Why I am a Cubs Fan

The Cubs are in the playoffs, so it seems a good time to review why being a Cubs fan is more than just an entertainment option for me, but a moral imperative. It goes deeper than the memories I’ve had at Wrigley Field, like the extra inning game several years ago when the wind was blowing both cloud and dragonfly off the lake over the sky above me as I sat in the half-empty bleachers, most of my immediate neighbors having left for one of the local watering holes, and I a felt a perfect bliss, the kind of feeling others get when standing above the Grand Canyon or handling crystals, and then Mark Grace bopped a two-run homer over the right field fence to win the game. Those kinds of moments, in and of themselves, are pretty powerful, but there is more to it than that, so I dug up one of my old journal entries from a few years ago. It reminds me not just of the joys and the sorrows but the ideology behind being a Cubs fan. Here is what I wrote:

People state the obvious when they talk about the Cubs and Sox, missing the deep vein into which this rivalry taps. Sure, it’s North Side versus South Side, on the most obvious level, but this really doesn’t say much, and it ignores that there are plenty of North Side Sox fans and even a good share of South Side Cubs rooters. Sox fans like to imagine that it’s working class Sox fans versus the yuppie Cubs, but most of the Sox fans drive in from the suburbs in their SUV’s and their minivans and probably make as much money as the average Cubs fan. Also, Sox fans think of themselves as more urban, which is weird, because very few of them live in the city, at least not the Sox fans going to games.

Cubs and Sox fans hate each other not because of some narrow provincialism of neighborhood or even class, but because they represent two contrasting aesthetics, two different ways of looking at the world. Chicago is a melting pot but also a battleground.

On the one side, the Cubs and Wrigley Field represent the Midwestern values of tradition and neighborliness, one where the green grass and the ivy echo the parks and fields of small town America, where everyone has a smile, where the girls are pretty and the beer is cold. All you’ve got to do is look at the buses from Iowa lined up against the fence of Graceland Cemetery and you know who the Cubs are being marketed to. The Cubs represent Chicago as the capital of the Midwest, the crown jewel of the Heartland, an organic part of the surrounding Prairie. Knock on a hundred apartment doors around the Friendly Confines and you’ll find a host of Iowans, Michiganians, and downstaters, most of whom moved to the city to live out their Midwestern, small town dreams, ones perpetuated by Harry Carey being beamed across the country on WGN.

The Sox represent a different aesthetic. Cellular Field is clean and walled in, the kind of place that all the suburban sons and daughters of Eastside steel workers now prefer. But the attitude of the embattled Bridgeporter remains, ready to take offense, eager to close ranks against the common foe. I guess they have fun at Cellular Field, but it is the joy of a man with a chip on his shoulder, a braying kind of fun, earnest, eager, defiant but insecure. This is the kind of town Chicago used to be. That’s why the Sox used to be more popular than the Cubs. But no more. Not for at least a decade.

The old dynamic has changed. A lot of old Chicagoans have moved to other parts of the country, and the industrial ethic is slowly dying. The kids of the rural Midwest, who surround the city for hundreds of miles, value kindness and decency and are not the knee jerk contrarians of the slaughterhouse and factory. And that is why Sox fans are so bitter: they know that they are now a minority in this town, the slowly dying relic of an earlier age.

Whenever I meet someone with a college degree who is a Sox fan, I am immediately suspicious. I’ll grant the man a mulligan if I find he’s from the South Side, as I figure you can’t help identifying with your youthful affiliations any more than you can help it if you were exposed to lead paint chips as a child. But to anyone else, I figure that there must be something disturbed in that person to make him identify with such a wrong headed bunch of people.

But then again, at least they don't root for the Mets.