Kris Shannon’s World of Sport Vilified Cubs fan on brink of forgiveness
As club chase first title in 108 years, Bartman likely to have mixed emotions
If some time next week, the Chicago Cubs earn the final out in the World Series and end a century of misery, many baseball fans’ minds will inevitably turn to a bespectacled man they have never met.
A man who has never swung at a Major League pitch, never stepped on the grass at Wrigley Field. A man, in fact, whose relationship to the Cubs extends only to one awful night in 2003.
How will Steve Bartman feel if his once- beloved team earn their first championship since 1908? Will he celebrate with the rest of Chicago or are the memories still too raw?
More to the point, is he still in Chicago? Is his name even still Steve Bartman?
These are the questions that, should the Cubs break through against the Cleveland Indians and banish their ‘ curse’, will loom large when the champions pop the champagne corks.
One person in a city of three million will be a common narrative in the triumph, a footnote both unexpected and entirely predictable after the peculiar fate that befell Bartman in 2003, when he pulled on his blue Cubs cap and headed to the ballpark to unwittingly become part of history.
For those unfamiliar with Bartman’s modern- day Shakespearean tragedy, the excellent ESPN documentary Catching Hell is required viewing. Otherwise, here’s a 3000- word Wikipedia page —‘ Steve Bartman incident’ — condensed into a sentence:
With the star- crossed Cubs closing in on their first World Series berth since 1945, Bartman reached over his front row seat and unintentionally impeded a Cubs outfielder’s attempts to catch a foul ball, allowing the opposition to rally for victory and driving a vilified fan into exile.
But words like ‘ vilified’ and ‘ exile’ barely describe the level of vitriol to which Bartman was subjected. They can’t capture the hate he would have seen in the eyes of rabid supporters who, clearly unable to cope with yet another failure, chose to cast an everyday fan as their sacrificial lamb.
Recollections of those scenes under the Wrigley Field stands, as Bartman was escorted away by security for his own safety, are enough to make any observer wince when contemplating what may happen if things again go wrong, what will await the poor soul who dares to let down the Cubs on this occasion.
But at least failure this year, like almost every other year for every other team in every other sport, will surely be about a player, a coach, an official. Individuals, in other words, being paid to perform their jobs and being paid to handle any subsequent scorn should they err.
Not a fan. Not Bartman who, unlike the usual scapegoats, parted with his own money before becoming public enemy No 1. What that must feel like — walking through the turnstiles like countless times before and, hours later, being ushered away with death threats — is almost unimaginable.
As are Bartman’s emotions this week, wherever he is. Thirteen years might have been enough time to heal all wounds but how can Bartman watch even one inning of any Cubs game without all the recriminations swirling back to the surface?
And what would he make of some Chicago fans launching campaigns to lure him back and make Bartman the main attraction in the festivities? The same supporters who drove him away, in other words, now telling him all his forgiven, when it was never his fault to begin with.