It’s time to reward decades of Cubbitude
At the entrance to Wrigley Field, the security guard was teasing me — acting as though he spied something in my purse that might keep me from getting into the pennant-clinching Cubs game that we had come from Washington, D.C., to see. According to my son, I looked like I might cry.
If you had in a sense come all the way from the dashed hopes of 1969 for this moment, you might be anxious, too — hopeful enough to have booked passage because this had to be the night, but worried that something could still go wrong — or that some St. Peter with a security wand wouldn’t let us in the gate.
My 93-year-old Cubs die-hard dad, whose own parents saw Tinker, Evers and Chance play on their honeymoon trip to Chicago in October 1908, the last time our team won the World Series, has been saying for years now that he is not leaving this earth until they win the Series again. So every year as my kids were growing up they’d say well, sorry about the Cubs but glad about Grandpa.
No, the moral of the story isn’t that winning can kill you. But nor is it that, as UCLA football coach Red Sanders said and Vince Lombardi preached, winning is “the only thing.” In fact, losing is a vital, educational, grit- and humility- and empathy-encouraging experience that my team has simply overdone.
Which brings us, of course, to the campaign that so many are happy to forget during this October’s playoffs. Donald Trump’s horror of losing and losers is a centerpiece of his campaign and beyond that, his life; it’s his go-to slam, but he also means it.
Trump himself has lost plenty, of course, but he has never acknowledged his bankruptcies and divorces as such. Chicago-born (and Park Ridge-raised) Hillary Clinton may or may not be a Cubs fan, but Trump definitely isn’t, or he wouldn’t be threatening not to accept whatever the scoreboard tells us after Nov. 8.
“We don’t win any more,” he has said throughout his run. Just before the South Carolina primary, he told a crowd there that if he were president, “You’re going to get tired of winning.”
At this campaign’s end, the non-winner does not have to be a “lovable loser” — the detested and hopefully soon-to-be chucked label with which my Cubs have so interminably been tagged. But breaking our hearts and their own didn’t make us into Yankee fans, either. My dad’s Cubbitude, his faith that next year really would be different and his devotion when it wasn’t, taught me something important about resilience.
While more than ready for a break from all that characterbuilding, I see the graciousness of George H.W. Bush’s letter to Bill Clinton in 1993 and Al Gore’s concession to George W. Bush in 2000 as a victory of a different kind. And I wonder whether the refusal to acknowledge seasons of loss in politics as in all of life isn’t the biggest defeat of all.
Melinda Henneberger, a political writer and a visiting fellow at Catholic University’s Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies, is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors.