The Cubbies, the Curse and the Coming Apocalypse

From left to right, the author, Matt Slater, Dave Early, and Norm Wheeler at a Cubs game at Wrigley Field, June 2015.

By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor

The following words are excerpted from a creative nonfiction anthology for the Made in Michigan Writers Series which Wayne State University Press will publish next year.

It was the seventh and deciding game of the World Series last Nov. 2, between my beloved Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians — the two teams in baseball with the longest droughts without a championship.

The game was in Cleveland, not Chicago, but for a split second I thought about driving to the Windy City for Game 7 and braving the teeming masses to get near Wrigley Field, where thousands would be packed into the streets watching the game on their iPhones. But when I read that bars in the neighborhood were charging over $100 for admittance, I switched gears.

No, I’d watch the pivotal game together with my Dad, older and hobbling, and a week shy of getting his right knee replaced. That meant meeting him at Art’s Tavern, the traditional watering hole of my hometown of Glen Arbor, where I’d seen a hundred sporting events on television, interviewed story subjects for my newspaper, the Glen Arbor Sun, even taken girls on first dates.

Art’s it was. We invited a small entourage of friends: Sudsy the sports aficionado; Jim my new colleague, himself a baseball worshiper; Tim the tavern owner, and John the union organizer from Cleveland (it seemed diplomatic to have one Indians fan in our presence.)

The Cubs leadoff hitter Dexter Fowler opened the game with a homerun to send our spirits soaring, and by the fifth inning we had a 5-1 lead. The unimaginable — a World Series victory — seemed within reach. But then it all began to slip away, like so many games, so many seasons before. The Indians chipped away at the lead, and then in the eighth inning star relief pitcher Arnoldis Chapman surrendered an excruciating, game-tying 2-run homer to Rajai Davis. Cubs nation was absolutely deflated. The ghosts had entered the ballpark. Their billy goats wanted to graze.

With the score tied at 6, the ninth inning came and went quietly. Tension was building. But before extra innings commenced, the heavens over the Midwest opened and began to spit rain. What did this mean? What message were the baseball Gods sending us? (The storm also knocked out cable TV for a group of travelers staying down the road at Le Bear Resort. Bewildered and sopping wet, they knocked on the door of the tavern, the only light in town. This being November, and outside of the typical tourism season, Art’s owner Tim had already closed the till and sent his staff home for the night. But understanding how much this game meant to us, he kept the doors unlocked, and the beer tap flowing, free of charge.) Meanwhile, as it rained in Cleveland, the Cubs players secretly huddled together in the bowels of their clubhouse. They wept, they talked, and they concluded, “We can do this”.

The Cubs scored 2 runs in the top of the 10th, the Indians scored 1 in the bottom half, a dribbling groundball toward third basemen Kris Bryant turned into a routine out, and our cursed “lovable losers” had gone the distance. They had won the World Series.

In Chicago, the north-side neighborhoods erupted in pent-up joy. My friend Matt, who lives four blocks from Wrigley Field, attempted to walk out his door and approach the ballpark. He couldn’t get more than 10 feet before the wave of bodies pushed him back like a strong ocean current. Back at Art’s, I didn’t know how to act, or what to say. The feeling was odd. I turned to my left, gave my Dad an embrace, finished my pint of IPA and watched the boyish celebration on the television screen as rain pattered the street outside. I drifted alone into my thoughts, deep into the baseball lineage.

Eventually, I returned home that early morning somewhere around 2 a.m., to my sleeping wife and sleeping nearly-2-year-old daughter in the crib next door, and contemplated waking up the next day and trying to imagine a reality in which the Chicago Cubs were World Series champions. Euphoric revelry would ensue, and carry us through the winter, I figured. Strangers who loved the Cubs would embrace each other on the streets from now until Christmas. And as icing on the cake, the following Tuesday a well-deserving woman from the Chicago suburbs would be elected President of the United States.

Before I closed my eyes, I thought for a split second about the baseball writer W.P. Kinsella’s essay “The Last Pennant Before Armageddon” which I had read as a teenager. In that fictional story, a Cubs manager, on the verge of his team winning the World Series, lets the lead slip away in order to save the world (He’s having dreams of the apocalypse, and he listens on a radio in the dugout as American and Russian warships are about to face off.) … For some, baseball offers a moral calling.

Maybe this was it. Maybe we wouldn’t wake in the morning. Maybe baseball wouldn’t return to the land the following April. Maybe some strange geopolitical event would … never mind, I drifted off to sleep. And for the next six days — yes, exactly six days — I would share stories, text messages, happy tears, and cocktails with other Cub fans.

The ghosts

Or maybe I didn’t drive home from Art’s after the game that night. Maybe I walked down to Lake Michigan and jumped into her holy, frigid waters, as I had told John from Cleveland I would if the Cubs won the World Series. Maybe I let the November wind dry me off and maybe I hiked along the Sleeping Bear Point trail under a night sky that was suddenly, miraculously, full of stars. And maybe I looked southwest, across the Manitou Passage and the graveyards of forgotten schooners, and hundreds of miles away I could see Belmont Harbor in Chicago, dancing in Cubbie blue and red lights, and people bouncing up and down in revelry as if they knew the end was near. And maybe the Northern Lights formed the shape of a baseball diamond, buttressed by red brick walls and covered with green ivy. And maybe I heard Harry Caray’s laughter rising from the lake bottom, but this time his voice described not balls and strikes but astronomical constellations in the sky while he sipped an Old Style beer. And in the dunes below me figures began to lope. No, not squirrels or deer seeking their next meal, but the familiar Cubs players of old. Ron Santo circling the bases on his legs ailing from the diabetes he kept secret from the baseball world; Ernie Banks “Mr. Cub” joyfully proclaiming to a journalist, “Let’s play two today” before snagging a line drive with his glove; Ryne Sandberg legging out a double in the gap; even Sammy Sosa, steroids and all, running out to rightfield and giving the Wrigley bleacher bums his customary two-tap fist to the heart pump.

Oh, but what’s this? I see a boat drifting toward the shoreline, a leaky canoe, tossing turbulently in the surf. In it, sitting calmly and clutching an acoustic guitar in his lap, is Steve Goodman, the Chicago singer-songwriter — come back to life after dying of leukemia 32 years ago. I strain to listen for his tune. The sound of the waves subsides and I hear it. No, it’s not “Go Cubs Go”, the marketing jingle that the franchise now plays like a broken record. It’s Goodman’s original anthem for the Cubbies. The one the team commissioned, then rejected for being too pessimistic. What he croons here on this drifting canoe is no victory ballad, but a thesis posed in the form of a question.

“It’s late, and it’s getting dark in here / And I know it’s time to go / But before I leave the lineup / Boys, there’s just one thing that I’d like to know / Do they still play the blues in Chicago / When baseball season rolls around? / When the snow melts away, do the Cubbies still play / In their ivy-covered burial ground?”

…

Six days later, the American people voted in a presidential election, and the electoral college selected Donald Trump to occupy the White House. To many of us, the apocalypse suddenly felt nigh. Had W.P. Kinsella predicted this in his essay? The Cubs winning the World Series, and the world imploding soon thereafter? I wanted to contact Kinsella and ask him, but I missed my chance. Kinsella didn’t live to see how the story would play out. Ailing from a decades-long battle with diabetes, the Canadian writer took his own life with the help of a physician’s assistant six weeks before the Cubs won the World Series. Maybe he knew what was to come.

Play ball!