Only in Chicago

By: Chicago Sports Review

Thursday, February 26, 2004

It is a strange thing to be a sports fan in Chicago. Fans here are among the most rabid, most loyal creatures in the universe, but with this comes a strange type of depression, bordering on schizophrenia.

Chicagoans love to win; they wish nothing more than for their teams to win championships, but the ownership of the major sports franchises have abused the fans here so badly that the city’s sports fans have an inferiority complex the size of New Mexico. What do I mean?

The era of losing starts with the baseball franchises. The Chicago Cubs haven’t won a World Championship in 95 years. They haven’t even been to a World Series since 1945, the last year of World War II. During most of this time, the Cubs were owned by the Wrigley family, owners of the chewing gum company.

For most of this time, the Wrigley family did very little to challenge for a championship, happy to draw the 1.2 million fans to Wrigley Field every year. If the team made money, fine. If not, the losses counted as a tax write off against the gum profits.

The White Sox have been little better. The Pale Hose haven’t delivered a championship since 1917, haven’t appeared in a World Series since 1959, and are probably best known for the “Black Sox” Scandal of 1919. From certain people’s perspective, the scandal, in which some players were paid to throw the World Series, was caused by owner Chuck Comiskey’s cheapness.

The Chicago Bears are a rarity: the first team in the NFL and one of the few left that is owned by the original family. When George “Papa Bear” Halas was alive, the Bears were champions, but as Halas aged and the league became more of a business than a “Mom and Pop” store, the team deteriorated.

The Chicago Blackhawks have not won a Stanley Cup since 1961. They haven’t been to the finals since 1992 and are currently one of the worst teams in the league. They are about to miss the playoffs for the sixth time in seven years.

Part of the trouble that Chicago franchises have had is money. As I implied earlier, the Halas/McCaskey family that have owned the Bears since George Halas died have no other businesses to rely on other than the Chicago Bears. The White Sox have had a number of owners over the years including John Allyn and Bill Veeck among others, none of whom have the millions required to freely spend to build a champion. Others of course, have had the money, but refused to spend any or have spent unwisely.

Blackhawks owner “Dollar” Bill Wirtz has been quoted as telling an incoming coach or General Manager “don’t think about winning a Stanley Cup, they’re too expensive.” After the Wrigley family sold the Cubs to the Tribune Company, the Cubs spent money in the early 1980s, but on players such as Danny Jackson and others who all turned out to be colossal busts. After that spending spree turned to naught, the Tribune has decided to spend money very infrequently; the mistake has impacted the team for two decades.

So, the frugality, hubris, and just plain stupidity shown by Chicago sports management over the decades has made a basket case of the collective psyches of Chicago fans. Even when Chicago boasted the best teams in a sport, fans feared that the “sky would fall in upon them” at any moment. Early in the 1986 Super Bowl, the heavily favored Chicago Bears suffered an uncharacteristic mistake: the normally sure-handed Walter Payton fumbled deep in Bears territory. It seemed as though the entirety of the city and suburbs gave a collective shudder, as though saying, “this is it, our team has been discovered as frauds and we are going to lose.”

Of course, the Bears defense held the New England Patriots to a field goal and the ship was righted. The defense ferociously attacked the Patriots and the offense scored at will, leading to a 46-10 thumping. Of course, Chicagoans said that they weren’t worried; they knew what was happening all along. But they were lying.

Even during the reign of the mighty Chicago Bulls, Chicagoans feared that the worst was near at all times. When the Lakers came into the old Chicago Stadium in Game 1 of the NBA Finals in 1991, Bulls fans feared the worst, but the Bulls were much better than the Lakers that year and swept them right out. The Phoenix Suns, Utah Jazz, and Portland Trailblazers were each supposed to pose serious challenges to the Chicago team, but none did.

But nowhere has the trauma been harder than on Chicago Cub fans. The Cubs were the “lovable losers,” punished much more than the Boston Red Sox fans because at least they had been to the World Series a number of times, falling just short. The Cubs usually couldn’t make the playoffs, and when they did, they were either upset, like in 1984 by the San Diego Padres, or swept as in 1998 by Atlanta.

So, the Cub fans were excited last season when the Cubs surprisingly won the National League Central, beat the dreaded Braves in five games, and were seven outs away from the team’s first World Series in over 50 years. Then, as all Cubs fans will tell you, the wheels came off. Leading the series 3-games-to-1 with the last two games at home in Wrigley, the Cubs blew it, losing both games 6 and 7 to the eventual World Champion Florida Marlins.

The signature event was a foul ball that drifted into the stands down the left field line behind the Cub bullpen in the eighth inning with the bases full of Marlins. Left fielder Moises Alou thought that he could make a play on the ball, reaching into the stands, but a North Shore fan tried to catch the ball, causing Alou’s attempt to fail. The Cubs claimed fan interference, which would have made the batter out, but, correctly, the umpires ruled that the ball was in the stands and no fan interference could be ruled.

The Marlins went on to score eight runs in the inning, win the game, and eventually win the series. The fan was escorted out of Wrigley Field for his own safety. Newspapers showed pictures of the “offender,” the news media went on a frantic search to learn the identity of the man who had broken the hearts of so many Cub fans. Various Florida businesses tried to give the fan various gifts including orange juice and vacations in Florida in appreciation for his act.

For his part, Steve Bartman is a rabid Cub fan who did what anyone else would do when a foul ball was headed for him: try and catch it. He did not lean over into the field of play to get the ball; the ball was in the stands. Also, Bartman took all of the gifts he received and donated them to the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation to honor Ron Santo, former Cubs third baseman and announcer who has had both legs amputated as a result of the disease. But the ball went to, you guessed it, a lawyer, who auctioned it off with the highest bidder being a group including the owners of Harry Caray’s Restaurant in downtown Chicago. Today, there will be a party at the restaurant at which time the ball, which many consider yet another sign of the jinx on the team, will be blown up, with all of the proceeds going to charity.

Now, in Boston, you never saw fans buying the ball that trickled under Bill Buckner’s legs in the 1986 World Series, or the glove that made the play being dynamited. (Neither of course do you see local tavern owners bringing goats to games to end the curse placed on the team by the bar’s a previous owner whose goat was refused entry to the 1945 World Series despite having a ticket.) But Chicagoans will gather Thursday night, akin to a Druidic ceremony or devil worship, to sacrifice a baseball. (Why do I have a mental picture of people dressed in goatskins dancing around a bonfire as in the film “Dragnet” with Dan Ackroyd and Tom Hanks?)

With the season about one month away, it is obvious that Chicagoan love their sports. It is also obvious that Chicago sports fans are completely out of their minds. If fans were one person, the person would be in an insane asylum and the owners of Chicago sports teams would all be incarcerated for child abuse. We are all crazy here.

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