‘There’s no way to quit’: David Ortiz hopes Celtics channel the spirit of his 2004 Red Sox – the last major American team to come back from a 0-3 deficit in the playoffs – as Boston is knocked out against the Miami Heat
- The Boston Celtics are currently 3-0 behind the ferocious Miami Heat in the Eastern CF
- Ortiz was part of the Sox team that came from 0-3 down to defeat NYY in the ALCS
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Even though the odds are against the Boston Celtics, former Red Sox slugger and Hall of Famer David Ortiz isn’t giving up on his favorite basketball club.
Big Papi knows that no NBA team has recovered from a 0-3 deficit like the Celtics did in the Eastern Conference Finals against the Miami Heat.
It has happened 149 times in the league’s history and the team in front has won the series.
Ortiz and the Red Sox faced seemingly insurmountable odds in 2004 as they trailed the rival New York Yankees 0-3 in the American League championship series. Not only did they come back, Boston also won the World Series. It is the only team in MLB history to do so.
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“Yes, and there’s no better time than this for that to happen,” Ortiz said in an interview Monday morning with The Associated Press during his charity golf tournament. “If you do it in basketball, it has to be the same city. You know what I mean.’
Inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame last summer, the 47-year-old Ortiz knows how the Celtics should look at it.
“When you’re 3-0 you have two choices: you quit or you go back, and in professional sports there’s no way to quit once you get to that point,” said Ortiz, the 2004 ALCS MVP. “Once you get there – even if you’re 3-0 – you don’t think about quitting, you think ‘OK, I’ve hit the bottom. I have to go step by step now. I can’t try to win three games at the same time.”
Like the 2004 Red Sox, who were knocked out 19-8 in Game 3, the Celtics suffered a major loss in Miami on Sunday night.
Ortiz remembered what the clubhouse looked like after that game.
“Pretty quiet,” he said in the interview, sitting at an outdoor table near the track. “We were really just thinking, ‘Man, they scored a lot of points in the third game. We had already played those guys more than 20 times and we know what we have to do to beat them.’ We just didn’t. Jump back on the wagon.’
Ortiz’s former ’04 teammate Tim Wakefield, also at the tournament, feels the Celtics need someone to lighten the mood.
Ortiz was part of the famous 2004 Boston Red Sox team that won the ACLS and the World Series
“They need to have someone like we had with Kevin Millar, to come forward and say, ‘Don’t let us win tonight,'” he said. “That actually changed our whole behavior. When we walked into the clubhouse for Game 4, we thought we were done.’
Ortiz said faith is essential.
“I think there’s no room for negativity once you get there,” he said. “Every thought should be in a positive way, every thought, so that you can bounce out of it.
“So we’re going from never to never and getting there,” he said, bursting out laughing.
Ortiz’s tournament – dubbed the Boston Heart Classic – raises money for children in need of life-saving medical treatment in both his native country, the Dominican Republic, and New England.