A diehard Boston sports fan. Married to a cool ass chick. Livin' the life in CA, writing for ESPN.com, making money talking about sports, "Lost" and your relationship with your father. Proud father of one little girl, with another bun in the oven, and due to come out anytime now. KG about the make his Celtics debut, the Pats rolling over yet another opponent, and then, his beloved Red Sox win their eighth straight Series game in the past four years for their second sweep in as many chances.

This excerpt from Bill Simmons' new article on ESPN.com captures a moment that leaves me dreaming of mine to come.



For instance, before 2004, I never would have called my father for a "Who's winning the MVP?" conversation before the final out. I never would have started recording the ninth inning on our bedroom TiVo just to give the World Series celebration "SAVE UNTIL I DELETE" status. I never would have pulled my daughter out of bed after the seventh so she could watch them win, even though she yelled, "No, I don't like baseball!" every time we turned on a playoff game this month. Things are just different now. The 2007 Red Sox were really good, they will continue to be good, and that's just the way it is. They weren't going to blow Game 4.

I promised my daughter there would be a payoff at the end -- that somebody on Colorado would make an out, that the Red Sox players would jump on each other and celebrate, that there would be dancing and hugging and everyone would be really happy. She understands absolutes (words like "happy" and "dancing" and "hugging") and understood something special was about to happen, but she had never heard the word "celebrate" before." She liked the way it sounded, so she kept saying it. Celebrate. Every time something happened in the last two innings -- a strikeout, a groundball, whatever -- she'd ask me why they didn't celebrate and I had to keep telling her, "No, you'll know when they're celebrating, I'll tell you when."

Eventually, she started watching me to play off my reactions. When Jamey Carroll cranked that one-out, 0-2 fastball in the ninth, for a split-second, like every other Sox fan who had abandoned their anti-jinxing rituals, I thought I had screwed everything up and screamed, "Noooooooo!" before Ellsbury hauled in the catch and she asked me what happened.

"That guy almost screwed it up," I told her

"Oh." She thought about it for a second. "They're not going to celebrate?"

"No, no, they're about to celebrate," I told her.

We moved to the edge of the bed. I was sitting down; she was standing between my knees and leaning against me. Paps uncorked a 2-2 fastball for the clinching strike ("Yesssssssssssss!!!!!!!!!"), whipped his glove in the air and flipped out like he always does. If there's an enduring image of this 2007 Red Sox team, it's the sight of a wild-eyed Papelbon waving Varitek towards him for a postgame embrace -- he always looks like some drunken Boston kid who just sucker-punched somebody in a bar and wants the fallen guy's buddies to run over for a full-scale brawl. COME ON!!! LET'S DO THIS!!! Once Varitek jumped into his arms, the entire Boston team mobbed them within seconds, and everyone eventually settled on jumping up and down in a delirious circle. A few seconds passed before my daughter finally turned to me with a big smile on her face.

"They're celebrating," she told me happily.

I don't know how I got here.

Some day, I can only hope to be sitting with my own kid, whom I am supporting through money earned from writing, watching the Astros win their second championship in four years, as the Texans continue to dominate the AFC, and the Rockets look set for a revival.

Oh yeah, and it'd be great to see UVa make the Final Four, too.

The World Series from a world away.

LUGO! JULIO FREAKING LUGO!

How is Julio Lugo playing in the World Series? How is he making key plays in a game that will basically put the whole thing out of reach? Didn't he single-handedly tank the Astros' 2001 Division Series with Atlanta when he Buckner'd that easy grounder in Game 3? Why couldn't the ball have rolled through his legs in this series, like it did back when it was hurting Houstonians, not Denver...ites?

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That's right, I'm watching Game 3 live from East Africa. And it's only because of a (very) timely visit from Tom, father of one of our co-workers, Emily, who also just happens to be in the neighborhood for a three week visit at just the right moment. Tom, Emily and her friend Erin (Sox fan) are staying at a badass resort in Usa River, just up the road from our village in Tengeru, and we're stretched out on cushions and pillows atop the floor in the Ngurdoto Mountain Lodge Internet room.

It is great to be part of Generation Anything is Possible with Ethernet.

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The last game I watched was, I don't know actually. It was before Craig Biggio's 3,000th hit, I can tell you that much. Even though I left for Africa a solid two days after that night, I didn't even get to see it -- a spur of the moment offer from Mr. Weinreb, one of The Bob's friends in Dallas, to come fly up for dinner then head home (not even joking), led me to hedge on Biggio not getting the three hits he needed to reach the mark we'd all been waiting for.

And I was right, he didn't get three hits. He got five.

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So I'm back with the MLB, and it's just in time to see the fourth crap World Series in four years. It's almost 6:15 in the morning here in Usa River, and the sixth inning isn't yet over. I love this game.

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A few thoughts.

The steroids ad sponsored by the Partnership For a Drug Free America (which organizations are actually included in this partnership, by the way?) is awesome. The basketball deflating, the announcer cryptically alluding to the fact that roids are going to shrink your pumbu, as they say in Swahili, and just the whole presentation is top notch.

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Joe Buck, you're funny. Tim McCarver, you're not.

Buck's joke (upon seeing a heavily bundled Kevin Youkilis, sitting on the bench in the cold Colorado night air for the first six innings): "Kevin Youkilis, sitting on the bench, dressed like he's ready for the Iditarod."

I let out a hearty laugh when I heard that one. And I especially loved the repeated shots of Youkilis in the dugout later in the game, after he'd already taken Papi's spot in the order, wearing a hoodie and some sort of industrial fireman mittens, practicing what could have either been his batting swing or a new form of mixed martial arts.

Then, the McCarver joke: "Youkilis now in the game, wearing only short sleeves. He's the only Red Sox infielder not wearing long sleeves, while earlier, he was sitting on the bench dressed like an gnome."

"A gnome," Buck corrected.

"Yes, a gnome, a gnome."

McCarver. First of all, he didn't look anything like a gnome. Second of all, shut up.

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Also, McCarver used the word "bevy" to describe the high quantity of fastballs Daisuke was throwing early in the game. You know he had that word written in Sharpie, circled twice to keep his attention, taped to the wall right above the press box window. He was waiting to say "bevy" like Manny waits to smash a hanging breaking ball out of the park in that thin Rocky Mountain air. Manny impresses me; McCarver doesn't.

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Rockies' players who don't have big biceps have no way to hide that fact.

Even though it's dipped into the upper 30's in the late innings, they're wearing the equivalent of a Sixers jersey over a "We must protect this house!" long sleeved undershirt. If you swapped Tulowitzki with Lugo, I guarantee you Rockies fans would laugh him out of the ballpark, maybe all the way to Idaho. Lugo, after all, looks like Danny Almonte ... at age 14. He is the one guy I can say with 100 percent certainty did not take steroids in the past ten years.

I would be scared to see what Barry Bonds looked like in a Rockies uniform next season.

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The little girl whose father has repeatedly made her stick her head into the middle of a homemade bullseye that reads "HIT IT HERE!" will probably have to undergo years of therapy after this series, as Tom remarked earlier.

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Rockies fans are rowdy, you have to give 'em that. They bomb on Astros fans, who leave early in the last game of the first World Series in club history ... when trailing by one run in the ninth.

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Watching games on mlb.tv kinda sucks. As the sun rises, and the new day invites more and more Internet users who are checking their email before work, there are more and more freeze delays. Usually, they happen in the middle of a really important play. For example, Matt Holiday's three-run homer in the seventh. The computer was frozen for about 45 seconds; all of the sudden, we see that classic FSN all caps indicator across the top of the screen, frozen in time just to rub it in Erin's face (she is from New England): HOME RUN ROCKIES.

Seeing as we'd been up all night, and it was past 6:30 in the morning, our celebration was muted, to say the least.

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I hate the Twix commercials they force you to endure every time you reboot the window, too. We've had to reboot about 20 times. So I've had to stare at the cover of a book called "How to Land a Mega-Hottie" about 15 times, since there is another Twix commercial that they rotate in occasionally.

"Adam? What are you reading?"

(shudder)

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It's 7:30 a.m. now. Breakfast has been served; all the old Euro tourists with man-pri's and nice Adidas shoes are out; Rockies are down 9-5, two on, two out, bottom eight, Papelbon on the hill.

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FOUR TIMES TONIGHT I thought Colorado had one going out. Every pop fly in Denver, I yell, "Get it! Get it! GET GET GET!"

The one time one actually went out, the computer was frozen.

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So that new Will Smith movie coming out called "I Am Legend" really got me when Fox started to pull a TNT and incorporate its upcoming movies into its coverage of the baseball postseason. Scrolling across the bottom of the screen in the sixth was a logo for the film, next to rolling footage of Kirk Gibson's Game 1 shot in '88.

"Legends of the World Series" was allegedly coming to theaters December 14.

"Whoa, that movie is coming out in theaters??"

"Who would go to that?" Tom asked out loud.

"Man, I'd go to that!"

"Yeah, you and eight other guys," he said.

"Y'all, that's just Fox advertising for its new movie," Hunter deadpanned from the back. His eyes were as glazed as a Shipley's donut from the lack of sleep, but he was still alert enough to realize a movie about the great World Series moments wasn't coming to theaters in December.

"Oh," I said. "Damnit."

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Thankyou, Joe Buck. You win the award for first non-local broadcaster to call Willy Taveras, Willy Taveras, not "Tavarez."

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Does Mike Lowell's skull tilt in the same direction as his scrotum? The man with only one ball, a result of testicular cancer, wears his helmet like he's hiding a stack of $20 bills on one side.

