It's funny, for as happy as I was last night watching the final out, it was pretty bittersweet. Mostly because I thought about all of the people that aren't with us anymore that missed it.
My father grew up on the South Side -- not quite Blue Island, but Morgan Park (and a proud graduate of Morgan Park HS, where he quarterbacked the football team), and somehow became a Cubs fan. He and his brother lived a pretty classic middle-class existence, growing up in a two-story house on a shady street, where Mom ran a small accounting office in a back den, often used by the first-generation immigrant grocers, tailors, and small goods shop owners in the neighborhood. His Dad was an ice cream distributor, going to grocery stores, soda fountains, and 5 & Dimes for his accounts. They weren't poor, but they weren't wealthy by any means, either.
Still, they somehow found enough money to indulge my Dad in his one true passion growing up -- the Cubs. In those days (the 1940s), you could get a round-trip on the L to Wrigley and back, and a seat in the bleachers, for less than a dollar. And every other weekend, on either Saturday or Sunday, Wrigley would host a double-header. So my grandmother would pack up a sack lunch for my dad (not yet in his teens), give him enough change to get on the L, and a seat at Wrigley, and off he'd go to watch his beloved Cubs. He'd be gone all day, but would come back, clutching his scorecard, with story after story about his Cubbies.
In 1945, a business owner who knew of my dad's love of the Cubs gave my grandfather two tickets to the 7th game of the World Series, so that he could go to the game. He and my grandfather were in the park the minute the gates opened, taking in batting practice. By some great fortune, a ball hit during BP landed right near him, and he scrambled over some seats to grab it. The ball, a cherished object in our family, sits in a box at my oldest brother's home.
Of course, he went off to college, married, served his country, had four kids, and moved around a bit before settling in suburban Cleveland, where I grew up. Still a baseball fan, my Dad would take us boys to Cleveland Indians games -- always bat day in the spring, usually the big weekend series against the Yankees, and sometimes just a regular weekday game during the summer. Once he scored box seats right on the third base line, so close to Buddy Bell you thought you could reach out and grab his cap. George Hendrick bounced a foul ball grounder
right to me, and -- of course with my glove in hand -- I scooped it right up. It, too, sits in my basement, a proud reminder of those days spent rooting for a team that -- like my dad's Cubs -- never could quite turn the corner and become a winner.
So last night was a little surreal for me as well -- rooting for my beloved Tribe, and knowing my Dad, now having passed away several years ago, would have found unbridled joy in watching his boyhood team accomplish something that he saw them, in person, last try to do --win a 7th game in the World Series.
No team in professional sports can break your heart quite like the Indians. But there is solace knowing Dad is smiling somewhere
, perhaps alongside his favorite player growing up -- the great Andy Pafko -- knowing that next year finally arrived.