Chicago and Boston fans have no reason to complain

Major League Baseball’s playoffs have been going on for a week now, and unthinkably, the… Major League Baseball’s playoffs have been going on for a week now, and unthinkably, the Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox are still lacing on their cleats.

I say unthinkably, because until Sunday, the Cubs hadn’t won a postseason series since 1908, and the Red Sox haven’t won a World Series since the end of World War I.

As of Monday afternoon, those same Cubs were preparing to take on the Florida Marlins in the National League Championship Series, and the Red Sox had won two in a row to extend their series with the Oakland A’s to a decisive Game 5 in the American League divisional playoff.

The Red Sox and Cubs are the archetypal lovable losers, and the American sporting culture loves an underdog. Not many fans garner national respect on a level that Sox and Cubbies fans do. Every year, they flock to Wrigley Field and Fenway Park, hoping that “this will be the season,” grumbling about past tribulations. They’re like a little kid who keeps getting beaten up by a bully, but still refuses to give up his lunch money, despite endless failure at hanging on to it.

The devotion of Chicagoans and Bostonians to their respective baseball franchises is admirable, but they’re not the lovable losers that the media likes to portray them as, and they don’t deserve all of the sympathetic “better luck next times” the sporting culture dishes out.

True urban sports fans root for all of their professional teams and focus on all of their respective successes and failures. Take a close look at Chicago’s and Boston’s pro sports franchises over the last two decades, and you’ll see that the successes far outweigh the failures.

The Cubs haven’t been good in a long time, but that didn’t matter in 1985, when Mike Ditka and Buddy Ryan assembled one of the greatest football teams in history and lost only one game en route to a Super Bowl championship. That Bears team also featured one of the greatest running backs to ever play football, the late Walter Payton.

And while we’re talking about great Chicago athletes, remember that Michael Jordan guy? Chicago fans certainly do, as Jordan led the Bulls to six NBA championships in the ’90s and established himself as an international icon.

Boston fans lay a slightly more legitimate claim to lovable loser status, but that claim is severely weakened by the fact that Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish led the Celtics to NBA titles in 1981 and 1986. And while that was a long time ago, let’s not forget that the New England Patriots shocked the world when they beat the St. Louis Rams to win the Super Bowl in Feb. 2002.

Allow me to flip the script for a second, and review what it’s like to be a Pittsburgh sports fan, particularly a young one. I’m 21 years old, and my life as a pro sports fan has been tantamount to slow, excruciating torture.

I’ve heard about the greatness of Jack Lambert and Terry Bradshaw, but I never got to see either one of them play. What I did get was Louis Lipps, Bubby Brister, and ten years of near-misses under Bill Cowher.

My dad has told me stories about Willie Stargell and Roberto Clemente, but I am too young to remember either one of them. Luckily for me, I’m not too young to remember Sid Bream sliding into home plate, Barry Bonds skipping town, and ten years of trade-deadline fire sales.

Then there are the Penguins. I do have fond memories of their Stanley Cup victories in 1991 and 1992, but I was probably more interested in the Ninja Turtles at the time. And I can’t shake this awful feeling that, despite Super Mario’s best efforts, the Pens won’t be around anymore in a couple of years.

The most gut-wrenching aspect of Pittsburgh fandom is the ‘Burgh’s unbelievable amount of success on the road to ultimate failure: three AFC Championship losses and one Super Bowl blunder for the Steelers in the last decade, two Eastern Conference Finals losses for the Pens in the last eight years, and two NLCS losses for the Buccos in the ’90s. Hell, it’s much more comforting to at least know now that the Pens and Pirates have absolutely no chance of making the playoffs than it is to anticipate them almost climbing the mountain, but not quite getting there.

So if you’re a Pittsburgh pro sports fan, I salute you, and I feel your pain. And the next time you see a kid in your class wearing a BoSox hat, stop yourself from patting him on the back, tell him to quit complaining and to watch the Patriots instead, and go out and buy yourself something nice.

Michael Cunningham is a senior staff writer for The Pitt News, and he’s not bitter. No, not one bit.