Win it for...: What a World Championship Means to Generations of Red Sox Fans

Win it for... is a tribute to a most underrated virtue – loyalty. It is a sonnet to a team, the Boston Red Sox, that has been a defining obsession for an entire region of people for more than five generations. The book features a collection of searing and heartfelt postings from hundreds of fans who wanted to dedicate a Red Sox victory in the 2004 American League playoffs and World Series to some unforgettable people in their lives. On the morning of the seventh game of the epic Red Sox-Yankees American League Championship Series, Shaun Kelly, who wrote the book’s preface and is a member of the internet message board called "The Sons of Sam Horn," began pounding away on his computer keyboard crafting his own particular "mojo" that he hoped would ultimately defeat the despised Yankees. He urged other members of the message board, some 1,900 strong, to do the same –urging the Red Sox to win it for the special people in their lives who had loved the team through th! ick and thin. From the grateful man who lost his brother in Okinawa 60 years ago to the sibling who dedicated a Sox victory to her brother who perished on September 11, 2001, there were scores of tributes from the populace of Red Sox Nation, young and old. Each of the more than 1,000 postings added something unique to what became a compelling Red Sox mosaic, the best of which are collected in Win it for... In the end, the individual contributors revealed something extraordinary about themselves. The postings would end up being featured in newspapers from Boston to Los Angeles, from Miami to Chicago. Peter Jennings would include it in his nightly news report on ABC, while the gang on ESPN’s "Baseball Tonight" would mention it during a discourse on Red Sox Nation. Featuring a foreword by Red Sox pitching hero Curt Schilling, nearly all of the proceeds from the emotional Win it for... will be split between the Jimmy Fund (the Dana Farber Cancer Institute) and Curt’s Pitch for ALS (Schilling’! s charity to help Lou Gehrig Disease research). The reader is invited to settle down into a favorite chair, sit back, and have a box of tissues close by for when the tears start flowing.