100 Things Cubs Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die

Introduction

True or false: It’s great to be a Cubs fan.

If you had to ponder the answer or laughed it off with a smirk and a knee-jerk “false” then you’re certainly not a diehard, and you’re possibly wearing a Cardinals hat at the moment.

If it was clear as a summer’s day at Wrigley Field that loving the Cubs is no more difficult than loving your family then you don’t need me to remind you of something you’ve likely known your whole life: It is great to be a Cubs fan.

Note that I didn’t ask if it can be painful, discouraging, or traumatic. Because it can be, has been, and, in all likelihood, will be again. But if the Cubs’ well-documented history of tormenting their supporters by being championship-challenged was all that mattered then this book would have been called
12 Things Cubs Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die
.

As far back as I can remember the Cubs have been a part of my life, though I don’t remember exactly how it all began. Unlike some people who can reach into their past and vividly recall first walking into Wrigley Field or who introduced them to the Cubs I’ve retained no such memory.

My dad, an avid sports fan but no fanatic, regularly took me to Blackhawks and Bears games and gets the credit, as well as the occasional blame, for those teams being part of my life.

But the Cubs? I honestly don’t know how I latched onto them. I’m sure some of it was falling in love with baseball at an early age, or the circumstance of being placed in my school’s morning kindergarten class, then choosing to spend my afternoons with Jack Brickhouse upon returning home.

My mom says I learned to read by looking up the baseball standings in the newspaper, but given the Cubs’ general state of disarray during the mid-1970s that doesn’t explain why I didn’t subsequently turn on them. However it happened, it happened. I grew to love the Cubs, warts and all. But there was never a day I wished I’d have been born a Cardinals fan, Yankees fan, or, God forbid, a White Sox fan.

As I’m writing this the Cubs are less than a month into Theo Epstein’s tenure as the Cubs’ president of baseball operations. I thought about taking out one of the “100 Things” and replacing it with an item on Theo’s hiring and what it may bring, but the truth there is we just don’t know. It was once thought Mark Prior would cruise to 300 wins and lead the Cubs into a decades-long renaissance. We just don’t know.

What we do know is the Cubs have had a long and extraordinary past, checkered though it may be. I haven’t spared sharing the most painful moments, trades, or seasons. But as you read this book I have no doubt you’ll find there is far more to the Cubs than the stale narrative about their losing ways.

1. Watch the Cubs Win the World Series

At the risk of making the rest of this book seem unimportant (don’t worry, it’s not), let me clearly say up front that it can be broken down into one thing followed by 99 things.

If you’re a true Cubs fan, there’s winning the World Series and then there’s everything else. And everything else doesn’t even come close. Other fans dream about winning the World Series in the same way they dream about a nice vacation, getting into a good college, or finally being able to move away from St. Louis.

When Cubs fans dream about winning the World Series, they risk falling into a coma. It’s that deep, that intense, and unless you’ve spent your life being told it can never happen, will never happen, and won’t happen, you can’t possibly know the depths of a Cubs fan’s hopes and dreams.

This is why those who cheer for the Cubs are alone in the baseball universe and will be until that one day when the final out is recorded or the final run scores to clinch the first World Series title since—do I even have to say the year?

It’s 1908. But of course you knew that. If you love the Cubs, you knew it because it’s been drop-
kicked into your skull from the moment you first realized there was something unique about your team. If you don’t love the Cubs you knew it for the same reason you know what year the Civil War started and can name the presidents carved on Mt. Rushmore. It’s part of Americana.

The Cubs’ failure to win the World Series has been the butt of jokes for decades. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if they hadn’t made it there so often and lost, as they did five times between 1929 and 1945. The Philadelphia Phillies lost the only two World Series they were in between 1903 and 1979, but their failures never captured the imagination of the public like those of the Cubs.

It’s such a part of the public zeitgeist now that Hollywood writers know they can get a reliable laugh out of the Cubs, like in
Back to the Future II
when the filmmakers suggested the Cubs had actually won the World Series. Have you ever seen the movie
Taking Care
of Business
with Jim Belushi? He plays a Cubs fan who breaks out of prison with 48 hours left in his sentence just so he can watch the Cubs win the World Series. It’s a perfectly awful movie, but Mark Grace makes a cameo appearance so it’s not all bad.

At the end of the film, the Cubs end up winning and while sitting in a car in the stadium’s parking lot, Belushi’s character calmly turns off the radio. No cheering, no screams, no nothing. Just a contented smile. This is why it’s called fiction.

When the Cubs win the World Series—and they will win it one day, though I’m not at liberty to tell you when—nobody will be calm. There will be crying and shaking and TV reporters will try to ruin much of it by sticking their microphones in the faces of crazed fans who will only want to hug their friends or call their mom or visit their grandpa at his grave to tell him what just happened.

And I can tell you this, as well: The Cubs players who eventually win the World Series will be remembered as gods.
They will be gods because they will have the power to make Cubs fans, if not forget the past, at least change the way in which they remember it.