Last summer Major League Baseball polled fans on the most memorable moment in baseball history. It provided a ballot full of suggestions, such as Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier, Cal Ripken snapping Lou Gehrig’s consecutive-game record (the eventual winner), and Carlton Fisk’s game-winning World Series homer in 1975. But none of my own most memorable baseball moments was listed. The Dybzinski Fuckhead Catastrophe came quickly to mind, the ever-clear image of Jerry Dybzinski, hung up between second and third and looking abjectly to the sky, caught in the baserunning boner that killed a seventh-inning rally and left the White Sox scoreless in the fourth game of the 1983 American League championship series, a game they’d lose 3-0 after gallant starter Britt Burns surrendered the leadoff home run to Tito Landrum in the tenth inning that sent the Baltimore Orioles and not the Sox to the World Series. In turn, the picture of Burns trudging to the dugout triggered memories of Steve Garvey pounding a double off the wall against Lee Smith in the fourth game of the following year’s National League championship series, a clout that scored the winning run and kept the San Diego Padres alive for the deciding fifth game, which they won with the help of a ball scooting between Leon Durham’s legs. This memory was quickly overwhelmed by several images from 1969: Don Young letting a fly ball drop, a black cat running in front of the Cubs’ dugout at Shea Stadium, Randy Hundley making a swipe tag at home plate and leaping into the air when the Mets runner was called safe. Who decided that memorable baseball moments had to be triumphant? Ask any Chicago fan, and his or her clearest baseball memory is apt to be an image of defeat. For 85 years, what else have we had?
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Go back to New Year’s Day. One didn’t have to be a University of Illinois alum or even a Fighting Illini fan to feel the frustration of their 47-34 loss to Louisiana State in the Sugar Bowl–though it sure helped if one was. (The only consolation was that the Illini, the surprise Big Ten champs, were spared the humiliation of losing in the Rose Bowl thanks to the shuffling of bowl assignments by the body that sets them up in order to crown a single national champion.) The Bears followed quickly upon that embarrassment. After making the playoffs and clinching home-field advantage and even a bye week with a 13-3 record, they were overmatched against a tougher, hungrier Philadelphia Eagles team that had been tested in battle in the previous week’s wild-card win and was armed with a quarterback far more talented than any the Bears have ever had–Donovan McNabb, a Chicago product and Mount Carmel grad to boot.
If Chicago fans were irritated by teams that made the playoffs only to humiliate themselves, they didn’t know how good they were having it. The Cubs and Sox both embarked on the baseball season with legitimate playoff hopes. The Cubs had a terrific pitching rotation that would soon be bolstered by heralded phenom Mark Prior, their top draft pick out of college the previous year. And they’d added Moises Alou to a lineup that already boasted Sammy Sosa and Fred McGriff. The Sox, meanwhile, had plucked leadoff man Kenny Lofton off the scrap heap and inserted him in center field, while sturdy starter Todd Ritchie had arrived from the Pittsburgh Pirates.
If the flops of the Cubs and Sox left Chicago fans bitter and angry, they in no way prepared anyone for the Bears’ downfall. The Bears picked up where they left off last year with a couple of lucky wins, the second one thanks to a missed field goal in the final seconds, then opened a 20-0 lead against the New Orleans Saints. At that point they collapsed, blowing the lead and losing 29-23; it was as if, like Wile E. Coyote, they ran off a cliff and suddenly noticed nothing beneath them but air. They lost close games when the breaks that had gone their way last year didn’t; they lost convincingly–as in a Monday-night debacle against the Green Bay Packers in which every play Brett Favre called seemed to produce a huge hole in the line or a wide-open receiver; and they lost another crusher when they blew a big lead against the defending Super Bowl champions, the New England Patriots. All this after the Bears had tantalized their fans by moving their summer training camp to nearby Bourbonnais–the gift shop there was like Field’s on the weekend before Christmas–only to play their home games in Champaign, two hours down the highway, while Soldier Field was being rebuilt. Through it all, coach Dick Jauron wore an expression that reflected the look of many a Bears fan caught in traffic: calm yet confused, grim and befuddled, accepting misery as if it were simply a return to the normal state of affairs.
