Rich Cohen - The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse

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TO AARON, NATE, MICAH, AND ELIA,

who will grow up with the nonsensical idea that the Chicago Cubs are often a great baseball team

That team will break your heart.

Herb Cohen

What you want is always out of reach. Sometimes its miles out of reach, sometimes you can almost touch it. If you do touch it, you will realize, after a week or two, that its not really what you want, that what you really want is still out of reach. This is what I was thinking as I arrived at the press window for the first game of the 2016 National League Championship Series. Wrigley Field beneath a Cub-blue sky. Chicago was playing Los Angeles best of seven to determine who would go on to the World Series, which the Cubs had not won since 1908.

Sports Illustrated had gotten me a press pass. I had written several stories about the Cubs for the magazine, but Im not really a sports reporter. I did not know the etiquette. I dressed as Id always dressed for a Cubs gamelike a Cubs fan. At the window, before issuing my credential, the woman behind the glass said, Take that off.

Take what off?

The Cubs hat.

Why?

Because youre a reporteryoure supposed to be neutral.

Im not neutral, I said. I havent been neutral since third grade.

If you want your credential, she said, take it off. Theres no rooting in the press box.

I went to my first game when I was eight years old. My favorite part was coming out of the tunnel, the field stretched before me as the grasslands must have stretched before the first trapper to make it beyond the Alleghenies. Something about all that greenery in the middle of the city. Only when you see it do you realize its what youve been craving. But what really got me was the players, scattered, playing long toss, the way they threw, how the ball exploded from their hands. If I can ever do anything that well, I told myself, Ill be happy.

My pass got me onto the field. Id never been at Wrigley this late in the season. Every other year, save a handful, the Cubs were basically done by late September. The field was crowded with reporters and celebrities. They gossiped and schmoozed but got quiet when Kris Bryant, the Chicago third baseman, went into the batting cage. Bryant had just finished his second big league season. Hed won the Rookie of the Year in his first and would win the MVP for 2016. Hes lanky and lean, with bright blue eyes, and he smiles all the time. He learned to hit from his father, a minor leaguer who never made it, whod himself learned from Ted Williams. In Bryant, you see the end of a chain that goes back to a golden age. He bends his knees at the plate, watching the ball all the way to the end of his bat. He swings from his heels, grinning as he makes contact. People in the left-field bleachers call to fans in the street, Bryants up. Dozens assemble, adults who have brought their gloves, hoping to snag one of the monster shots he sends onto Waveland Avenue.

I ran into Theo Epstein, the forty-two-year-old president of the Cubs, the man whod built the team into a contender. Epstein is a star, having taken over as general manager of the Boston Red Sox when he was just twenty-eight and leading them to their first championship in eighty-six years. In 2011, he moved on to Chicago as a climber will move from Everest to K2. If he won here, hed have beaten the games two most storied curses. Yet it was different. Hes from Boston and grew up a Red Sox fana local boy made good. He arrived in Chicago as an outsider. Winning with him would be just as sweet but not quite as pure. Why had it taken a Red Sox fan to finally turn the Cubs around?

He was making his way through the crowd, chatting and shaking hands. Hes sharp faced, as fit as one of his players, with dark hair buzzed at the sides and dark, intelligent eyes. He shook my hand. I know his father, Leslie, a terrific novelist. We talked. I said, They made me take off my Cubs hat.

Who did?

The people at the press window.

Where is it now? he asked.

In my bag.

Keep it in your lap as we play, he said. If things go wrong, you can squeeze it for luck.

* * *

The press box is above home plate at Wrigley Field, a two-story glassed-in booth with long tables and enough seats to accommodate a few hundred reporters. The ambience has not changed much since the 1932 World Series, when Babe Ruth supposedly pointed to center field, then hit a home run to the exact place he had been pointingthe famous called shot. The last time Id been here it was empty. Now it was packed, with over a dozen reporters from Japan alone. I ended up in the auxiliary press box, a section of seats in the grandstand up near the rafters on the left-field line.

Jon Lester was the Cubs starting pitcher. He has a mean game face, bald and bearded; hes a bulldog, a left-handed ace. He kept the Dodgers off the basesthe Cubs took an early lead. They were ahead 3 to 1 in the eighth inning, but, as all true Cubs fans know, this is the witching hour, the time when everything goes to hell, when a routine grounder slips through Leon Durhams legs, when Steve Bartman, the fan seated along left field, goes for the foul ball. Just like that, the Dodgers loaded the bases, the air leaked out of the balloon. You could hear it whine. Joe Maddon, the Cubs manager, brought in his reliever, Aroldis Chapman, a big Cuban who throws in excess of 100 mph. He struck out two batters, but the third man hit the ball into the gap, driving in two runs.

The game was tiedbut thats not how it felt to me. It felt as if we were a dozen runs behind and the cause was hopelessly lost and the slaughter rule would have to be invoked. What can I say? Its the nature of my condition, the disease incubated by forty summers at Wrigley Field. I am a Cubs fan. I get to the park expecting to lose, curious only about how it will happen. But the fans in the upper deck that night, especially those under thirty, did not seem downcast or forlorn. In fact, more than a few seemed confident, even happy. They began to chant. I could not make it out at first. Then I could: We dont quit! We dont quit! We dont quit! I laughed. Those fools! I said to myself. Do they know nothing of history? We do quit. Thats who we are. We are the team that has not won a championship in 108 years, that is often eliminated from the playoffs by late August, that always finds a way to not get it done. Woebegone, befuddled, bewildered. We are the Cubs.

Being a Cubs fan has created my cast of mind. I am not unhappy; I am fatalistic. I know how to live in the moment. I know how to enjoy what I can while I can because I know that disaster is coming. It started with that first game my father took me to when I was eight. 1976. The Cubs were terrible. August, so humid the sky was weeping. The Cubs were playing the great Cincinnati Reds, the Big Red Machine. I do not remember the details, only that at some point we were optimistic and ahead and could not lose and then wed been beaten and it was all over. That was the first time Id seen a drunk adult, the first time Id heard a heckler. He was screaming in the left-field bleachers, flecks of peanut at the corners of his mouth, double-fisted, frosty malts sloshing: Why dont you get a different fuckin job, Biittner, ya bum!