In a Bar in Chicago, the Real M.V.P.s of the Series Got It Done By SARAH LYALL NOV. 3, 2016
Step into the crowd outside Wrigley Field in the bottom of the 10th inning, moments before the Cubs’ World Series win. By BEN KOLAK, NIKO KOPPEL and KAITLYN MULLIN on Publish Date November 3, 2016. Photo by Joshua Lott for The New York Times. Technology by Samsung.. Watch in Times Video »
CHICAGO — Fifth inning, Game 7 of the World Series, and the Chicago Cubs were comfortably ahead by four runs. What more auspicious moment could there be for an out-of-town visitor to sneak into a friendly bar full of happy fans who were watching their team coast to victory?
I ordered a drink and took my seat in front of one of the TVs. Not 10 minutes later, a wild pitch touched off a bizarre series of events, with the Cleveland Indians scoring twice and reducing the Cubs’ lead to two. The guy to my right immediately blamed me.
I had forgotten how important it is not to disturb the atoms in the universe while watching a Cubs game. “You walk in, and look what happens!” he said.
On the blackboard outside the bar, the soup of the day was listed as “the tears of our enemies.” Inside, it was a heaving mass of anxiety, fear and superstition. Cubs fans have intensely personal relationships with their team. Everyone at that bar was convinced that something he or she had done, worn or said, or not, was specifically driving the action on the field.
A bartender was carrying a lucky nut, apparently some sort of walnut that worked better if it was left in her pocket, although it was unclear. A customer said she had come to that particular bar, despite living five miles away, because “the Cubs always win when I watch games here” and she did not dare go anyplace more convenient. The waiter announced that everyone would get a free shot if the Cubs pulled it off, then berated himself for raising the possibility, convinced that he had jinxed the outcome by prematurely placing the shot glasses on the bar.
It was excruciating. They were ahead and it was going to be fine. They were tied and it was not going to be fine at all. The curse hung heavy in the room. Except for the guy on my left, who was from Belgium and did not have a good explanation for what he was doing there, most of the people at the bar seemed in danger of contorting themselves into coronaries.
Philip Dobosz, who grew up in Chicago and said you “never get the Cubs out of your system,” even when you move away (he moved away to Wyoming), began nervously relating what had happened to him in 1969 when he was in eighth grade at a Catholic grammar school on the South Side. School would let out and he would run across the street to the Sinclair gas station, where he could buy a soda for a dime and, if he was lucky, watch the ninth inning on the black-and-white set behind the counter.
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Poster Comment:
I moved to Missouri and am still a Cubs fan.