Losing feels like Death Lite. It’s not real death, not actual oblivion followed by the flinging of spadefuls of earth on a coffin lid, but it comes close.
It comes so close that you wonder why Chicago will put itself through the misery. Through the fist-forming, teeth-clenching, gut-roiling, Alfonseca-bashing, headache-making misery of it all. Through the necessity of humbly imploring the Almighty at regular intervals, “Huh?”
Through the buoyant leap of expectation, which inevitably precedes the headfirst skid of disappointment.
As the city sinks into stunned bereavement over Wednesday night’s loss by the Chicago Cubs in the decisive game of the National League Championship Series, it’s time to settle this thing once and for all: Why, in the name of logic and sanity, do people willingly undergo this sort of torment?
“If we lived every day with our emotions as raw as they get in sports, we’d be dead in a week,” said John Jeremiah Sullivan, a sportswriter who works for GQ magazine.
People can only take so much of the psychological tsunami known as the Cubs (or White Sox, Bulls, Bears and Blackhawks) season. But why do they take it at all? Everybody knows there are more important things than baseball; more important than those killer walks given up by Kerry Wood on Wednesday; more important than the zeal exhibited by the accidental scapegoat the night before.
There are wars, floods and famines. There are tyrants and despots. To be upset about the outcome of a game–a mere game, amid the creeping dangers of an unstable world–is folly.
And yet, there it is: the passionate intensity invested in the Cubs and other teams year after year, despite frustration and failure and, what’s worse, the brief, tantalizing taste of success that lures the fans onward yet again, setting them up for an even more devastating loss.
Jane Leavy, author of “A Lefty’s Legacy,” the recent biography of the legendary Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax, isn’t surprised that Cubs fans believed until the final out. Belief in a sports team gives people a “way of belonging,” she said.
“How many other things are there in life–in our modern, secular American society–that can do that? God knows religion doesn’t do it any more. Political party identification doesn’t do it any more,” she said. “It’s about community, about being part of a community. It’s about saying, `I’m a long-suffering Cubs fan’ or `I’m a miserable Red Sox fan.'”
Miserable they may typically be, but for the flicker of an instant, Red Sox fans are exultant: They will face the Yankees Thursday in Game 7 of the American League Championship Series, after pulling even in Game 6. Leavy, a die-hard Yankee fan who was interviewed while the sixth game played on television in the background, interrupted herself constantly to react to the action: “Yes! Yes! Oh, no.”
Her own life proves her point, she said. “Why am I a Yankee fan? Because my grandmother lived in a building two blocks from Yankee Stadium called the Yankee Arms. It was built in 1927–and yes, the 1927 Yankees were the greatest team of all time–and in the foyer there was a stained-glass window with crossed bats.
“Something of an old place is activated in these connections to a team and a place. It recaptures something. It’s the Cubs game your dad took you to and even though he’s not alive, you have the memory of the game.”
People collect the physical objects used in the game, Leavy said, because they acquire a kind of magical significance. “Memory resides in tactile things. A scuffed ball. A scorecard is almost an architectural blueprint of memory,” she said. “They become conduits to some part of ourselves that is cherished–and lost.”
Bill Savage, a Chicago native who teaches English at Northwestern University, said he has no trouble understanding why the Cubs evoke such zealotry from fans. “Last night [Tuesday], when [Alex] Gonzalez made that error, my heart sank because I’d invested so much. It’s the degree to which you, the audience, choose to get invested emotionally. No, the bandwagon-jumpers don’t suffer as much–but they don’t enjoy it as much, either. The reward is commensurate with your investment.”
Though he loves great literature, Savage is equally enamored of a game that goes down to the wire, he said.
“What differentiates baseball from theater is that you don’t know how it’s going to end. You know how `Hamlet’ is going to end. Baseball has that uncertainty, and it creates a level of suspense that even the best `Hamlet’ can’t deliver.”
Yet a baseball game and a Shakespearean drama share at least this, Savage said: Both create an enticing story line, a narrative that brings a cause-and-effect coherence to the world. Are the Cubs at the mercy of a stubborn curse or the victims of some unlucky bounces? “What story you choose to tell,” Savage said, “creates the value.”
And in a world increasingly diced up by competing ideologies, a world increasingly fragmented, identification with a sports team can provide a sense of kinship found nowhere else.
“People invest their sense of themselves into the performance of a bunch of athletes,” Savage said. “People say, `We won’ or `We lost’ who don’t play on the team or work for the team. Nobody questions or second-guesses that familiar, consoling `We.'”
For Sullivan, sports “seems to be very close to the center of what we are. The team comes to stand for you, for your own frustrated hopes and desires.” Solidarity with a team and its fans creates “a oneness with all these other people you don’t know and probably never will meet. That’s the greatest thing about it: You lose yourself in the team and the players and the crowd.”
His book “Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son,” which chronicles horses that lost the Triple Crown after winning the first two races, will be published next year.
Sullivan said his research makes him sympathetic to Cubs fans. “We’ve living in the age of the heartbreaker.”
But isn’t a sporting event, despite its allure, essentially pointless?
“That’s what I love about sports: It is meaningless,” Sullivan said. “It’s a child’s game. That, to me, is the level at which it most perfectly resembles life. We assign importance to things that don’t warrant that importance in any meaningful way.”
Losses feel awful. But they shouldn’t dissuade a fan from caring, Leavy said. “It is a loss, but it isn’t losing your job or your parent or your baby. Maybe, though, a sports loss helps prepare you in some bizarre, psychological way for a real loss.
“Baseball is not linear. It’s not a game that goes back and forth. It is elliptical. It is nuanced. There are moments when nothing much appears to be happening. Those spaces are what we fill with memories, with relationships,” Leavy said.
“Baseball is from another time, a time when there was a place of recollection, for anecdote, for turning to someone and saying, `Remember the night when ..?'”
Sullivan agreed. “There is a kind of beauty in loss, a catharsis. I would say to Chicago, `Embrace it.'”
The wisdom of his words may take a while to sink in. For now, as most Cubs fans would point out with glum grimness, loss feels like loss. To have come so close and then to fall short seems the cruelest of fates.
As Thomas Lynch, author of “The Undertaking: Life Studies From the Dismal Trade,” wrote, “Grief is the tax we pay on our attachments.”
To gauge the depth of fans’ passion for the 2003 Cubs, one need only measure the emptiness left in a city’s heart by Wednesday’s final score.
