In 2019, beloved baseball player David Ortiz was shot at a bar in the Dominican Republic. The shooting swiftly unraveled the two very different lives the Boston Red Sox star had been living, in Boston and in his home country. Mike Damiano masterfully tells Ortiz’s story for Boston magazine.
That frenzied quest for answers has yet to bear fruit, but it nevertheless opened a window into Ortiz’s personal life, offering a glimpse of him that had not always been visible to his legions of fans in Boston. Although Ortiz has always been unusually open and accessible to the public, and those traits are part of why Bostonians have grown to love him, there were some parts of his life—especially in the Dominican Republic—that he had long kept out of the spotlight. Consequently, the shooting didn’t merely reveal the two worlds Ortiz inhabited. It prompted the unraveling of his burgeoning attempts to finally bring them together for good.
Get the Longreads Weekly Email