A Fan’s notes

Posted by Paul Anderson | Monday, September 14, 2009 @ 2:27 AM

derek lee

Each weekend I traveled the fifty-odd miles from Glacial Falls to Watertown, where I spent Friday night and all day Saturday in some sustained whisky drinking, tapering off Sundays with a few bottles of beer at The Parrot, eyes fixed on the television screen, cheering for my team. Cheering is a paltry description. The Giants were my delight, my folly, my anodyne, my intellectual stimulation. With Huff I “stunted” up and down the room among the bar stools, preparing to “shoot the gap”; with Shoftner I faked two defenders “out of their cleats,” took high, swimming passes over my right shoulder and trotted, dipsy-doodle-like, into the end zone…”

That passage from Fred Exley’s “A Fan’s Notes,” always tickles me as I recall all the years I’ve spent hollering at TVs when someone on the Chicago Cubs would do something monstrously stupid. The same goes for the Minnesota Vikings, though there have been more highlights than lowlights over the years and, thankfully, the NFL is only on once a week as opposed to the daily, water-torture dripping of angst that goes with rooting for a miserably dysfunctional sports franchise like the Cubs. A friend recently asked me why the Cubs are, as I like to say, the Charlie Browns of the major leagues. I told her the great Mike Royko, in his final column, put it best. The Wrigley family, which owned the team, was cheap, but worse than that the Cubs for decades were plagued with racist leadership. It started with the racist Cap Anson who would even refuse to take the field if the opposing team had black players. He was instrumental in establishing racial segregation in baseball, which finally ended in the ’40s. Years after Jackie Robinson shattered the color barrier, the Cubs were the last team to sign black ball players and by then all the good ones were signed elsewhere. The Tribune ran the team like one of its corporate divisions and any serious sports fan knows that corporations run the worst athletic franchises. Baseball especially needs individual owners who are fans first. In other words, they just want to win to feed their outsized ego. Think George Steinbrenner. The best example of terrible corporate ownership is with the Pittsburgh Pirates. The executives there don’t appear to care about winning — revenue sharing makes sure they stay profitable. They have a disincentive to invest in the team because the worse they are the more money they’ll get in revenue sharing. Conversely, the Rooney family has reigned over one of the most stories football franchises in NFL history because they’re fans. A fan owns the Cubs now — let’s see how he does.

Being a fan is serious business. Exley will tell you that, though he wanted fans more than he wanted to be a fan. Ironically, he earned enough a literary niche to warrant fans (myself included). But being a fan can really stink, especially when it’s for a team that will eternally let you down as the Cubs do. Last year, I saw the Cubs win 97 games, many in ways the Cubs never won games with impossible comebacks. Statistically, they were among the best teams in baseball. It seemed like it was finally their year. Then they got swept in three games by the Dodgers. I foolishly took a ticket to the last game of the season when a friend of a friend had an extra one. I sat in the nosebloods listening to idiotic hecklers the entire game while my guys hardly put up a fight. It broke my heart and I don’t think I’ve fully recovered. I came into this season not really caring, and then I met Mona and, well, I never found much enthusiasm for the team. I knew when they traded Mark DeRosa, let Kerry Wood go and signed Milton Bradley in the off-season that they were doomed. And I was right.

Oh sure, Mona downloaded an MLB  app on her iPhone for me so I could check the scores, but it more often than not just annoyed me to see them losing — again and again — that I stopped checking that, much less watching or listening to the games. Early in the season I made the mistake of putting the game on when they were playing the Dodgers and I saw Alfonso Soriano up with men in scoring position. The game was on the line in the late innings and the Cubs appeared to be in excellent position to rally. First pitch, right-down-the-middle fast ball. I was beside myself .

“You idiot! That’s your pitch!” Mona looked alarmed. “I warned you,” I said, referring to how maniacal Cubs fans get when the game’s on.

“Watch,” I told her. “Next pitch is a slider in the dirt. He’ll swing and miss.”

