This is the moment I’ve been dreading for years. Cubs and Dodgers in the National League Championship Series – a reckoning for the greatest sports sin of them all. I abandoned my father’s favorite team. I cursed myself.
What I did 10 years ago when I moved to Los Angeles is truly the most heinous act of treason imaginable. I quit the Cubs and allowed myself to be sucked into the blue vortex of obsessive Dodger fandom. It’s betrayal, plain and simple, and I cannot muster much of a defense. The worst part is, my dad isn’t even alive to suffer through this. His heart literally gave out. If he was still here, he probably wouldn’t have lasted through what’s about to happen.
The first thing you’ll do is tell me that I’m a coward, that I got sick of losing, that I have no loyalty. What about the Sammy Sosa home run chase? The 1998 wild card tiebreaker? Mark Grace, Kerry Wood, Ryno, Andre Dawson, Harry Caray passing out on his notes, and that one game where Bill Murray did play-by-play?
I grew up a Cubs fan, probably the only Cubs fan in the entire city limits of Merced, California, because my dad (also named David, but less fond of the more informal version) was. Why would anyone root for the Cubs in California? We’re generally cheerful people, sons and daughters of Disneyland and open roads. Merced isn’t exactly Hollywood. It’s an Air Force town populated with retired airmen, farm workers, and people who thought they were just passing through. Still, there’s enough sunshine optimism that the idea of cheering for a perennial loser lacks a certain appeal.
My dad, himself a retired Air Force master sergeant, was not a cheerful man. The Cubs were perfect for him. Most of my vivid memories of him are his grousing. He loved to complain about how the world had set out to ruin him. Bureaucrats, friends, relatives, and his own wife were somehow preventing him from being happy. “You’ll be a lot happier when I’m dead,” he’d be prone to say at totally inappropriate times. One day, he came in from washing the car just so he could throw a phone book against the wall as loud as he possibly could. I still don’t know why he did it. No one would tell me.
Nothing was ever his fault, either. If we couldn’t pay the bills, it was because my mom spent too much. If the car broke down, it was because the salesman screwed us. He was overweight because there wasn’t enough good food in the house. The Cubs have a literal goat to pass down all of their existential fury and self-loathing. My dad had to find the metaphorical kind. His love-hate relationship with the Cubs was formed when he was born in the Chicago suburb of Aurora, Illinois, which is most famous for being the town where the movie Wayne’s World is set.
My grandparents moved to Southern California when my dad was still a kid, and just about everyone took on the Dodgers as their favorite baseball team, except no one told me that for years. I equate this to finding out you’re adopted or that your parents are actually Soviet spies, but worse. You realize that you’ve been living someone else’s lie for your entire life and have to come to grips with that.
Instead of being given the choice, I accepted the received wisdom that Chicago was the center of the sports universe. To a child in California, Chicago was a distant, unknowable entity. Why should I care? And yet, my father persisted in rooting for the least cool baseball team possible and made me do it to. I’m sure he just wanted someone else to be depressed with him.
A case could be made that the Royals or the Padres are less appealing to a young child than the Cubs were in the early 90s, but I’m not buying it. The Padres play in sunny San Diego and have a jolly, fat, bald man as their mascot. Also, do not sleep on the San Diego Chicken as a major plus for a prepubescent boy. The Royals were pretty lame too, but Kauffman Stadium was my default stadium when playing World Series Baseball for Sega Genesis. I just really liked the water fountains, I guess.
What’s the best part about being a Cubs fan? Going to Cubs games and getting well and truly wasted during the day. Not only was I not allowed to drink until I was 21, I also didn’t live anywhere near Wrigley Field. WGN, the Cubs’ superstation broadcast partner, wasn’t even offered on our cable subscription. So, I flirted with other teams, much to my dad’s chagrin. The Giants were the closest, geographically. The Mariners had Ken Griffey Jr. And there were the Dodgers, where my uncle and grandmother lived. The uncle I never saw, who my father refused to talk to. The grandmother that my father couldn’t stand.
“I hate the Dodgers. They’re cocky,” he’d say when invoking the bane of his existence from Los Angeles. “They carry themselves like they’re better than everyone else. They buy titles and they have no respect for the game.” As an extra bit of guilt, my mom would feed me this line about how David Sr’s aunt was buried in her Cubs hat. How could I abandon such maniacal devotion so casually?
Something broke in me in 2003. Game 6. Bartman. I made the truly foolish decision to call my dad in the sixth inning. “We really might do it this time,” I said breathlessly after running back from my college job manning a desk at the library. “Give it some time,” he responded with a trademark terseness. The greatest lesson I ever learned from my father is that baseball is not fun.
When the meltdown was complete, I called my dad again. His affect had not changed much. “They will lose Game 7. No one comes back from that, especially not the Cubs.” I hung up the phone, not sure whether to drink myself to sleep, cry, or both. The Red Sox stole our thunder a year later, capturing the hearts of the entire country in a way that was charming at first, but turned completely obnoxious by 2008. Which, by the way, Cubs fans should be prepared for. If they do win, the faithful are going to have to learn to swallow their pride and not throttle every soulless bandwagon rider, opportunistic celebrity, and media pundit who suddenly discovers their love for your favorite team. If you own a company that sells Cubs hats in various shades of pink or green, start planning that yacht purchase now.
In 2006, my dad keeled over from a heart attack in the middle of the work day. My mother later revealed to me that he’d simply stopped taking the medication that regulated his heart problems and had purposefully prevented her from receiving certain Air Force retirement benefits. He also left her with tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes. Her wages were garnished for years and she sunk into a massive depression that strained our relationship.
I moved to LA a year after burying my father, but was committed to keeping up my Cubs fandom. After all, who wants to be the guy to abandon tradition? Does anyone covet the reaction of moralistic baseball fans eager to rub your disloyalty in your face? But the more I learned about my dad’s estrangement from his family, the more I started to see why he hated the Dodgers in the first place, why whenever we visited Los Angeles when I was growing up, he’d sink even further into depression.
Loving the Cubs was a way to escape, to imagine another life. But LA is my life. I got married here, I bought a house here. I’ve lived here longer than my dad ever lived in Illinois. I slowly gave up trying to force myself to root for the Cubs around the same time I stopped forcing myself to see my father as anything other than a flawed, sad man full of spite. When I root for the Dodgers this coming week, I’m rooting for myself, for my own choices, and for the person I want to be. There will be lots of talk of ghosts during the NLCS, but the only ghost that matters to me is the ghost of my father. I’ve already exorcised that one.
