Stepping out into the moonlight of my back yard with a martini and a cigar might have seemed a bit extreme at that late hour, considering that I had to wake up in five hours, but my dead father was waiting.
There are a lot of important things I could have talked about in an audience with the dead out under the stars, but when the White Sox land in the World Series, who cares about the other stuff? Plus, the apparent disgust of the national TV commentators who couldn’t completely hide their East and West Coast “homie” status made it all the more sweet.
Now, I’m not going to get all sappy and explain how in a time when fathers and sons weren’t exactly encouraged to have meaningful discussions, he and I could always commune over the Sox. But now, several years after my father’s death, once the Sox had conquered the American League, I thought he and I should speak again ever so briefly, even if just to tell him, “They did it!”
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Because after a life of heartbreak as a Sox fan, I wanted to thank him and the Sox for imbuing me with a serious attitude problem that has served me well in life. It’s something I’m proud of, and it’s made me resilient in other ways.
When your team avoids ultimate victory so consistently and really blows the big games, you either swear off sports altogether or develop some pretty thick skin. And when you grow up outside of Chicago, I mean way outside, near Peoria, in a place where straight-faced people talk about prisons as an industry, that skin has to get even thicker. You become a loser’s loser.
Because for Downstate kids of my era, Chicago might as well have been New York. Both were equally unreachable. Just traveling to Peoria was a huge deal. To actually travel to Chicago just to see a baseball game was unthinkable. Maybe if someone close to us were dying in a Chicago hospital, we could have justified sneaking in a game. But unfortunately we didn’t know anybody dying up here.
Too, TV coverage of the Sox down there was a rarity. So I have few visual memories of them, and if it weren’t for Bob Elson on radio, I wouldn’t have any audio memories either. But thankfully, he was able to describe their losses in vivid detail.
So, for all you Chicagoans who are coming out of your half-century sulk over the Sox, talking about how hard it’s been and how you’ve never gotten any respect in this Cubs town, buck up. Generations of us from beyond the boonies never even got to go to a game. We would have loved to have seen the Sox lose.
I hate to say it, but I guess what I’m claiming is that I am a much bigger loser than you city people are. What’s worse is that I lived in a vast chunk of Downstate Illinois whose allegiance, inexplicably, belongs to the St. Louis Cardinals.
I’ll confess that as a Sox fan, I don’t hate the Cubs, mainly because I always despised the Cardinals. So it was a matter of my enemy’s enemy being my friend. Thus, I never was indoctrinated into the cross-town rivalry and actually developed an affection for the Cubs too. That makes me, well, bi, and even more of an outsider among many Sox fans. And you know what? I can take it. Because if nothing else, the Sox are an outsider’s team.
But let me make a point that I think all Chicagoans can revel in, even Cubs fans. Those network TV baseball commentators are having to wallow in their own slop because their preferred coastal glamor teams couldn’t beat one team from a city whose tradition for losing surpasses all others. And that, speaking as a real loser, feels sooo good.
So, on behalf of my Sox forebear, go Sox!
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