously an iconic Bruin and one of the sport’s all-time greats but the Hub’s fans are total suckers for buying into this myth that he deserved better. If you’re going to claim you’re a Boston guy first and foremost, you don’t beg out of the city to play with a better team. It’s really that simple.
Even if he had let his contract expire and signed with a team, it would be totally different than asking for a trade. Did getting Brian Rolston, Sami Pahlsson and Martin Grenier plus the first-round pick that eventually became Martin Samuelsson help the Bruins? Kind of. Rolston scored 90-something goals in Boston over four seasons. Better than nothing, I guess.
If a beloved captain who played with the team his whole career and became an all-time great like Jarome Iginla asks to be traded out of Calgary so he can win a Cup, that’s his prerogative. But if he came waltzing back into Calgary with that Cup after a year and a half out of town, only a city full of fools would give him a parade. Boston did it.
I’ll never understand why Boston fans don’t feel hard done by over this. It just seems ridiculous. The way other beloved guys like Manny Ramirez or Antoine Walker were run out of town is in many ways regrettable, as an entire fanbase turned on them because of the way the front office handled the situation with the media. Quite the opposite with the Bruins and Bourque, though a lot of that probably has to do with the way Bruins ownership is perceived in Boston.
Bruins fans have a lot to gripe about in the team’s history, like the trade that sent Bobby Orr to Chicago or the nickel-and-diming Jeremy Jacobs is perceived to have done with the team from the mid-90s until the lockout, but the fact that this isn’t among them is baffling. It’s perfectly okay to love Ray Bourque and all he did for the team and the community, but if anyone else had done what he did, words like “traitor” would be thrown around liberally.
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