[I was going to post this in the middle of March, but then, when Covid-19 caused MLB to delay the season, I decided to wait until baseball was ready to start again. I didn’t realize it would be this long. In any case, here it is.]
Before I left for our trip to Egypt in February, which seems forever ago, I wrote a post I titled “Congratulations, Chiefs Fans. But 50 Still Isn’t 108.” In it, I tried to explain why, even for Cubs fans who weren’t around for 108 years (or who weren’t even around for 30 years), the Cubs’ 108 years was different than the Chiefs’ 50 years. In doing so, I mentioned that the media was always talking about how it had been 108 years and that’s what everybody read about.
But while I was gone,1 I realized that wasn’t it. Yes, the media constantly harped about the 108 years,2 but that was only part, and not the main part, of why fans, even those in their 30s, felt they had been there for 108 years. It was, instead, that special tie between sports fans of different generations, a tie that I think is especially deep for Cubs fans. Maybe this is because things have not always gone well for the Cubs. When Ryan Dempster gave up that two-out, two-strike grand slam to James Loney in game 1 of the 2008 NLDS, people remembered the Marlins’ eight runs in the eighth inning of the game 6 of the 2003 NLCS, the 9th inning home run by Javy Lopez off Kevin Tapani in game 2 of the 1998 NLDS, the grand slam home run off Greg Maddux in the 1989 NLCS (when Giants batter supposedly read Greg’s lips), the ball that went under Leon Durham’s Gatorade-soaked glove in the 1984 NLCS, and so much about 1969.3,4 All of them were part of being a Cubs fan.
Recent Comments