I am a fan of the Boston Red Sox living in Texas. Red Sox Nation is everywhere so it’s not as unusual as it was pre-2004, but it’s still a bit odd. Ultimately, I’m asked where in Massachusetts I used to live. My answer of “Enid” draws a lot of blank stares. Allow me to explain.

I grew up in Enid, Oklahoma and there were no professional sports teams to follow. The closest thing we had was the Oklahoma City 89ers, the Texas Rangers triple-A affiliate. A lot of people would say we had a great professional team in the state with the Oklahoma Sooners, but that particular discussion will be held for a later date. For kids in Enid it was either find your own teams to love or just give up and follow the Dallas Cowboys.

In 1980 our family lived directly behind a Circle K quick shop and every dime I had went to buying comic books and sports cards. I was a Marvel guy while my best friend Scott was a DC guy. He was a football card guy, and I preferred the classic baseball card.

When the brand new series of Topps arrived I opened a pack to discover a 1980 Jim Rice card. It had the A.L. all-star banner above his head and he was standing in the batters box. To a skinny kid with very few positive male role models he looked like the strongest man on the face of the earth. Steve Garvey had been my favorite baseball player up until then, but within a day of unwrapping that 1980 Topps Jim Rice I had a new favorite baseball player of all-time.

This was before the days of the world wide web and 24 hour…. well, anything. I had to wait for the morning paper each day to check the box scores and see how Jim Rice had fared in the previous night’s game. (And let me tell you it was sheer agony when the Sox made a west coast trip and all the games finished too late to make it into our small-town paper.) As a result of following Jim Rice, I began to follow a few other guys on the team, and before the season was finished I was a Boston Red Sox fan. They weren’t very good that year, but they won more than they lost and they had a terrific outfield with Rice in left, Fred Lynn in center, and Dwight Evans in right.

As it turns out, all of my favorite sports teams can be traced back to one player – Jim Rice and the Red Sox, Walter Payton and the Chicago Bears, and Kelly Tripucka and the Detroit Pistons. Though I’ll admit to loving Payton more than any other athlete I’ve ever admired in my lifetime, football and basketball take a back seat to baseball for me (to be honest, I haven’t followed basketball for years. It’s not even in the backseat, more like the trunk).

All these years later and I still have that Jim Rice card, but now instead of waiting for the box score, I get to watch every game live thanks to the MLB Extra Innings package. As a result, I get to see Jim Rice almost every night during the baseball season as he does in studio analysis for NESN. He still looks like the strongest man on the face of the earth to me.