Father-son connection to Cubs will never pass
Rob Kinder remembers a sticky-hot summer day in 1971 when he fell in love with the Chicago Cubs. He was 11, and his mother and father took him to Wrigley Field. He vividly recalls the Cracker Jack and the crack of the bat. And he couldn’t believe how green the grass looked. “I was hooked for life,” he says. Kinder will be watching on TV Monday when the Cubs play their home opener as defending World Series champions for the first time since 1909. He’s 57, living in Fountain Hills, Ariz., where he is national account manager for a branding company and a season ticketholder for Cubs spring training games in Mesa.
He and his father, Bob, shared sun-dappled days at such games for 16 years until this spring, when his father wasn’t well enough to go, except for one game. Father and son returned to the ballpark a day later for a photo-op with the World Series trophy. That photo means even more to Rob now. His father died Wednesday in hospice care at Rob’s home.
Kinder posted the photo of him with his father — smiling in a wheelchair with the trophy they never thought they’d see — on Facebook a few hours later as a way to let friends know the family’s latest sad news. Kinder lost his mother and sister last year.
“I know they’re all together in heaven now,” he says, “dancing to Glenn Miller.”
Kinder grew up in central Virginia but spent a lot of time in Chicago in the summers because his sister, Kaye, lived there. Her roommate was a flight attendant for United who knew some of the Cubs. Sometimes some of the players would hang out at the apartment. That’s where wideeyed Rob met his heroes.
The boy would grow up and follow his favorite team across the country and across the years. That’s a familiar story these days: Longtime, long-suffering fans who remained loyal to their lovable losers and lived to see the resurgent Cubbies triumph at long last.
But Kinder’s story mixes joy with grief. The Cubs’ ascendancy was a lone bright spot in an otherwise terrible 2016.
His sister died on New Year’s Day. His mother died a week after the seventh game of the World Series. And a month after that, his father suffered a seizure from which he never fully recovered. Rob and his wife, Sherry, were his hospice caregivers, just as they were for Rob’s mother last fall.
When the Cubs slipped past the Cleveland Indians in the 10th inning of Game 7, Kinder quickly stepped to his mother’s bedside, set up in his dining room. He whispered to her that the Cubs won the World Series. She opened her eyes. “They finally won?” she asked. Yes, he said. She smiled and weakly raised an index finger.
“That was the last conversation we ever had,” Kinder says. “It is a memory I will treasure for the rest of my life.”
Father and son watched the storybook twists and turns of Game 7 together on TV. Kinder will treasure that, too. So many family memories are bound up with the ballclub from Chicago’s North Side.
That’s why Kinder soaks up everything he can about his Cubbies online. Last month, he was reading a story by Tony Andracki on Comcast SportsNet Chicago that told of growing up as a Cubs fan and then covering them as a grown man. That piece linked to a column I’d written for USA TODAY Sports a week earlier about reporters who root for the story. Kinder recognized my name and sent an out-of-the-blue email. It turns out we’d had a chance encounter decades ago.
In 1984, at a service station on the New Jersey Turnpike, Kinder was gassing up when I tapped him on the shoulder. His 1983 Oldsmobile Firenza carried this Virginia vanity plate: CUBS. I asked for his phone number and said if the Cubbies won their division — thereby earning a spot in the playoffs for the first time since 1945 — I’d give him a call.
We were working on a story about how cable TV allowed fans to follow their Cubs from afar. We quoted a carpenter in Kodiak, Alaska, who said, “I like baseball, and they’re the team I could get.” And we quoted Kinder from Richmond, Va. These days he watches almost every Cubs game through MLB Extra Innings on DirecTV. Then he watched on WGN, the superstation that carried the Cubbies to 14.5 million cable homes.
Kinder’s picture, with his CUBS vanity plate, made the front page of USA TODAY on Sept. 26, 1984. A friend who was working overseas saw the story in our international edition and called from a bar in Israel. The (Richmond) News Leader ran an item about it. And a local TV station came to his house as he watched the Cubs beat the San Diego Padres 13-0 in Game 1 of the playoffs. They’d win the next game in the five-game series, too — only to get swept in San Diego and miss the World Series yet again.
Kinder’s email to me included a photo of the framed front page, his 15 minutes of fame from 1984 frozen behind glass — and also that photo of him and his father posing just weeks ago with the holy grail of a trophy.
Father and son are smiling. The trophy is gleaming. And behind them, sprinklers spray the sparkling diamond.
You can’t believe how green the grass looks.