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Matsuzaka brought honor upon his people. Okajima brought shame.

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Final score: Sox 10, Rockies 5.

Final "should be" score: Rockies 1,000, Sox 7. (Daisuke gets 2 RBI? Lowell gets a free pass to third in the top of the ninth, then scores on a sac fly? Lugo playing balls to the wall in the field? The humidor doing a disservice to its own team? Rockies should have taken it all the way home tonight).

Err... I mean this morning. It's 8 a.m. in Usa. Time for that free breakfast that comes with life in a tourist lodge.

I've gradually become aware of an Afromantic trend that existed in 1970's Black America, and with only three months of intensive Swahili experience under my belt, I have yet to uncover just how prevalent it was.

So far, the list stands at four. All of its members were born within five years of one another: from '73 to '78. As my vocabulary grows, new revelations will be had, and the list will undoubtedly grow. But until that happens, here are the first four members of the "I'm a famous African-American athlete/rapper with a Swahili Name" club.

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1) Kijana Carter.

Though kijana means "young person" -- between the ages of just-finished-puberty and I think around mid-20's -- this running back who I associate with my college football-obsessed childhood is the oldest of the bunch.

Penn St. or Cincinnati? Bengal or Nittany Lion? The decision on which photo to select for this portrait was a tough one. He was the man in college. He was garbage in the pro's.

Like a boy among vijana

I went with Cincinnati, obviously.

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2) Amani Toomer.

Amani means "peace" in Kiswahili. He's just a year younger than Kijana, and about 1,000 times more successful as a pro.

Not very peaceful when you go across the middle, is it Amani?

Pretty much anyone who's ever gotten an email from me has seen the tag line of "peace" or one of its relatives in French (paix), Spanish (paz) and Serbian (mir). Now, all of my emails are ending with the first name of No. 81, Amani "It's Not A" Toomer.

Funny that after the comma, I type my main Swahili nickname: Hatari.

"Danger," in Kiswahili.

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3) Kobe Bryant.

Kobe means "turtle" to the Waswahili.

They pronounce it like koh-bay, but so what? Akon is referred to as uh-KON! by all of the wannabe South Central thugs we play basketball with at Soweto. Akon and uh-KON!; Kobe and koh-bay; it's the same word. I'm calling him Kobe "Keep Your Head in Your Turtle Shell From Now On" Bryant.

Sloooooooowwlyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy....

I doubt his folks were like Amani's and Kijana's. I think they were just trying to give their son an abstract namesake, not engender in him some mystical connection with East African shelled amphibians to help him play calmer. Err... reptiles. Or whatever turtles are.

[Just to prove I'm not the only one who is Not Smarter Than a Fifth Grader, read Hunter's answer to my editorial question:

"Uh.... (pause) .... shit. (pause, pause) They're reptiles."

(As he's cooking behind the wall, I can't see him. I hear nothing for the next six or seven seconds, except for the sound of a busted ass knife chopping up potatoes)

"Shit," and the silence was broken, "are they mammals?" (I laugh) "No, they're reptiles." (clearly thinking to himself) "I mean, they lay eggs."

He comes out of the kitchen to make his point.

"I'm going with reptiles."

I don't think Mwindaji should have a say, being from the North Carolinian village (Charlotte) that traded the future Hall of Fame turtle to the Lakers on draft day, back when Bryant was fresh out of Lower Merion High School.

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4) Kanye West.

Kanye is in a different category, not only because he's the only non-athlete of the bunch, but also because his name derives less from Kiswahili than from a language Biti refers to as Kiswahili cha mtaa: street Swahili.

♫ That's that crack music, (insert word I don't even feel comfortable writing with asterisks for fear of political correctness)! That real black music, (insert word I don't even feel comfortable writing with asterisks for fear of political correctness)! Na-na-na-nah-nah-NAH-nah-nahhh!♫

"Numba two, mos def."

It sure is, Kanye. Always about cracks, and in your case, a black one.

Today when I hitched a ride from my village to town, I started chatting with the driver in Swahili. Naturally, I dropped a few lines that you don't learn in books, cha mtaa kabisa.

He asked what else I'd learned. I explained the difference (there is none) between mikasi ("multiple pairs of scissors") and mikasi ("sex"). That led to me learning the truth about Kanye West.

"Unamjua Kanye? Kanye West?"

"Ndiyo."

"Do you know what his name means in Kiswahili?"

"No."

He gathered himself for what he knew was going to be a fit of laughter.

"In Kiswahili, 'kanye' means, 'Go and take a shit.'"

For the son of a college professor, you'd think his mother would be better than that.

♫ Hey mama, I wanna scream so loud for you, cuz I'm so proud'a you, and let me tell ya what I'm about to do... ♫

Kanye in the commode.