I was going to write a post on how poorly the Cubs have been doing and the fact that the season is, with respect to making the post season, over. The Cubs are 12 games under .500 and 11-1/2 games behind the first place Cincinnati Reds.
Here are some of the things I was going to mention: We have lost the first game of our last eleven series. In our last eleven games, we have scored 20 runs. If you exclude the game we won 8 to 6, we have scored 12 runs in ten games. In six of those eleven games, we held our opponents to two or fewer runs, and we still lost four of them. We have had 51 "quality starts"; we have won 27 of them. Before today’s game, we had given up eight runs in the first four games of the current homestand; we only won one of those games. And on and on.
But then I read an article in the Personal Journal section of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal: "Soccerbleu! The Curse Of Sports Patriots" by Eric Felten.* The article talks about the reactions of various countries to the poor play of their teams in the World Cup. Nigeria’s President, Goodluck Jonathan (fascinating name), has banned the Nigerian national team from playing in international competition for two years because they didn’t even win a single game.
The French National Assembly has held hearings to investigate the failure of the French team to make it out of the first round. When the head of the international soccer (a/k/a football) federation warned against political interference, a French government spokesman responded:
"‘There is no interference. It is the role of the state to think through, with the [French football] federation, a problem that goes beyond sport. The French team represents the country, not just the federation.’"
The article then switches to the relationship of national teams and patriotism, and it concludes as follows:
"If you base your love of country on the winning ways of your national teams, your loyalties are likely to fray and fade when those teams falter. This is the shabby and self-deluding sort of patriotism based, as C.S. Lewis put it, in ‘a firm, even prosaic belief that our own nation, in sober fact, has long been, and still is markedly superior to all others.’
Lewis was leery of a loyalty based on triumphs. The man who loves his country because it is victorious isn't one to stick it out when Fortuna gets up to her old tricks. ‘No man,’ Lewis wrote, quoting an ancient Greek adage, ‘loves his city because it is great, but because it is his.’
Which is why the right sort of sports fandom supports a solid sort of patriotism. Rooting for your team, even if it loses year after year, teaches fidelity and galvanizes us against the vagaries of circumstance.
That's the stuff of real patriotism, with its willingness to suffer if need be, that we celebrate this Independence Day weekend—when it doesn't hurt to be reminded of Thomas Paine's contempt for the ‘sunshine patriot.’
Maybe the problem for France isn't that its national team lost, but that the nation needed so badly for them to win."
And so, when our daughter comes home for the Fourth of July (and her mother’s birthday), before we go to the beach, we head out to the Friendly Confines of Beautiful Wrigley Field to watch our team play. We don’t go because they are going to win this year (though we have every hope that they will win today). We certainly don’t because we are "sunshine fans". We have sat through too many rain delays and snow and just plain bitter cold, to be considered that. No, we go because they are our team and we are their fans. And that is the way it should be.
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* You may be able to find Mr. Felten’s article here for a while.
Update (7/3/10 9:15 pm): The Cubs did win today. They beat the Reds, 3 to 1, but it wasn't easy. In the first six innings, the Cubs left 14 men on base without scoring a single run. They finally scored three runs in the seventh [correction: sixth], but they left three more runners on base. The 17 men they left on base was, I believe, just one short of the National League for runners left on base in a nine-inning game - and they didn't even bat in the ninth.
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