Apologies in advance, but this will be fairly melancholy. Emphasis on fairly. Let's go!
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Baseball isn't my favorite sport. Today, I can take baseball or leave baseball. I'm, first and foremost, a basketball guy.
But there's something. Something that I can't put my finger on. Something terribly intangible about the Cubs that affects me in a way that I can't explain and I can't change.
I've often joked with others that raising a child to love the Cubs is - at the least - mildly abusive. Training a child to love a sad-sack team that will never amount to anything, it's masochistic. Or is that sadistic? It's probably both.
But I'm stuck with it. It has stuck to me in a way that I can't let go. Should I have children, I'll absolutely subject them to the same abject misery.
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My Father's Father was a hard man. I didn't know him well. He struggled with emphysema throughout my childhood, sucking on oxygen as the disease ate him away breath by rasping breath. We spent summers and the occasional winter with him and my Grandmother on Little Pickerel Lake doing the Chicago-ans in the north-woods thing.
My Grandfather loved the Cubs. My Father was raised a Cub fan, and I was in no position to do otherwise. There was no choice. Nor should there have been.
My Grandfather once lent me a book about the 1969 Cubs and I ate it up. The names, the faces, the pain, the everything. Cementing that connection to the past. Have I mentioned that I share a birthday with Ron Santo? To note, I vividly remember the Brant Brown game. Ron's call was on radio, and I heard it after I had watched it, but it's still the best. It all worked out, the Cubs still made they playoffs in '98.
I spent the whole summer of 1989 devouring the Cubs. This was probably the year that sports were irrevocably etched into my psyche. I watched nearly every game. I lived the Cubs. I breathed the Shawon-O-Meter. My life was WGN, Harry and Steve. It was a foregone conclusion that this was the year.
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In the summer of 1989, this happened.
On the previous play, Ehlo scored on a give-and-go off the inbound and put the Cavs up by one. I was crushed. My pathetic-bad-fan-kid-instinct was to turn the game off and walk away. My parents told me to hang in there and see, who knows what could happen?
The Shot happened.
The Bulls went on to beat the Knicks and then get smothered by the Pistons, but that was somewhat inevitable. It didn't crush me. I was all sorts of anything-can-happen-let's-just-see-it-definitely-will!
I watched the final game of the Cubs-Giants NLCS upstairs in my parents bedroom on the tiny TV. I don't remember why I wasn't watching downstairs. Will Clark just killed the Cubs that series. Killed them. This crushed me. They lost, and so did I.
I didn't want to watch baseball anymore. I sat in my room and sobbed. Why? How could they lose like this? I didn't understand. The first time that you realize that it doesn't always work out with sports, well, it sucks.
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I ended up serving as a replacement / impromptu pall bearer at my Grandfather's funeral. I was probably 12 or so. I don't remember. It was weird. I think that this was the first funeral that I attended where I felt, oh I don't know, feelings. I didn't know what to do with them. My Father gave the eulogy. I'd never seen him that vulnerable.
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I grew up with Go! Cubs! Go! I still love it.
Despite what Billy Corgan thinks about him and it, Eddie Vedder sums up my feelings on the Cubs with "All the Way". It kills me every time I hear it.
For me it's that longing, that desperate longing that brings it home. It hits that spot. That perfect spot where the world fades away and every moment breaks my brain vividly. My moments. My Father's moments. My Grandfather's moments.
The hope, despite all of that misery, makes it work. Someday we will go all the way.
Go! Cubs! Go! is a celebration written by a folksinger. All the Way is a cry-in-your-beer song in the best sense. It speaks. It plays out that story. That story of being one. Of being in love.
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