Jerry Remy was a beloved figure in Red Sox Nation. He played second base for the Sox, and then enjoyed a long career as an analyst on the team’s television broadcasts. Remy, known affectionately to Boston fans as the RemDawg, died over the weekend after a years-long bout with lung cancer.
“When I was a kid we were used to losing every year,” Remy recounted after the Red Sox won their last World Series title in 2018. “Now we win every year.”
John Holt, a lifelong Red Sox fan who grew up in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, said Remy “was one of us.”
Holt worked with Remy, who began doing color commentary for the Sox in 1988, for two years on the team’s telecasts before coming to Connecticut, where he was a sports anchor for more than a decade.
Holt sees Remy the way modern football fans see Tony Romo — an analyst who’s a wizard at calling out plays before they happen.
“He could analyze the game, he could see what was coming next and relate it to the viewer in a way we could understand and appreciate as sort of this Everyman,” Holt said.
Like Holt, Gerry Brooks grew up in Massachusetts as a big Sox fan. Brooks, a recently retired news anchor who worked at NBC Connecticut for 25 years, was asked about Remy the player. Remy was on the 1978 Boston Red Sox team that lost in a one-game playoff to the arch-rival New York Yankees and Bucky Dent.
“He was a hometown boy,” Brooks said of Remy. “To look at him, you’d never think he was an athlete. He was what, 5-9 and maybe 150 pounds? And we all said, ‘Well, if he could do it, why couldn’t we?’”
Though the Sox didn’t beat their rivals in 1978, they’ve gotten the Yankees a couple of times since then. Holt was at Remy’s last public appearance at Fenway Park — the 2021 American League wild-card game. A do-or-die game against … the Yanks.
“It made the pregame and maybe the night for a lot of people to see Jerry,” Holt said.
The Sox won 6-2.
