Celebrating the 103rd Consecutive World Series the Cubs Won't Win, or, Do the Bartman!

Wilt Chamberlain once said, "Nobody loves Goliath."  While stories about Chamberlain's personal life tend to belie that bit of self-deprecation, it is true that sports fans love an underdog.  This explains why there was so much rooting for the Boston Red Sox when in the 2004 ALCS they came the first team in baseball history to come back from a 3-0 playoff deficit and won Boston's first championship since 1918.  It explains how exhilarating the 1980 Miracle on Ice was, when the USA topped the Russian juggernaut in the semifinals en route to a gold medal.

But even our love for the Davids of sport fails utterly to explain why anyone loves the Chicago Cubs.  I, for one, do not.  And so it is this week that I celebrate the 103rd consecutive World Series the Cubs will not win.  And it is in the same spirit that last Friday, October 14, I celebrated the holiday of Bartman, as I do each year.  This was the eighth year of Bartman, and every year, it's a little sweeter.  The 2005 Bartman was especially sweet because my White Sox were winning a World Series, the first of my lifetime.  To think that only two years earlier, I had all but given up on the White Sox playing in a World Series before the Cubs did.  But each Bartman is sweeter than the last.

October 14, 2003 was -- for a few hours -- of the darkest days in my sporting life.  The Chicago Cubs were hosting the Florida Marlins in the sixth game of the National League Championship Series at overrated Wrigley Field.  The Cubs had two of the best pitchers in baseball set to pitch elimination games:  Mark Prior for game six, and if needed, Kerry Wood in game seven.  Entering the eighth inning, Prior had allowed only three hits.  The Cubs were staked to a 3-0 lead.  After a popout to open the Marlins' eighth, I gave up on the game and dejected walked to the other end of my house for dinner.  As a lifelong White Sox fan, I knew the end was near.  The Cubs would soon be in the World Series before my White Sox, and I would never, ever, ever hear the end of it.  

When I returned to the TV thirty minutes later, a miracle had transpired.  I knew the Cubs had lost, because ESPN News was  running a long interview with a depressed and confused-looking Dusty Baker.  But how?  How could the Cubs have blown such a lead?  There was this Zapruder-like tape-loop running on a split screen with Baker, and it was a foul ball on the third base side.  The ball kept falling, and Moises Alou kept almost catching it, and this arresting figure in the front row, with headphones, sweatshirt, and -- of course -- a Cubs cap, reaches for it, oblivious to Alou, and prevents the catch.  The rest was history.  Alou freaks out at Bartman.  As if primed genetically for failure, the Cubs get distracted.  Prior, already well over 100 in his pitch count, can't get another out.  The Marlins, with the extra out gifted to them by Bartman, score eight runs in the eighth.  Game Six is theirs.  The pall of anticipating doom spread over Chicago.  Game Seven was a foregone conclusion, and the Marlins walked right over the Cubs.  Myself, the Ligues, and the other dozen or so White Sox fans breathed a sigh of relief that few could understand.

Without Bartman?  The Cubs and Yankees play the most overhyped World Series of our lifetime.  (Which, by the way, the Yankees would have won going away.)  With Bartman?  It's Shakespearean.  Cub fandom is an art of suffering, an epic masochism, a fetishization of failure ("The Lovable Losers"?  Come on.)  Because loving the Cubs is all of that, it is almost literary that a member of Cub Nation pulled the Cubs back down into their ineffable Cubness.  (Indeed, the meanspiritedness shown Bartman in Cub Nation shows the bad karma that is Cubbiness.  Known for cloying camaraderie, the Cub-lovers turned on the poor guy like piranhas.  Bartman the human showed a lot of class afterward, never capitalizing for money or media attention, despite many offers.  He felt bad, Cub Nation.  Let him go, already!  Anyway, he's a saint in my house.)

This is all hard to understand if you were not a Chicagoan who is also not a Cub fan.  The Cubs get all the media play in Chicago.  Their fans are by turns smug and willfully oblivious.  The spring is filled with bloated hype about how good the Cubs will be, including in years they end up winning 68 games.  The coverage is breathless through All-Star breaks below .500.  No, the Cubs are not going to break out of it.  No, the Cubs are not going to make up that 11 game deficit on the Cardinals.  No, that three game series in August is not crucial, nor is it relevant to anything.  No, the field is the other way, you're facing backwards.  You get the idea.  Growing up not loving the Cubs in Chicago, one gets all kinds of grief, most of it not good-natured.  Just because no Cub fan ever got drunk and attacked the first base umpire.  And because the Cubs never forfeited a game by causing a riot of crazed rock and rollers (drunk again) watching a mass disco record detonation in center field.  Jealousy is so unbecoming, Cubbies.

Oh, this just in:  at this writing, no one alive remembers the Chicago Cubs winning a World Series.  The last time they did so was in October 1908, when they beat the Detroit Tigers.  In 2005, the Chicago White Sox won the World Series, defeating the Houston Astros 4-0.

Damn, that was a fun paragraph to type.

Anyway, here's a video to help you and your loved ones celebrate this fine 2011 World Series between the St. Louis Not-Cubs and the Texas Not-Cubs.  Cheers.  And do the Bartman!