I am the anti-Cub. The fly in the Old-Style, the gust of spite blowing the ball to Bartmann. I put cement in Leon Durham’s glove, poison in Prior’s arm. I am standing on your neck Cubs fan, and I won’t let you up until you stop begging for mercy. Until you show some dignity and self respect. Until you stop pouring your heart and cash into the font of slavish expectation that this, finally is your year.
Come on.
On Clark and Addison where it’s always April Fool’s Day, history’s biggest hoax, perpetuated by the Tribune Company, continues to dupe the faithful. The trick is so believable that every day they ask to see it again. It’s a 6-month running laugh track, yet filmed before a live audience. Renewed annually, it’s black comedy on the base paths, fine-tuned over a century to be so excruciatingly poignant as to wring even the salt from the tears of the northsiders. Is it coincidence that Bill Murray, long suffering fan, played the lead in Groundhog Day, the movie where every day was the same day, no matter what he tried?
If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then what does that say about your state of mental health, oh nation of misery? Would you take a girl out on 99 dates without getting more than a peck on the cheek? Would you repeat your senior year 99 times? Would you enter the wrong PIN number in the ATM at the First Bank of Hope Springs Eternal 99 times, figuring that this time, just this once, your perseverance will be rewarded with a ring and a parade down LaSalle Street?
I am the anti-Cub, and I know who you are. Like fat, drunken, maniacal locusts you descend upon Miller park in your Saabs and Volvos, spurning decency and sportsmanship. You invade St. Louis every year yet fail to learn anything from the fans whose team is second only to the Yankees in championships. In Cincinnati, the weather stations include you in their forecasts. Warning sirens blare, women and children hide. You’re Cub fans: rabid, delusional and pitiful. Like the abandoned mongrel skulking down an alley, only the most pious feed you scraps of sympathy. Those with more sense just give you a wide berth.
I am the anti-Cub and am perplexed as to why you would not eschew Wrigley Field until the organization achieved the seemingly impossible and fielded a playoff squad two years running. Why you don’t form angry mobs in the street, demanding of ownership a refund for a century of failing to provide closure - or at the very least, a voucher for psychiatric services - escapes me. Can there be any doubt that anyone in Cub nation (which borders on Indig nation to the north and Condem nation to the south) unfortunate enough to have survived 2003 is suffering at least some form of post-traumatic Dusty disorder? Believe-it-or-not, he probably got the better end of the deal. As whipping boy for all your sins, oh bleacher bums, he has an iron-clad right to seek righteous vengeance and declare himself free and clear of your shenanigans.
How many silver trophies will it take to bury the goat? One? Two? One hundred? In Boston they purged their sins and exorcised their demons against their eternal foe. They always had a target. Someone upon whom to focus the full fury of their suffering. Bucky Fuggingdent or Aaron Fugginboone. And lest ye forget the Mookie man. Whoever. Now it’s the Bronx turn to play catch up. But for the Cubs, who is the man in black, the boogeyman in the closet, the Dark Lord oppressing the bright-eyed? Who is the evil foil, the Everest to surmount, the mortal enemy - the man who killed my father - prepare to die? Well, he’s sitting in that seat on Addison street. Ordering that Budweiser. He’s a Cub fan, his own worst enemy. He wears mediocrity as a badge of defiance against reality and sanity, and accepts losing as a birthright. He blithely returns every season to the theater of the absurd, the one-act play of the ridiculous.
I am the anti-Cub. And I know that a Bear can be a ferocious maneater - best left unaroused. A Cub, on the other hand, is a cute and cuddly little woodland creature who relies on its mother for protection. But I’m not fooled by these babes in their red, white and blue all-American double-knits. They aren’t America’s team. Never have been. Unless America is the land of the disappointed. The land of the underachieving. The land of the mismanaged. The land of huckster schlock and double-talk. No, the Yankees are America’s team. They invented the pinstripes. They put the numbers on. They’re ruthless, unapologetic and unlovable. And all they do is win. They don’t play in the Friendly Confines. They play in The House That Ruth Built. In their world of black and white, there is only one acceptable result. They’re not into warm and fuzzy.
So while the losers who aren’t loveable, and their team, suffer through another season of passable mediocrity in a division of “who’s-that-guy?”, what’s the anti-Cub to do. Show pity? Sympathy? Concern?
Nope. I am the anti-Cub.
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