My Cubs: A Love Story

Scott Simon spoke at the afternoon graduation ceremony of the University where I work few years back.  I mention this because I actually remember something of his speech, which is unusual.  I have been to, conservatively, fifty college and university graduations and 10 high school graduations.  At the reluctant son’s high school graduation this year, his principal, the graduation speaker, said something that I remember.  He said that people often complement him on what he says, then, when he asks them what that was, they can’t remember.  He went on to give a very good talk – and one that I can’t remember a thing from – like almost all of the other speeches.  And that’s not because I don’t listen – I do.  There is a picture of me at my Ph.D. ceremony in a sea of graduates, all looking in different directions or talking with each other – I am looking intently at the speaker.  I have no idea who he was (I think he was male), or what he said, but I’m sure I knew at the time.

Scott Simon flew to our ceremony after doing the Saturday morning broadcast of weekend edition which I listened to on the way into the morning ceremony.  What he had to say was surprising.  He spoke about Afghanistan – a place from which he had just returned.  He talked about how horrific things had been there before we invaded – Al Qaida had been in charge and he told brutal stories about what they had done.  The surprising part was that he said he was a Quaker and therefore was opposed to war on principle – but this was an exception.  His view was that something needed to have been done and he was glad we did it.  (I wonder what he would think of this spring’s movie – War Machine – which argues against the principle of such wars).

Scott Simon is a consummate conversationalist.  He clearly enjoys talking and listening to the people on his show.  This book, which is partly about the Cubs and partly a memoir, points to some of the roots of this love of talking, and it is based (I think) not just in a love of baseball and a love of the home town team, but of being connected and engaged with men who loved to talk about baseball and life and were very good at. 

Scott Simon’s mother’s best friend was married to one the managers of the Cubs during their century of woeful ineptness, Charlie Grimm.  “Uncle” Charlie was the manager when my Grandfather became a fan – when the Cubs were last in the series before 2016 – in 1945 when everyone’s rosters were depleted by able bodied players being drafted.  They made it to the series but were trounced.  Grimm was immortalized in a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post Cover.  He is glumly watching a game – wincing along with other players in the dugout – at something going on in the field.  The Cubs, who could gather my grandfather onto their train in a moment of glory – were hapless.  Scott Simon knew Uncle Charlie both as the manager, but also a figure in his life.  Someone to talk to - someone who played and managed baseball teams, and played the banjo as well.  Someone who sang him songs that he was not yet old enough, at least in his mother's mind, to hear.

Scott Simon and my Grandfather and his children were fans through hapless times.  My uncle was an usher at Wrigley Field shortly after graduating from college - something my grandfather was probably both pleased and appalled by - and was one of those Cub’s fans who, throughout the rest of his life, was continually hopeful in the spring only to have his hopes dashed by fall.  When the Cubs were in the pennant race last year, his widow and grandchildren decorated his grave with Cubs memorabilia, as I’m sure was done throughout Chicagoland. 

My relationship with Cubs was a long distance one.  Born in Chicago, the Cubs were a connection to a specific place while my father moved the family from city to city around the country as he pursued a corporate career.  Going to visit grandmother (grandfather died when I was about six) always included a trip to Wrigley to watch the Cubs and Ernie Banks play.  Scott Simon was much more closely involved.  He was going to games or, actually, going to Wrigley Field after games and being let in to hang out with his godfather, Jack Brickhouse, the radio announcer for the Cubs, in the Pink Poodle, the ballpark’s press lounge.  There he learned that Leo Durocher, another Cubs manager, who neither paid for his drinks nor tipped, was not a nice man.

So this book is a sweet and tight and well written book about one of the most improbable – and therefore surprising - things – the Cubs becoming not just the best team in baseball – every one of their infielders was a starter in the 2016 All Star game - but finally, after 108 years, winning the World Series again.  And it is a memoir – Simon’s memories of the team are inevitably intertwined with his memories of growing up, a growing up that included his parents – his father moved out of the home because he was addicted to alcohol and died of that addiction when Scott was 16.   In his loyalty – but Scott would say - his love of his team and his father, Scott had to learn to deal with disappointment.  Love is a better term here because love allows us to embrace our ambivalence towards what we love.  We don’t overlook the other’s shortcomings to love them – their shortcomings are part of what makes others dear to us.

Writing about disappointment is a tough thing to do.  J.D. Vance navigated this in his memoir about growing up and leaving the Appalachian culture in Hillbilly Elegy.  Sherman Alexie did this in a fictionalized manner in The Absolutely True Story of a Part Time Indian – a book written for adolescents.  They and Scott all did this with grace, though Scott with not nearly the level of detail of the others.  I remember the first memoir that I read that I felt at the time was poorly written – was by Russell Baker who was a favorite columnist of mine for the New York Times Sunday Magazine.  It was about growing up (and called that) in Virginia and becoming a reporter in Baltimore.  It was embarrassing to read – everything that he said was entirely human, but I think he did not know all that he was revealing about himself as he was writing.  I felt, when I was done with the book, and this was a very long time ago, that I knew something about him that he didn’t know about himself.  What that was, I don’t remember, but I do remember the feeling of being embarrassed by having what felt like secret knowledge.

Scott tells a story where he is not going to be embarrassed in that way.  It is simultaneously well told, revealing, and it is clear that he has a command of the narrative.  He lets us know just as much as he wants to about the turmoil of his relationship with his father – and no more.  He does not give us undigested bits that we have to chew over ourselves in order to make sense of.  Both Vance and Alexie do a bit of this – Vance, I think, because he tells the story as he experienced it, as facts, but without a sense that he has quite mastered them yet – I think he is still reeling a bit.  Alexie is also reeling just a bit, and so embroiders his story with enough fantasy material that it is unreal.  To be fair, Vance and Alexie are trying to process bigger chunks of trauma – stuff that is overwhelming – than Simon.  And by this I don’t mean to be minimizing the experiences that Simon had – who am I to judge the impact of losing a father who is more tied to drinking than to you – but I think the context in which that happened – a supportive one – where disappointment could be discussed – allowed Simon to better integrate his experience of loss – or to sequester the parts that aren’t and can’t be processed off – to keep them out of the book so that they don’t interrupt the narrative arc.  On a more personal level, I think his love for his father includes the parts of his father that are hard to manage.  He doesn't have to paint the picture in bold colors - he can acknowledge it and let it go at that - allowing us to know that he has a range of feelings towards him.

Truth be told, I am much more comfortable with unprocessed aspects of a narrative being included than I once was.  I am richer for having read Vance and Alexie and not a bit worried that I have access to parts of themselves that they didn’t at the time of the writing – and I think I could talk with them about that without embarrassment.  That is a central part of the task of a psychoanalyst after all – to help people process the experience of unearthing something that they have kept from themselves.  What’s interesting here is that rooting for – and supporting – a losing team (which 29 of the 30 Major League teams are every year) prepares you to be able to talk about sorrow.

I built my own life – and therefore the life of the reluctant son – on a very different foundation than the one that my father laid for me.  The reluctant son has lived in only one town – and it has its own major league team.  He has grown up rooting for that team – and in the way of modern kids who can get access to information about every team – other teams.  And the team here has not won it all since long before he was born. But there is a winning tradition here – and he expects that, someday, they will win again.  It will not surprise them if they do.

I have been ambivalent about having introduced him to sports.  As a late adolescent, that is the lingua franca we have – we can talk about sports.  Not so much about girls or classes or other things that I imagine might be important to him – but we can talk about sports – and watch them together.  We watch games on TV and, occasionally, in person.  He has played baseball.  He has also seen how athletes respond to various situations – with grace and without it.  I have felt – and think I have written elsewhere – guilty about having exposed him to the hubris of ballplayers.

Scott Simon calls our attention to a conversation recorded on Television in the final game between Anthony Rizzo, the young all-star first baseman, and David Ross, the catcher who would retire after the game, in the seventh inning of the seventh game – Rizzo says, “I’m an emotional wreck.” And Ross replies, “It’s only going to get worse.”  Changing a situation – doing something surprising – is difficult.  After Scott watches the Cubs win, he wakes his daughter to let her know that the Cubs won.  She says “Awww… I knew they would.” And she falls back asleep.  His daughter is not surprised – she has not caught the seemingly indelible expectation that the Cubs will lose from her Dad.

I think this book is about learning how to live with things that are surprising – and for Cubs fans there is nothing more surprising that winning.  Scott is invited to dinners that fete the Cubs including at the White House because he is successful – on the radio – but mostly at connecting with people.  He is being a different kind of parent to his kids than his Dad was to him.  He has welcomed surprise into his life – and seems to feel as comfortable with it as one can.  He seems to be doing this by acknowledging that the world is complicated – and that he plays a complicated role in it.  I don’t know what he thinks now about our being in Afghanistan.  I wouldn’t be surprised if he thought we should have gotten out some time ago.  I wouldn’t be surprised if he were aghast about a great deal that is going on domestically and internationally, but I think that whatever he is feeling he is feeling with love.  The Cubs may or may not win this year.  In a mirror of one of their great snafus, the center fielder that was a key component in the team last year is now playing with the Cardinals.  They desperately need a new leadoff hitter.  They may not win again – but they might.  And we will have set backs and victories, our sports heroes will disappoint us, but sometimes, as the Cubs did last year, they will win – and do it with style.  Scott Simon helps us poor long suffering Cubs fans realize that this is not something to be feared because it is different and what happens as a result of winning may surprise us, but that living with love means embracing surprises – disappointments – but also great pleasures. 

I have written about the Cubs twice before - once in writing about Wrigley Field and once in writing about Steve Bartman - a post that Scott Simon appears in his analysis to agree with, more or less.

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