Cubs vs. Sox

“A friend of mine at work scored us free tickets to the White Sox game tomorrow night. I have never been to a White Sox game.”

I was talking to my aunt on the phone as I stood in my hotel room, ironing the work clothes I would wear the following day. It was Sunday and I had just arrived in Chicago for an engagement I would be running that week.

“That sounds like fun! That was your Grandpa Dan’s favorite team, you know.”

“It was? Really? I did not know that.” Our conversation moved on from there, but even as I headed to the game the next night after work, I turned this thought over in my mind again and again.

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I have always treated learning about sports as I imagine I would treat learning to speak German if I was suddenly forced to live in Germany: it is not a language I have an actual interest in, but if learning it positively impacts my daily quality of life, then I had better buckle down and teach myself the basics.

My parents did watch sports on television while I grew up: football, basketball, and tennis mostly. Neither of them were the type of sports fans that would talk theory or stats. The only exception to this was every four years when the summer Olympics would come on. They would watch the swimmers in the games and make notes on their backstroke and butterfly, their flip turn techniques, how many breaths they would take in a lap, the materials their suits were made out of.

So I learned sports talk from other people. First it was from the boys I grew up with in my neighborhood. We played informal football, basketball, and baseball games in each other’s yards. I learned some terminology from Phys Ed classes in school. And when I joined the marching band in high school and sat through football games every Friday night in the fall, I picked up some more jargon there.

And so I learned enough about sports to be able to carry on basic conversations with people: I knew the difference between a home run and a touchdown, field goals and foul balls, draft days and the playoffs. It felt like part of passing for normal, whatever that meant.

Back when I was in elementary school and playing pick up games in my neighborhood, Phoenix did not yet have a baseball team. Neighbor boys I spent most of my time with would sit down on summer afternoons, turn on WGN, and cheer for the Cubs. Although I had no interest in watching baseball on TV, I wanted to fit in with the neighbor boys more than anything, and so I sat down and cheered for the Cubs too.  Aside from the Buffalo Bills, which my parents made clear were the only choice of football team in our house, the Chicago Cubs would be the only other sports team I would ever identify myself as a “fan” of.

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I would have likely not remembered much about being a Cubs fan, however, if it wasn’t for my Grandpa Dan. My mother’s father, he and my grandmother would come out to visit us in Arizona every few years. My brother and I were the only grandchildren in my mother’s immediate family and I was the oldest. My grandfather was over the moon about having grandkids and always wanted to spoil us accordingly.

My grandfather loved sports, particularly baseball, football, and golf. When he heard from my mother I had started watching Cubs games, he started sending me Cubs paraphernalia: he sent pennants and t-shirts. When he took a trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, he bought glossy pictures of Ryne Sandberg and Mark Grace for me to hang up in my room. He would also send mementos from other teams: a Bills commemorative coin and a Buffalo Sabres hockey puck.

But the Cubs stuff is why I was so surprised by Aunt Terry telling me the White Sox were Grandpa Dan’s favorite team. Despite my elementary knowledge of sports and having never lived in Chicago, I have known about the White Sox vs. Cubs rivalry for many years. It would have been so easy, especially given my age and my tenuous connection to the Cubs to begin with, for my Grandpa to talk me out of my Cubs fandom. Or if he wasn’t going to talk me out of it, to tell me (as many strangers in Chicago will do with little prompting) why the White Sox were clearly the right team to cheer for. But he never did–not once.

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Grandpa Dan died in October 1997: he was sitting in his easy chair, watching a Bills game, when he passed. I was sixteen when we went back east for his funeral. I was just getting to the age where I was beginning to form relationships of my own with my extended family. We stayed at my grandparents when we were back in Buffalo and I remember walking around the house, feeling terrible I didn’t know more about Grandpa Dan.

My mother never got along with her parents. The strain on my relationship with my mother and my inability to rely on my mother’s account of anything made me reluctant to ask her any questions about Grandpa Dan (or Grandma Rita, who died six years after Grandpa Dan). It has only been since Basil and I have grown close with my Aunt Terry in the last few years that I have started to learn about either of them in detail: likes and dislikes, hobbies, and family stories.

Which is why learning about Grandpa Dan’s favorite baseball team had such an impact on me. Maybe some people would say a grandparent’s love is supposed to be unconditional, but experiences in my life have demonstrated to me that unconditional love is not a given. Grandpa hardly got to see me, knew me mostly through short visits and what my mother would tell him, and yet he loved me anyway. Even enough to let me cheer for the Cubs.