Tag: Chicago Cubs

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A Long Time Coming

This year, another of the long, painful legacies finally came down.

OK, my friends who are Cubs and Red Sox fans are probably laughing themselves silly. After all, when your wait for vindication approaches or even exceeds the century mark, that’s a special kind of pain right there. Never mind the poor, hurting teacher I knew who was both a Cubs AND a Red Sox fan – an exercise in masochism if there ever was one.

Still, 50 years between championships is long enough to wait. And so, despite my own passion for the division rival Denver Broncos, I couldn’t help cheering along with my friends and family from Kansas and Missouri (yes, I know my geography) as the Kansas City Chiefs finally brought home the big one.

Naturally, they didn’t do it easily. The Chiefs rarely do anything easily. Every single playoff game, right up to the Super Bowl itself, had the same script:

  • Come in full of promise, heralded as one of the best teams in the NFL.
  • Fall behind. Maybe way
  • Find a way back that John Elway himself would envy.

If the last five decades could be translated into a single football game, that’s about what it would look like. And it’s why Chiefs fans went absolutely nuts afterward and a lot of the rest of us with them. The wait is painful. But the end is all the more glorious for it.

But putting it that way overlooks something.

It assumes that all you have to do is wait. Have patience, and the good things will happen.

That’s never been true. In football or the larger world.

For the last five years, the musical “Hamilton” has been a phenomenon on Broadway. Part of the attraction is the contrast between the show’s version of Alexander Hamilton – energetic, impatient, fighting to burn his name in the history of the world – and Aaron Burr, a charming man who plays his cards close to the chest, waiting for the right opportunity to show itself. At a crucial moment, when Alexander has just cut a deal to put his long-sought national bank in place, he taunts his rival:

 

When you got skin in the game, you stay in the game,

But you don’t get a win unless you play in the game,                          

You get love for it, you get hate for it,

You get nothing if you wait for it, wait for it, wait for it.

 

There’s nothing wrong with playing the long game. In fact, it’s vital. Most rapid revolutions fail, and many of the ones that succeed turn on themselves – the English saw it with Cromwell, the French with Napoleon, the Russians with Lenin and Stalin. The movements for change that win have a foundation underneath that is built from a long span of patient and often-frustrating work.

But the work has to happen.

If the Chiefs had blown off the draft year after year – if their fans had never bought a single ticket or tuned in any of the sponsored games – there’d be no trophy, and probably no Chiefs.

If the American colonies had never made a single move toward self-sufficiency over the decades that preceded the Revolution, the fight would have failed, if it had come at all.

If the civil rights movement had waited for rights to just happen, instead of constantly working, constantly struggling, constantly refusing to be put down despite yet one more failure, all of America would be poorer for it.

It’s still true today. Transformation doesn’t come from a single election. Victory or defeat in a cause doesn’t stem from a single action on Capitol Hill. Those are just individual notes in a greater melody. What makes the difference is constancy – not quitting, not turning away, taking the time that needs to be taken without assuming that all that’s needed is time.

Victory is never guaranteed. But it’s that sort of stubborn persistence in pursuit of it that can shape lives. Or histories. Or even the occasional sports franchise.

It’s no fun to endure. But the reward is worth it.

Just ask the Chiefs.

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Hitting Reset

The Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians had reached the height of their battle for a history-shaking triumph when I heard the thumps, like elephants dancing a tango overhead.

One thump usually meant our 85-pound dog Blake had jumped on the bed for the night. Two could mean he’d gotten down to try a different spot. Multiple thumps from the wrong side of the house meant … what?

I dashed upstairs, traced the noise. Missy’s bedroom. Inside, our disabled ward was on the floor with all her blankets underneath her. She’d fallen out of bed, and then started hitting the ground in frustration rather than get up.

“Missy! Are you OK?”

Physically, she was. No broken bones, no obvious injuries of any kind as I helped her back up and onto her mattress. But still she cried, a night interrupted in the worst possible way.

My wife Heather appeared in the doorway. “Oh, honey,” she said, sympathy in every word. “Do you want a little more of your story?”

Missy nodded. I pulled out the book that had been set down just before the lights went out. And soon, we were smiling and giggling at tales of adventure and ridiculous exertion on a world that would never be.

The world had been made right again. All was restored to its place. And after the lights went out, I went back to our bedroom to thank Heather for the suggestion.

“A lot of times, it just helps to go back to doing what you were doing before,” she said.

