In short, the city was glowing Thursday.
The White Sox had been a proxy for this city of blue-collar roots, of smarting Second City status, of a million real and perceived adversities hung on it and its South Side team. In a stroke this week, the Sox washed those cares away, in what locals recognized as the Chicago way: hard work.
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What happened after the Sox won was more than a World Series victory–it was akin to relief.
As the World Champion Chicago White Sox returned to Midway Airport on Thursday, fans stood seven deep along 63rd Street to welcome them home. Manager Ozzie Guillen jumped from his limousine to walk along the route, a parade marshal for a block, shaking hands and talking to well-wishers.
Other players waved from cars that crawled down the street. From the sidewalk, waves of screams rose and fell against a background of steady applause.
The crowd formed three hours before the team’s 3:30 p.m. arrival. Those who got there late saw the impenetrable scrum and climbed up–onto street signs, fences and light posts. Flags and homemade placards bounced and waved in the humanity.
“You’ve made history,” one sign told the White Sox.
“Don’t Stop Believing!” another exhorted.
Most signs were simple: “World Series Champion Chicago White Sox.”
It seemed to say everything.
“I cried when they clinched,” said Art Baltazar, 36, of the Archer Heights neighborhood. “I cried when they beat the Angels. I’ve been crying all week.”
Near U.S. Cellular Field Thursday, honking cars cruised by fans who cheered or waved Sox flags well into the afternoon. Residents of nearby Bridgeport wore the team’s Series victory like a new suit.
“We’re the center of attention right now,” said lifelong resident Shirley Mesa, 45, as TV news crews filmed her and about 200 others waiting to buy Sox memorabilia inside the Grandstand souvenir shop on 35th Street. “At last, something positive.”
“It’s a burden I’ve carried since I was a young boy,” said Reggie White, who has lived all his 40 years on the South Side, his team never visiting a World Series in all that time.
The feeling he had now–being a winner–was too much to contain.
“I feel like a champ!” he shouted in the middle of a conversation. “I feel like a champ!”
The people around him seized on the outburst too, repeating it like a cheer.
“I feel like a champ! I feel like a champ!” they said.
The line of champs waiting outside a Bridgeport store to buy Sox knickknacks bumped fists and exchanged high fives.
“I feel on top of the world today,” White shouted over his fellow cheering champions. “It’s our day. Our day.”
To understand why winning feels so good, you must understand how painful it is to almost win, said Scott Madey, professor of psychology at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania. It feels worse than losing, he said. It’s even worse than coming in third.
With other psychologists, he looked at the facial expressions of medalists in the 1992 Summer Olympics and saw pain in the faces of silver medalists that contrasted deeply with the joy evident for those who took bronze.
“What it means is thinking about what might have been,” Madey said. “For the silver medalist, it wasn’t what they achieved, but what they could have had.”
On Wednesday night, as rain began falling in Bridgeport, the White Sox saved working class Chicago from 88 years of Might-Have-Been.
Less than 24 hours after Chicago swept the Houston Astros, Mayor Richard Daley called for a ticker tape parade to be held at 11 a.m. Friday, departing from U.S. Cellular Field to wind through neighborhoods from Bridgeport to the Loop.
Unable to wait until then, thousands bedecked themselves in White Sox jerseys, ballcaps and T-shirts and flooded the city.
At sporting good stores in Bridgeport, the Loop and elsewhere, shop floors were crowded and fans formed lines to buy trinkets that not only said “White Sox,” but “World Series.”
“You feel like it was you. You feel like the winner,” said Sylvia Gomez, 46, of the Chicago Lawn neighborhood. She couldn’t sleep Wednesday night, she said, and Thursday night didn’t look much better.
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“I hope God blesses them, because they made us all winners,” she said.
It was something magical that happens when a professional baseball team wins a game in Houston Wednesday, and an anonymous man downtown is pumping his fist Thursday at passersby in Sox gear and declaring, “We did it!”
“This isn’t about a sport. This is about life,” said Gene Hynes, 54, a traveling GMC salesman from Plainfield with a lingering jealousy of fans of championship teams.
With bags under his eyes and a smile on his face, he is adjusting to a different reality now.
“You don’t have to hold your head down anymore,” Hynes said. “I can look at Yankees fans with pride now.
“I can say `We won the World Series.'”
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