Even most casual sports fan — and plenty of non-fans — by now know that the Chicago Cubs outdueled the Cleveland Indians in game 7 of the World Series last Wednesday night to end a championship drought of 108 years.
When the Cubs last won the World Series, Mark Twain was still around to write about it, should he have chosen to. Neither world war had yet been fought. Heck, the Ottoman Empire was still a going concern. The Cubs’ iconic Wrigley Field, the oldest stadium in the National League? Wouldn’t even be built for another eight years.
My grandfather had just turned two years old and would later tell me, as we watched another forgettable Cubs season fizzle away in September of ‘74, that he didn’t really remember that 1908 championship.
The Cubs’ victory ended the longest run of futility in North American professional sports, which is rather obvious when you stop to realize the NHL, the NFL and the NBA did not exist in 1908.
But the win also touched off one of the most unusual mass “celebrations” in the history of sport: hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fans in and around Wrigley Field used chalk to inscribe the stadium’s walls with the names of loved ones who had not lived to see the day.
After a victory roar that could be heard across Lake Michigan, the scene for many settled into something more akin to a memorial vigil.
From the quiet of my Vancouver Island living room, I could relate. I’m a third-generation Cubs’ fan, having inherited the affliction from my father beginning as a 10-year-old in 1969.
That, of course, was the season of the Cubs’ epic collapse. Seemingly ticketed for their first World Series since 1945, the team instead surrendered the pennant to the streaking New York Mets in a 17-game turnaround over the season’s final six weeks. Still, I was hooked. It was the year I bonded with my dad over baseball and learned about a curse of a goat, the Cubs’ nickname of “Lovable Losers” and the fan motto: “Next year.”
My devotion must have left an impression. It was, in fact, the “next year”, while we were living in Tucson, Arizona, that dad somehow convinced my devout mother to let their 11-year-old son not only travel across town by bus — alone — but to skip a school day at St. Mary’s Catholic School to catch his first Major League baseball game. Spring training, yes. But, still.
The Cubs were coming to Tucson for a Cactus League game at Hi Corbett Field, spring training home of, yep, the Cleveland Indians.
In 2010, I would drag my own teenage daughters to a spring training game in Arizona. The Cubs beat the Dodgers, the girls got T-shirts, and my oldest became a fourth-generation fan.
From 1945 to 1984, the Cubs were merely inept. The only time they so much as threatened to sniff the postseason was that ill-fated summer of ’69. But in 1984 began a series of playoff appearances that raised the spectre of the curse supposedly placed on the team when tavern owner Billy Sianis bought tickets for himself and his goat, Murphy, for Game 4 of the 1945 World Series. When the two were kicked out of Wrigley Field early in the game because of the goat’s offensive odour, Sianis is reported to have said, “Them Cubs, they ain’t gonna win no more.”
Seems fairly tame as curses go, but it was pretty effective until last week.
The ’84 team outscored San Diego 17-2 while jumping to a 2-0 lead in their best-of-5 series, then led the Padres 3-0 into the sixth inning of the decisive fifth game before first baseman Leon Durham allowed a ball to roll between his legs in a move made infamous by the Red Sox’s Bill Buckner two years later.
In 1989, the Cubs lost the NL championship series 4-1 to the San Francisco Giants, but led each of the final three games before each one slipped away in turn.
In 2003, they were five outs from the World Series when fan Steve Bartman immortalized himself by reaching out to grab a foul ball that appeared about to be caught for an out. The batter followed with a hit that began a winning rally by the Miami Marlins.
The Cubs’ penchant for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory became so ingrained that I found myself disappointed in their four-game sweep by the Mets in the 2015 NLCS — not because they lost, but because the manner of the defeat was so mundane.
Therefore, when the Cubs took a 6-3 lead into the bottom of the eighth inning of last week’s Game 7, my daughter and I were on the edge of our seats, waiting not to celebrate, but to see how the Cubs were going to cough this one away.
And indeed, they gave up the lead. But this time, after a rain delay, they stormed back and won in extra innings, unleashing cheers and tears.
I thought immediately of my father, who died in 1987 without seeing the Cubs ever hoisting the trophy — or even playing for it.
I thought, too, of my daughter and all the newer, younger Cub fans, whose team will no longer carry the legend of a goat’s curse or the title of Lovable Losers.
It almost feels as though they’re inheriting a different team from the one I spent my life with.
It’s fair they and the Cubs will craft a new future together. The past is buried.