A reset button.

It seemed too simple to be true. And yet, I knew what she was talking about.

In case I was too slow to get it the first time, the larger world was re-enacting it downstairs. The Cubs had seemingly been in the midst of one more traumatic collapse, from a 5-1 lead to a 6-6 tie, when a rain delay had hit in the 10th inning. The brief stop gave the Cubs time to come together, rally, and clear their heads before returning to the field to get the job done.

“Because they met, they pumped themselves up and won that inning,” Cubs general manager Jed Hoyer told the Chicago Tribune after the renewed team brought home its first championship in 108 years.

“(Right fielder Jason Heyward) said ‘Let’s forget about everything up to this point. Let’s believe we can do this,’” the night’s MVP, Ben Zobrist, told the paper.

Forget. Reset. Renew.

Easy to say. Easy to forget.

I’m stubborn. Many of us are. It’s tempting to focus on the frustration, on what’s not working, on what’s worse and not getting better. It feels good, in a perverse way, to pound the floor and cry.

But it doesn’t get you anywhere.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked away from a piece I was writing that went nowhere, or a tedious chore that had gone south. Not for good, just to clear my head before taking a fresh run from the last place that worked. As Sir Paul McCartney put it, to “get back to where you once belonged.”

It was going right. And it can be again.

Forget. Reset. Renew.

The night ended with a smiling Missy, back in bed, the covers safely around her.

The night ended with an exultant baseball team, charging the field, sleep postponed by jubilation.

The night ended – but the lesson went on. Simple and clear.

No tango-dancing elephants needed.

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Turning Tales

Many of my baseball-loving friends have the blues. And they couldn’t be happier.

Some of that blue belongs to the colors of the Kansas City Royals, questing for their first title in 30 years and desperate to wrap up the unfinished business of last year’s almost-world championship. No question, these are Royals in search of a coronation.

The rest have a darker shade to their uniforms – appropriate, since these are the friends who know the blues indeed. These are the brethren of the Chicago Cubs, the legendary hard-luck team that has not even seen a World Series game in 70 years without buying a ticket. The team that has not won a championship in over a century. The team cursed by a goat, now praying to be freed by the prophecies of the Back to the Future movies.

I promise, I’m not kidding.

If both teams manage to make the Series at once, I think Facebook may just explode. After all, these are fans who have not just been loyal, they’ve done penance. The moment is at hand – Luke Skywalker in the Death Star trench, Frodo Baggins at the edge of Mount Doom, Rocky Balboa ready to get the tar beaten out of him.

Er, never mind that last one. But it does make a compelling story.

And that’s a primal power indeed.

Stories surround us and penetrate us, binding the galaxy together – no, wait, that’s the Force. But it’s a small difference. This is a big world we live in, too large for us to take it all in at once. By shaping a story, we make it something we can hold and understand, something that makes sense.

It’s why sports can have such a draw. This is a story in its basic form, redrawn every day on the playing field: good guys and bad guys, victory and defeat, beer and hot dogs.

It sits at the heart of our politics. In a democracy, candidates compete to tell us the most convincing story, with themselves as the hero who can ensure success or avert disaster. Sometimes those stories are true. And sometimes … well, you know how to finish that tale.

It’s why good journalism can be some of the best writing around. Every person on this earth has at least one story worth telling; a skilled reporter can let you into that story as though it were your own and reveal the wonder that lies beneath the most everyday persona and event. Whether it’s a mighty flood or an airplane-throwing contest – and I’ve written about both – anything can be compelling if you find the heart beneath. (I’ve always said that the heart of every one of my columns is the question “Why do I care?”)

Granted, like any power, it can be misused. Often – maybe too often – we impose the story we want to see on the world around us, regardless of the facts. Researchers have recently suggested that our brains aren’t wired to seek the truth, but to cling to the items that support what we want to believe. Call it Simon’s Law: “Still a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.”

But stories make us human. They fuel our curiosity and build a community. And if a story survives long enough, it can bind us across the centuries, tying us to anyone who ever invoked our version of “Once Upon A Time.”

Yes, even Cubs fans.

So if sports make you crazy, take heart. You’ve got a tale or two of your own that means just as much. From the outside, it may seem just as odd as celebrating men who swing lumber and fling horsehide. Let someone in. Share it. Revel in it.

How to do it? That’s another story.

And one that no one can tell as well as you.