Guess what happened? Yup.

“Watch,” I told her, even more exasperated. “He’ll do it again. Another slider.”

Guess what happened? Uh huh. Strike three. There goes the rally.

I told her, in quite hysterical tones, that it appeared everyone in the known universe understood a slider in the dirt was coming except for Soriano. “And they pay this guy hundreds of millions of dollars! He’s a worse crook than Bernie Madoff!”

I wouldn’t have blamed her if she started seriously reevaluting the relationship at that point. I thought it best to not put the game on. But Mona finds the sideshow quite amusing. In fact, she bought me a ticket to the Cubs-Dodgers game on my birthday last month and, of course, I did the usual “theater of the mind play by play color commentary.” That typically means a combination of intelligent insight into pitch selection sandwiched in between sighs, cursing and predictions of the worst kinds of doom.

“Juan Pierre’s up. Great. He couldn’t even hit the Mendoza Line when he was with the Cubs but now he’s Rickey Henderson again and he’ll probably bloop in a two-run single. I swear, you put a Cubs uniforn on Babe Ruth and he would’ve sucked. He probably would have had a career-ending injury.”

She finds that kind of blather hysterical. So do I. The hysteria of a mad man.

So after back-to-back division titles that led to three-and-out sweeps in the first round of the playoffs the Cubs have gone back into hibernation. Oh well.

Now it’s time for the NFL and for my Vikings. Should I be worried? Of course. The Vikings are prone to spectacular collapses as well. In 1999, after their 15-1 season, kicker Gary Anderson decided to miss his first field goal in a year, sending the gane into overtime. They eventually lost.

I joined a local club today that gets together on Sundays to watch the Vikings at a pizza joint in Irvine. I wasn’t sure what to expect. In the past, when the Vikings have looked promising I’ve gone to area sports bars and begged the bartender to put the Vikings on one of the TVs — usually I needed to put $5 in his hand because not many folks in California care about a team from Minnesota (except for the Lakers, right? But that was a long time ago). One friend liked to drag me to a Bears bar in Burbank when the Vikes played Chicago and that was as brutal as watching the Cubs in Chavez Ravine.

So, with Mona in tow (she’s interested in football now that I’ve gotten her hooked on “Friday Night Lights,”) I watched the Vikings among other fans and it was just about the most fun I could have imagined. I watched slackjawed as several of the fans sang the team’s fight song when the Vikes scored. But it was too crowded for me to run dipsy-doodle-like along with Percy Harvin or psych somebody out of their jock like Adrian Peterson and, well, I think even Mona has her limits for my eccentricities. Or maybe not, but it’s best not to push it.

Still, we left before the game was over so we could make it to South Coast Plaza in time to see one of her clients, chef Cathy Pavlos of Lucca Cafe in Irvine, put on a cooking demonstration at Bloomingdale’s to coincide with Orange County Restaurant Week. And I didn’t mind a bit. I could check the score on Mona’s phone and, besides, there are more important things than being a fan. I’m learning more about that every day. Where I once let sports consume my entire weekend to the point of having a few games going on at the same time, now I’ve got a life. And thank God for that.

tarkenton

My favorite Viking of all-time, QB 1 Fran Tarkenton wrote a book. I need to read this.

memonavikes

How lucky am I? I’ve got someone I can watch the game with on Sundays. Now if they’d just get the air hockey game there in better working order for halftime…

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2 Comments »

  1. Comment by laurel — September 14, 2009 @ 3:12 AM

    Hello Paul, so glad to hear from you again. To be perfectly honest with you, I think that Mona is the lucky one. Much love, Laurel

  2. Comment by Geoff West — September 14, 2009 @ 11:18 AM

    Listen up! Do not mess this up! You’ve got a talented and gorgeous woman who actually enjoys sports, shares her Iphone so you can get the scores and tolerates your rabid support of pathetic teams. It just doesn’t get any better than this, buddy!:-) :-)

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