Hey, hey, holy mackerel – no doubt about it…
Writing by treason on Friday, 28 of September , 2007 at 10:01 pm
“The world would be a lot better off if it were dominated by people like Ernie Banks. The former star of the Chicago Cubs was never too busy to greet people with a smile. He didn’t complain about extra-inning games or doubleheaders… Baseball would have little difficulty drawing fans if it could find the mold which developed Banks and put one of him on each team.
Banks continued to play with the Cubs through 1971. He had one major disappointment in his career. He never got to play in a World Series, because the Cubs never won a league championship.”
– Best Baseball Stories, A Quarter Century – Hank Lowenkron, Editor
Every family has a running joke – at least one, anyway – and ours was probably pretty typical for North Side Chicagoans. My father was born in April 1906 and died in April 1970. Technically, it was his fourth and final heart attack that did him in, although sometimes I suspect 1969 might have had something to do with it.
In 1970, my mother took me and one of my sisters – now deceased – to Prescott, Arizona, leaving the city we loved behind us. A married sister was still there, another sister was already a longtime resident of Tempe, and my brother was in the Air Force. My father, who had been separated from my mother for several years, stayed behind. I was ten years old and carried a ten-year-old child’s fantasy west with me. I believed that one day, when my father retired, he’d leave Chicago and join us in Arizona. My father loved Chicago, and he left his family’s horse farm in the Shenandoah Valley when he was sixteen, hopped a train with his dog Sally, and made his way to the “City of the Big Shoulders.” He was a diehard Cubs fan, yet never saw his team win a World Series. He died two weeks short of retirement age and my fantasy died with him.
My sister – her father’s daughter, as my mother was always quick to point out – “took after” him and his family (the Dutch and English side, not my mother’s Italian side) in several ways. Like Dad, she was a Cubs fan. She was born in April 1953 and died in the spring of 2003 – her heart failed, too – and she was another Cubs fan who never saw her team win a World Series.
My mother always told us that our father was a jinx because whenever he watched the Cubs play, they would lose. The running joke: He must have watched a lot of games. Family legends stick, and my sister and I carried that curse. To this day, I’m afraid to watch the Cubs play or wear a Cubs cap or shirt when there’s even the slightest, most remote possibility that they could actually win a championship. Because, if they lose… well, it’ll be my fault.
I’d said I’d boycotted baseball this season and wasn’t watching the game. It was difficult, hearing reports of the unusually good performance of the Cubbies after the All-Star break, but I stood firm. Misbehavior had affected even my team and after a brawl and the fisticuff between team members, I refused to participate and lend my support.
But I am old and weak. I confess that I did watch the last couple games at Wrigley and I even started wearing Cubs jerseys and sweatshirts again. One day I wore my 1969 shirt, and a woman stopped me in the grocery store to tell me how much she liked it.
“We’re from Chicago,” she started.
By the end of the conversation we had both agreed that this winning streak would end somehow. But we could still hope. The team had left Wrigley and was in Florida, playing somewhat dismally against the Marlins. Would this be another sad September?
I’d stopped watching after that last Chicago game and was trying not to pay attention. But tonight I knew the Cubs could clinch the division if they beat the Reds and the Brewers lost to the Padres. I didn’t watch the game. I didn’t wear a Cubs shirt. I didn’t want to jinx the team.
What happened to the Chicago Cubs in 1969 appears to be, ironically, happening to the New York Mets in 2007. It might turn out to be a very sad September for Shea Stadium’s fans, but I do not relish this. I know what they’re going through. I – dare I say it? – really do feel their pain.
A local theater just produced Bleacher Bums recently. The director is a woman who said she always wanted to do the show because her team, like mine, was the ’69 Cubbies. That woman in the grocery store asked me if I’d gone to see it, and I said that I hadn’t.
I’d thought about it, sure, but in the end I didn’t go. Guess I just didn’t want to jinx it.
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