September 25, 2008

IT’S NOW OR NEVER

Hit or miss. Black or white. Yes or no. Do or don’t. For a fan, this is what it gets down to. There are no alternatives to winning. There are no shades of gray where your team is concerned, especially when it’s a team that is built to win right now. The expectations have never been higher, so the stakes rise with them.

Failure, 1) lack of success 2) non performance of something due, required or expected: failure to win.

I’ve raised a few eyebrows when I’ve brought up the “F” word behind the bar, (Not that my using the “F” word should come as a surprise) the “F” word being failure, of course. Leave it to me to offer some rain clouds to the “Cubbie Blue” skies. Being a bitter old cuss sometimes is part of the Frankie O repertoire. I do this not out of spite, but out of a genuine concern for my Cubbie brethren. Nothing, and I mean nothing, hurts more, than having your heart ripped out, just short of the ultimate objective. I go back to a quote of one of my favorite philosophers, Vince Lombardi: “Some of us will do our jobs well, and some of us will not, but we will be judged by one thing, the end result.”

I definitely am one to say, “Enjoy the ride”, I feel way too many people don’t take the time to realize what they have, and enjoy these things to the fullest, remember I’m a bartender. Most of these things though, are in one’s life, not in their rooting interests. Rooting for a team is supposed to be a diversion, a guilty pleasure, it’s not supposed to define you. That being said, rooting has a cumulative effect, it grows as time goes on, more so when your, “beloved”, break your heart time after time. Then it becomes something different. My doctors (yes, that’s plural) call it an obsession. There’s a lot about life to love and there are things not to. Rooting for your favorite team is that place to hide, to get away from things for a while. What I’ve noticed around here is that Cubs fans seem to have passed through that same threshold.

When I moved here in ’95 it was easy to get tickets to any game. Cubs’ games were fun. Have a beer, watch a game and enjoy the neighborhood. Sure, there were die-hards that hated to lose, just ask Lee Elia, but this wasn’t New York, Boston or Philly. There wasn’t a public mandate to win, or else. People would still come, the Cubs were lovable losers. Then Mr. Hop-a-lot hit 20 dingers in June of ’98 and everything seemed to change. The homerun chase created a ton of excitement and “buzz” in town. Now, Cubs games were the place to be. The eventual play-in game that year against San Francisco was great to win, but did anyone expect them to beat Atlanta? (That answer would be: No, they’re the Cubs, we can’t believe that we can actually watch a playoff game before we go to Bernie’s.) With the increased attendance came increased expectations. Losing was no longer “cool” or acceptable. The feeling was palpable any time you went to a game. There was an “edge”. It was starting to feel like one of those east coast cauldrons.

Then, dare I mention, came 2003, and truly, nothing’s been the same. The thing about that year was that it kind of came out of no-where. The Cubs had losing seasons in 3 of the prior (no pun) 4 years. The big acquisition was the manager who had lost the previous year’s World Series. Then it happened. People were allowed to think the unthinkable, “could this really be the year?” Witnessing that year from behind the bar was something that makes what I do for a living a lot of fun. This wasn’t Jordan, I still contend that the Bulls phenomenon was more a Jordan thing than a Chicago Bulls one; this was “our Cubbies”. The heartbreak that I witnessed, at the end though, was hard to take. People had let their guard down and dared to dream, then had those dreams smashed into a million little jagged pieces, that they used to throw at the over-weight bartender who was reminding them that they still had to pay their bar tab.

Since that time pay-back, from the Cubs, not yours truly, has been expected. Add to it that since the near-miss in ’03 Cubs fans have had to watch the absolutely, in every way, messy collapse of ’04, then the injury riddled return to Cubdom of ’05 and’06. Now couple that with a certain team from the Southside winning it all in ’05 and a talent-challenged Cardinals team taking the title in ’06 and it’s no wonder that Cubs fans were demanding a winner on the Northside. (Ask Corey Paterson or Jaques Jones how “warm and fuzzy” the Friendly Confines are.) Last year only set the stage for how important this year really is. With the additions of Lou Piniella and Alfonso Soriano last year, the Cubbies became nationally relevant. Again, the ending was a bitter pill to swallow, but, as is often heard here, “there’s always next year!” Well, next year’s here. This is the one. I don’t know of any other way to put it than to say that anything short of a World Series title this year is a failure. Is that harsh? Of course it is. It’s a hundred years worth of harsh. The reason over 3.2 million paid attendees came to the ballpark this year is to be part of something, something that no one here has been a part of for 100 years. Being “close”, or “at least we got to the World Series”, isn’t good enough. (It’s not a 63-year curse!) The “end result” is all that matters now. The guests have been invited and the table’s been set, now it’s time for the Cubbies to get this party started!