Eagles and Mustangs Set To Write Fenway's Next Chapter

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Boston is the apex of the modern-day sports world. Its franchises are well-oiled machines that produced a dozen championships over the past 20-plus years, and the success produced an unmistakable confidence and understandable swagger that was as commonplace as a parade of Duck Boats bringing trophies and legends through the city’s clogged streets.

For newer and younger generations, the championships are nearly a birthright, but older fans remember a time when Boston-area teams struggled to find successful identities among the national landscape. Championship droughts were more common (aside from the Boston Celtics, at least), and fans in the city lived a more morose and downtrodden existence.

Nowhere embodied that feeling more than Fenway Park, where the Boston Red Sox went 86 years without celebrating a championship. The franchise seemingly found every possible way to struggle over the course of nine different decades, but their ability to shatter their fans’ hearts reached unfathomable heights in the aftermath of a World Series ground ball trickling through Bill Buckner’s legs. Now a home of championship glory, Fenway was instead a place where grumbling fans waited for something bad to happen to baseball’s original “cursed team.”

Things weren’t rosy, but the history of Fenway Park added to its lore. The odd-shaped stadium located in between the rectangle-shaped by streets named Van Ness, Ipswich, Landsdowne, and Jersey became a community gathering place intertwined with the city’s sporting culture, and anyone walking through the turnstiles could blur their eyes and remember how a sporting society appeared through the decades. As celebratory banners unbelievably finally started hanging, the stadium transformed into the iconic, enduring place where new chapters were started.

It became more than just a baseball stadium, and in the days after Christmas, its next chapter will once again transform a city’s sporting history when Texas-based Southern Methodist meets the homegrown Boston College Eagles in the Wasabi Fenway Bowl.

“I’m a Yankee fan, so I don’t know if they’re going to let me in the park,” linebacker Vinny DePalma joked during media availability in the aftermath of the bowl announcement. “But yeah, I’m just really excited. It’s a historic place. [Outside linebackers coach Paul Rhoads] was telling us that it’s the oldest professional stadium in the United States, and I’ve been there for some games and some concerts. It’s a great venue.”

Games at Fenway Park are more like church services for a local population that grew up building memories within its walls, but its ability to do more than just host baseball games venerated it as Boston’s holiest cathedral. Former heavyweight boxing champion Jack Sharkey won his final career fight by defeating Phil Brubaker by unanimous decision just two months before Joe Louis ended his career with a knockout at Yankee Stadium, and welterweight champion Tony DeMarco – the Boston Bomber himself – beat Vince Martinez in one of his few fights away from the Boston Garden.

The American Football League’s Boston Bulldogs played at both Fenway Park and Braves Field, as did the Boston Shamrocks, and the Boston Redskins played at Fenway for four seasons before moving to Washington, D.C. after 1936.

Boston College likewise used the stadium for home games that year, and it served as the home field for the 30,000-plus fans who jammed through its gates to see wins over Georgetown, Auburn, and Holy Cross during the national championship season of 1940. Two years later, the 1942 team ascended to No. 1 in the country before Holy Cross derailed another championship bid before 41,300 fans, but the Eagles remained a fixture until Mike Holovak, the running back of those championship teams, opened Alumni Stadium as head coach of his alma mater.

Even as teams departed, it always felt like Fenway had a number of different uses beyond just the Red Sox. The Boston Patriots found their first permanent home by moving into Fenway Park, and playing games at Fenway helped the team survive financially until they moved to Boston College and Harvard before opening Schaefer Stadium in 1971.

“I’m probably going to have to make some calls to see what it’s like to have played there,” laughed head coach Jeff Hafley. “Like how do you substitute in the red zone if your team’s all the way there, do you run across the field? Or do you say excuse me and work your way down? I have no idea how you actually [play with teams on the same sidelines], but I’ll talk to some coaches who played at Fenway and we’ll have to practice with guys on the same side and get used to it.”

Nearly everyone took their stab at playing Fenway, and the turn of the century brought Bruce Springsteen, Jimmy Buffett, the Rolling Stones, Phish, and the Dave Matthews Band concert tours within its walls. Paul McCartney played Fenway in 2009, and the New Kids on the Block returned home to perform at the park with their 2011 tour with the Backstreet Boys.

Everyone from Billy Joel to Foo Fighters to the Zac Brown Band to Jay-Z and Justin Timberlake has been at Fenway, and the Dropkick Murphys streamed their 2020 concert from an empty Fenway during the COVID-19 pandemic. That was 10 years after the third Winter Classic brought the NHL to Fenway for the first time, to which the Boston Bruins’ overtime win over Philadelphia preceded a Frozen Fenway series that saw Boston College and Boston University battle one week later.

Football eventually returned to Fenway in 2015 when Notre Dame’s Shamrock Series hosted Boston College in the Eagles’ return to their classic, interlocking logo now worn with regularity, and in 2017, a game against UConn saw AJ Dillon run roughshod over the Huskies in a 39-16 win. On both occasions, Fenway hosted hurling matches between Irish teams from Galway and Dublin with the 2018 edition forming a championship tournament between Cork, Clare, Wexford, and Limerick. All of this preceded the next logical addition of a postseason bowl game, and after two years of postponed debuts due to COVID-19, Louisville defeated Cincinnati, 24-7.

SMU had been scheduled to play Virginia in the 2021 version before the pandemic forced the teams to cancel their trip to Boston, but the Mustangs return next week as the reigning American Athletic Conference champions. A certified juggernaut, they’ll join the ACC next year with Cal and Stanford, at which point they’ll play BC as a conference opponent in Dallas before returning to Boston to play at Alumni Stadium in 2025.

“I never got to play [at Fenway],” said the sixth-year DePalma, “and I’m really excited. My family will be able to come up [from New Jersey] to see another game in Boston, but that it’s played at Fenway is pretty, pretty cool. It’s pretty special.”

The 2023 Wasabi Fenway Bowl between Boston College and Southern Methodist is set to kick off on December 28 from Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts. Tickets can be purchased by visiting redsox.com.