There was a time when all that mattered to a 13-year-old boy was watching the Chicago Cubs play baseball on television.
Although he couldn’t have even found Illinois with a yet-to-be invented GPS navigational device, he scheduled each of his lonely summer days, after moving to a new town, around WGN’s home-game coverage.
The kid grew up playing several sports with his father and siblings, but they were all suddenly too busy to bother.
Anyone who has spent a summer in the oven of Phoenix or Las Vegas understands that you don’t just go outside during the day. Television programming in the afternoon was primarily soap operas and infomercials.
Before there were professional teams in the desert, the MLB Season Packages on satellite, or 64 ESPN channels, there was WGN.
Even though there were much closer professional baseball teams; Padres, Angels, and Dodgers broadcasts were only available on AM radio at night. Sports websites and text-message updates from ESPN mobile were just a degenerate gambler’s science-fiction dream.
I don’t know which marketing genius inside the Wrigley Gum Network decided to broadcast a local Chicago station with regional professional sports coverage to every basic cable system of the barely inhabited desert southwest, but it worked.
Andre Dawson dingers (as we used to say) over the ivy had this boy jumping off the couch, arms in the air, mimicking the umpire’s round trip signal. Dunston-to-Sandberg-to-Grace double plays inspired a few holes in his bedroom wall when he attempted to “turn two” to an imaginary first baseman.
It even had him learning baseball history and sports writing through comparisons to Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance double plays.
He bought a goofy, red, white, and blue baseball cap with a cartoon bear on it at the mall and wore it everywhere, except to church on Sunday.
He gave each weeks’ allowance to the Fleer, Donruss, Upper Deck, and Tops Corporations. But to him, all the cards were “commons” unless the player was wearing a Cubs uniform.
Sports fandom knows of no more faithful a soldier than a junior-high boy.
Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card?
He’d trade it for a Greg Maddux or Vance Law just to complete a team set.
It was good times for Chicago Cubs fans. Players like “wild thing” Mitch Williams, who once took a line drive off his temple, made headlines and racked up wins. Jerome Walton won Rookie of the Year by stealing bases and pushing up the Jerome-O-Meter.
What he hadn’t heard about, or more probably ignored, was the reputation Chicago had of being “lovable losers” or a silly superstitious curse. There was hope that each game and postseason would be the one where they finally lived up to their potential.
He eventually made some friends when school started, and the next five summers were spent skateboarding and swimming at the lake instead of listening to Harry Carey slobber through the seventh-inning stretch.
As years went on and as the Baby Bears baseball team continuously stumbled each September and October, so did their self-declared biggest fan’s interest.
Sure, he would check a box score whenever he happened across a sports page in McDonald’s, but he could hardly call himself a fan.
Other sports and sporty girls were better at keeping his attention. All those years of hopeful build-up, soon followed by heart-breaking frustration and letdown, too closely mirrored his experiences with the opposite sex to be positively formative.
Years later, there was a renewed interest in a Dominican home-run hitter chasing history, until...well we won’t re-hash all that...too painful.
A few more years down the road found him spending a nostalgic day sorting out those baseball-card albums, painfully deciding what put into his parents’ dumpster and what would just end up gathering more dust in the garage of his first home.
Still later, the Cubs, and unfortunately Major League Baseball, lost him as a fan forever when even Boston won a World Series.
That boy now has four kids of his own and hasn’t watched an entire baseball game in years. Although he has made his living by working in various sports industries, baseball has never been one of them.
He signs his kids up for soccer and golf every spring instead of little-league baseball. He couldn’t even find his old ball glove when the chef at his work signed him up for the company softball team.
He decided, years ago, that like a drug addict, Chicago needed every single one of their co-dependent fans to withdraw all love and support in order to allow the franchise to finally hit rock-bottom.
Ideally, for the Cubs team, they might finally accept reality and maybe Mark Cuban or someone who actually wants to win will give the franchise a fresh start. Just like an intervention, without the finality of this profoundly depressing notion, nothing would really be done to turn around the organization.
Then, about a month ago, he accidentally DVR’d Baseball Tonight instead of a college football game. The segment opened with a story about Alfonso Soriano and a Japanese right fielder, also with an unpronounceable name. It went on to talk about a recent no-hitter by the Cubs' ace starting pitcher Carlos Zambrano.
Before he could stop and delete this mistake, a long-ago and deeply ingrained memory response flashed across the nostalgia lobe of his brain. He couldn’t immediately care though, due to an even stronger defense mechanism, constructed of scar tissue to avoid more pain, which halted that foolish instinct.
He didn't choose this life or this team. He really had no chance; WGN was his only option.
Now, kids can not only choose from way too many televised games, but they also can follow any game or team online. It is encouraging to know that through technology, this terrible cycle of fan abuse can end.
You could call him a fair-weather fan of the Cubs, but that would be like calling Tina Turner a fair-weather wife of Ike.
Just like that perpetually abused spouse, he will be back for the playoffs just this one more time, with the hope that things really have changed.
This time around, there is much more at stake.
This time he will be watching it with his seven-year-old son.
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