Ron DeSantis may want to Make America Florida, but he’s making it clear that if he could, he’d infuse Florida sports fans with the passion of those in Massachusetts.
During a Tuesday interview on Boston’s WBZ, the Florida Governor waxed nostalgic about his fandom of the Boston Red Sox when they broke the Curse of the Bambino (incurred when they traded Babe Ruth) in 2004. He described a devotion to the team unlike that seen in the Sunshine State.
“I grew up a Braves fan in the Southeast and then when the Rays came, I was in college, so I was kind of getting into them,” DeSantis said. “But by the time I was in law school, like, I was part of Red Sox Nation, I was rooting for them more than, you know, and so when they went down three to nothing in 2004, I was like, man, is this ever going to happen?”
“When they came back to beat the Yankees winning four in a row, I knew the curse was gone. I knew they were going to beat the Cardinals and the feeling in that part of the country, not just in the city of Boston, in Cambridge and other parts of New England, the whole population was so into it,” said DeSantis, who was at Harvard Law School at the time.
That excitement was unlike anything he’d experienced at home, he said.
“And that was unlike anything I’ve seen in Florida because, you know, the Bucs have won a couple of Super Bowls. We’ve had other teams do. Well, we’ve had a lot of great college football and people get excited, don’t get me wrong, but this was just in the bloodstream in New England. And I’ve never seen so many people be so revved up and when they won it, it was like such a big deal.”
DeSantis hasn’t commented that much on Florida baseball as Governor, though in 2020 he did mock the sparsely attended Miami Marlins games as evidence that people could socially distance. Before that, he did acknowledge being a fan of the Atlanta Braves during the Dale Murphy era, when the team was a SuperStation WTBS staple.
Meanwhile, he has a history of transitory fandom when it comes to professional football. While he thanked a crowd in New Hampshire for the Patriots releasing Tom Brady so he could come to Tampa, he also claimed to have been raised as a Pittsburgh Steelers fan.
Furthering his intersectional sports identity, the Governor has talked about raising young Mason to be a Jacksonville Jaguars fan. He took his son to Jaguars’ playoff games, though he did leave the win against the L.A. Chargers at halftime earlier this year.
Prior to that, he lauded the hiring of former coach Urban Meyer and mocked the team for a failure to “even sell out limited capacity” back in 2020, claiming it was “because some of the fans are concerned about some of the things we’ve been seeing out of the league.”
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