It’s that time of year again — time for local media to
spend away its space rehashing the Cubs-versus-Cards argument. The dispute rages: Better team? Better
fans? Better ballpark? Better peanut vendor? Better parking? Better
neighborhood? Better scoreboard? As interesting, one supposes, as
the always topical “What’s smarter, pig or
dog?”
Let us now settle the debate once and for all
by talking about . . . the White Sox.
Sox fans. We ask
not for equal time in community media, no more than we’d ask
for equal Jerry Springer time. It doesn’t matter to us what
local sports say, and it doesn’t matter whether you read on
— unless you’re man enough — ’cause
we’re looking for a fourth Sox.
6 a.m. Bob & Ray’s Café. Kilgore Carpp, Always
Gainsay, and are I talking baseball. We’re interrupted. A
Cards fan butts in.
“Maybe could be a Sox-Cards
series?” he grunts. “I think them there Sox is a good
chance a makin’ it this year.”
We say nothing. He has the question-mark
eyeballs scaring all Cardinal fans. He struggles to link a few more
cropped words together. We intensify our silence. He leaves.
It’s kinder to believe that the Cardinals don’t exist.
St. Louis, we suspect, is a large farm somewhere in Not Chicago.
Sign of the time.
The signs announcing the population as you enter Springfield read
115,500, according to the last official fabrication. Were politics
to hide away long enough to let an honest count take place, the
sign would announce 100,003 folks: 50,000 Democrats, 50,000
Republicans, and three minds shining strong and independent.
Reshuffle the 100,003, and it deals into two
ordinary piles of 50,000 Cub fans, 50,000 Card fans, and one stack
of three mighty Sox fans.
No political party-to-team affiliation is
dictated yet! As we speak, Democrats are still allowed to follow
either the Cubs or the Cards and so, too, Republicans, if they are
properly registered.
Body politic doesn’t dictate Card or Cub
— what psychologists call herd mentality causes the common
heaps. Bandwagon folk. Endless egregious copies. They phone ahead
to see what everyone is wearing to the ballpark or political rally,
lest they stand different.
A Sox fan, on the other hand, can wear a
tuxedo in a crowd of sweatshirts, or a sweatshirt in crowd of
tuxedos, and not only feel comfortable but also know that everyone
else is poorly dressed.
Sox fans don’t fit Springfield, they fit
Chicago: Sandburg’s “of big shoulders” Chicago. If
they ride a bandwagon, it’s to test the transport they built.
But every very once-in-an-ethereal while, in a
flickering spasm of freelance thought, a Cubs or Cards fan forgets
his Springfield geography and asks what he can do to become a
Soxman! And we sometimes entertain his petition because we need a
fourth — for poker, for golf, for bar-tab payment.
Tainted history.
In 1960 I attended half of the Cubs home games because I was
passing by anyway on the way home from school and you could get in
free after the top of the fifth. Average attendance that year
— in the time before bland yuppies discovered that it was
cute to say “Wait ’til next year” — was
362. Not exactly everyday bathers, those 362 were at least true to
tradition.
In those days, Cubs fans were the result of
inbreeding within the dying residue of Old World ruling classes.
Sox fans were hands-on working folk.
As with all struggles, the lineup for sides is
not so well defined today. Today the Sox-versus-Cubs difference
expresses itself not so much in bloodline as in life philosophy. A
Sox fan thinks and does what’s right and comfortable, no
matter what others think; a Cub person will suffer any discomfort to dance to
the puppeteer’s tune, “What will others think?”
Bill Veeck, who chiseled an ashtray into his
wooden leg for the convenience and comfort of his nickel cigar, was
not just a Sox man; he owned the team.
Rod Blagojevich is a Cubs and/or Cards fan,
depending on the poll of the of the moment.
Debate over?
This article appears in Jun 2-8, 2005.
