I'm still wrestling with the options for my baseball preview extravaganza. As a rational human being, I realize that there are precious few baseball fans left in America and that most of us are already e-mailing each other on the topic with Spring Training on the horizon (it's Truck Day at Fenway already!) and so post upon post here would kind of be redundant. Stay tuned, there'll be something soon.
Instead, I'd like to weigh in on the scourge of the sports world - Sports Bigamy.
Boston Sports Guy has a strong stance on this and I'd gladly link to this, were the heads at ESPN.om not charging for access to his old articles now. Suffice to say that he's sticking to his guns and holding that if there is even the slightest chance that the two teams you root for should ever meet, it's a bad idea and you need to choose one or the other.
Let me give you a little background before I make my plea.
As a little guy, growing up in Chicago's south suburbs, there were scant few things to do in the summer. Included in those were getting into trouble, playing outside with other kids who talked us into getting into trouble and watching baseball on TV.
In our neighborhood, there were three kids my age, including David. David's dad was the only hard core fan of any type and for any sport. My dad and others would watch football or baseball, but it's not like anyone lived for the tailgate in our neighborhood. By virtue of David's dad being a Cub fan, he became a Cub fan and the rest of us fell in line.
In the summer, this was fine, we had our little secure pocket of Cubdom amidst the Sox fans and with WGN playing pretty much all the games those days, we were happy kids who would walk away from smashing batteries with a hammer on the curb (true story) to watch games all summer. On days when there was no baseball (keep in mind this was prior to night baseball in 1988 at Wrigley) we'd be in the yards as Leon Durham, Rick Sutcliffe and after fistfights, someone got to be Ryne Sandberg.
When school started, there were football and nuns making sure we were kept on the straight and narrow, so somehow baseball didn't come up much (actually look at the Cubs or White Sox records from the early 1980s and you'll see why there wasn't much interest). Sure, it would come up from time to time when kids start looking for reasons to beat on each other (You're a Cub fan? I'm a Sox fan! Whap!) but this was before interleague play.
Every summer they'd have the "Crosstown Classic" where the teams would meet on an off day and play a game no one gave a crap about - case in point, Michael Jordan played for the Sox on one of these days. After we got tired of ragging each other about who won the Crosstown that summer (which was hard to remember two months later) the arguements ran out of steam.
That was, until 1984.
Suddenly, the Cubs 'magic number' began appearing on the front page of the sports section and mentioned on the radio as they did afternoon drive news updates. I had no idea what this meant. None. I just knew that the Cubs were still playing and it was getting colder outside. None of this made any sense, but I got a t-shirt that had the words 'Cubs' and 'Champions' on it, so it was all good.
Sure they lost on Durham's Gatorade glove, blowing a 2-0 lead in San Diego, but from there the fire really started in grammar school. Whereas before we were all fans as a means of identification, things began to get nasty. Whether this was because of the Cubs' success or the White Sox' resurgence or just kids filling a need to be more competitive as we hurtled towards puberty doesn't matter, but one thing became clear - the Crosstown wasn't going to cut it anymore.
The line was drawn. White Sox fans the fall before were still Sox fans and now would give me hell when the Padres won against the Cubs. Some defected to the Cardinals, others just chose sides seemingly at random. Hardly a day went by that spring where I wasn't hearing a snide remark about someone who had beaten the Cubs. That's not to say that they started it. Not by a long shot, but this is where the unpleasant business of sports bigamy comes into play.
With my mom being from Massachusetts, I instinctively chose the Red Sox. While I knew that one day they might see each other, they were a world apart from my non-interleague Cubs and I ran with it.
In retrospect, someone should have stepped in and explained the choices I had made (in fact there are child protection laws against this type of things these days). While it may have started as extra ammo against the White Sox, we all started to care about our AL teams. This lead of course to Miss Wick's second-grade class of little Cubs and Sox fans losing all track of the math lesson as we tried to remember two teams for each of the guys in class and who had won and lost the night before (in an era of no SportsCenter or internet, this was tougher than the long division we were trying to avoid). In short, it got out of hand really quickly.
This also set me up for the Cubs loss in 1984 and the Red Sox historic collapse against the Mets in 1986. Honestly, I can't express the disappointment I felt in 1986 - I saw a clip of it two weeks ago and I still feel sick... and I didn't even get to see the game live. I was too young to know that they were cooked for Game 7, and kept my hopes up that they would pull through. I heard about it until I moved to a new school the following year (not because of the Wold Series, but it wouldn't have been a bad idea anyway).
From there, I grew into football and the Bulls took Chicago by storm in the Jordan years. Adding in hockey in high school left no room for baseball and it all fell by the wayside. College meant long summers with time to kill and drunken nights seemed to always have a baseball game on in the humid background. And as baseball crept back, so did the Red Sox.
While I'd always kept a Cubs hat around and still went to games in high school, my Red Sox hat had been lost in the shuffle and so it was replaced. Since then, the Cubs and Red Sox have held a photo-finish in my baseball life.
Look for Part II tomorrow or Wednesday.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment