The 100-Year Drought and Other Fans’ Faith

By Lew Freedman

“Cubs win! Cubs win!” was the late Chicago Cubs broadcaster Harry Caray’s instant wrap-up at the final out on good days. Lord knows what he would have bellowed if his Cubs had won it all.

It is unfathomable that a professional sports franchise can compete year after year for a century and not stumble into a championship. In baseball futility, the Cubs surpass Charlie Brown.

The last time the Cubs won the World Series was 1908. Few recall that they were on a hot streak. The Cubs were defending champs and but for the inconvenient 1906 interference of the Chicago White Sox in the first cross-town buggy series, would have been vying for a three-peat.

Over the last 100 years the Cubs have had the adjective “lovable” virtually surgically attached to their name. It might be too cynical to suggest that the description is a synonym for “pitiful,” but a sprinkling of sympathy is definitely involved. If land experienced such a lengthy drought it would have been plowed under for condominium development long ago.

Instead, those who support the Cubs 40,000 strong at Wrigley Field every day have only become firmer believers, convinced they are on the cusp of a tidal wave of history. Now it is expected 2008 will symmetrically be the Cubs’ year.

No baseball fan would argue that the Cubs have shirked dues paying. Their bill, just like your fill-up-the-tank charge at the gas station, only grows. As is suitable, the Cubs are shadowed by bad-luck legends, from the Billy Goat Curse dating to 1945 to the interception of a foul ball in the 2003 playoffs by poor Mr. Every Fan.

The Cubs don’t even have co-empathizers within carrier-pigeon distance anymore. When the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, it was Boston’s first championship since 1918.  When the White Sox won the World Series in 2005 it was Chicago’s first championship since 1917.

Currently, the second-longest baseball losing streak belongs to the Cleveland Indians, last champions in 1948. Ninteen-forty-eight? Heck, there are still players alive from that World Series. It would take a Ouija board to talk to a witness of the Cubs’ 1908 victory.

The longest a franchise has been Stanley-Cup-free in the NHL is 47 years when the Chicago Blackhawks last sipped champagne from the trophy. The Arizona Cardinals of the NFL have trailed disappointment behind them from Chicago to St. Louis to the desert since the franchise’s only championship in 1947.

Similarly, the geographic hop-scotching of the Sacramento Kings cannot mask the fact that they used to be the Kansas City-Omaha Kings, the Cincinnati Royals, and once upon a time were the Royals in Rochester, N.Y., where they captured an NBA title in 1951.

Fans of teams with gaps on their championship resumes are often labeled “long-suffering.” It’s more like frustrated. If a team finally wins the title, no one appreciates it more. If it doesn’t happen in their lifetime, those fans carry their faith to the grave, having relished all of the smaller thrills provided by the games, the sport and their guys.

A recently-made Cubs documentary interviewed many ex-players who said that when the Cubs get back into the World Series, they plan to race back to Wrigley Field to watch. Too many a man they said they hoped they lived long enough.

Once they wore Cubs uniforms. Now they carry their faith in their hearts.

(Lew Freedman is a Chicago-based sportswriter and the author of “Cubs Game of My Life” from Sports Publishing LLC and “Cubs Essential” from Triumph Books.)