There is nothing greater in sport than a champion for the people.
You can have your superstars, you can have your dynasties (hi, Hawthorn), and you can have your super-teams like the Yankees, Real Madrid or the All Blacks.
But for a lay down, heart-pumping, sport-induced moment of sheer joy, nothing comes close to watching a champion team do it for the little guy and break a long-standing championship drought.
I challenge you to tell me that you weren’t just a teeny-bit excited for the North Queensland Cowboys in the NRL grand final this year. Twenty years, and 21 seasons of heartbreak wiped out in a moment.
Or South Sydney last year. Make that 43 years of mediocrity and despair.
What about Geelong, in 2007? Forty-four years of heartache, as year after year they went to the big dance, only to be on the bottom of the dance-card, and missing out before the night was over.
2005 was a good one. The Swans wiped out 72 years – they were based in a different state the last time they won a premiership. Meanwhile, Wests Tigers brought premiership success to Tigers and Magpies fans who probably thought it was never going to happen.
In terms of football, those 32 years – 32 years! – that Australia waited to get back to a World Cup felt like centuries.
Such droughts, of course, are not solely the realm of Australia. Think about poor Portsmouth in the 2008 FA Cup final. That club had waited 69 years for more success. Some droughts seemingly may never end, at least not any time soon, such is the supposed curse that Benfica are currently riding out in European Cup competition.
Championship droughts, curses: sport really can dish out the anguish. None more so than American baseball.
The Boston Red Sox were the pin-up boys for curses and championship droughts. A world series win in 1918, then nothing for decades.
A championship drought all attributed to the sale of their best player, Babe Ruth. Actually, Babe was the best baseball player ever. Think Don Bradman, but American, and smoking a cigar. The ‘Curse of the Bambino’.
They broke their drought in 2004, a 4-0 series sweep of the St Louis Cardinals to deliver a World Series some thought they would never live to see.
Which ultimately brings me to the Major League Baseball post-season currently underway in the States.
Four teams left standing: the Kansas City Royals, Toronto Blue Jays, New York Mets and Chicago Cubs.
All four teams stand on the precipice of breaking their own World Series droughts.
The Mets last won it in 1986 (against the cursed Red Sox, more on that later), the Royals in 1985, and the Blue Jays back in 1993.
However, if you are a true romantic sports fan at heart, you cannot go past the Chicago Cubs as the team to get behind.
They are a team that have not won it all since 1908. That’s right, no World Series victory for them for 107 years. They have not even been to the big show since 1945, the last time they lost a World Series.
And a lot like the Red Sox, the Cubs have apparently had history very much against them.
Rather than suffering from a player curse, they are afflicted by the ‘Curse of the Billy Goat’.
In Game 4 of that 1945 series, when Cubs fan Billy Sianis showed up to Wrigley Field, home of the Cubs, with two tickets for himself and pet goat, he was swiftly asked to leave.
It was then that he allegedly uttered the immortal words: “The Cubs, they ain’t going to win no more.”
And they have not.
Sport does strange things to the mind. People will actually believe anything. Sport is truly a form of improvised theatre, and like all great theatre, there is tragedy.
For a period there, I thought that a lucky shirt I wore to Newcastle Knights games meant they would win. I was on a two-year winning streak, including the 2001 grand final, with that shirt, a streak that was broken by Hazem El Masri and that bloody sideline conversion in 2002 that I have to re-live at least twice a year.
Red Sox fans believed that they were cursed because they sold their best player to their greatest rivals in 1918. A curse that even afflicted their own players to make errant mistakes, such as one Billy Buckner in the 1986 World Series, who had to live with the infamy of allowing the go-ahead run off his error, in Game 6 to the Mets, as the Sox ultimately lost Game 7 and the series.
Buckner became something of a recluse because of that series, such was the notoriety that he and his family had to withstand for decades.
Imagine having to re-live your greatest mistake over and over and over, on television, and be associated with letting down an entire city. I would imagine you would become somewhat reclusive as well.
Buckner ultimately forgave the game and Red Sox fans after he was brought back into the fold in 2008, after the Sox won two World Series in four years, when he was welcomed to Fenway Park, home of the Sox, to throw out the ceremonial first pitch of the season.
It was a catharsis for Buckner, who shed tears for the torment he had felt responsible for putting his family through.
The Cubs are now presented with an opportunity to have their own cathartic release, however, not for the sake of a billy goat, but for one Steve Bartman.
You see, the Cubs last participated in a Championship Series, the series you need to win to make the World Series, in 2003. They were facing the Florida Marlins (a somewhat less-storied franchise that actually no longer exists).
Leading the series three games to two, with Game 6 at Wrigley Field, leading three runs to nil at the top of the eighth inning, the Cubs, and their religious fans, were finally dreaming of just going to the World Series.
Possibly they were thinking of winning, but not wanting to get too ahead of themselves, were most likely simply enjoying the thought of once again participating in a World Series.
Top of the eighth, first Marlins batter, out. The Cubs were five outs away from a World Series.
It was at this point that the ‘Bartman incident’ occurred.
For a longer analysis of the incident, The New York Times gives a good account.
The long and the short of things is that Bartman, an avid and die hard Cubs fan, is the immortal face for supposedly interfering with a foul ball that could have been caught by left-fielder Moises Alou.
The catch never took place because Bartman went to catch the foul ball, a common practice in Major League Baseball, thereby denying Alou the opportunity.
Wrigley Field, otherwise known as the Friendly Field, went feral. Bartman had to be escorted by security staff before the game ended, as the Cubs gave up eight runs in that eighth inning and lost the game.
Despite Game 7 being at Wrigley Field, the Cubs lost the series, and have not come close since.
Bartman’s face was shown around the world, and while he released a written apology through his brother, he was never seen nor heard from again.
The rumour is that Bartman will not even use a credit card these days, such are his concerns that his location and identity will be discovered and he will be harassed.
The Bartman incident is also beautifully captured in the ESPN film “Catching Hell”, in which the victimisation and scape-goating of Bartman is considered against the wider picture of why we must apportion blame in a situation that we refuse to accept.
Bartman apparently still lives in Chicago, and one would imagine that, much like Buckner of the Sox, he silently and patiently waits and hopes for the Cubs to win a World Series, and allow him to move on with his life.
So get onboard the Cubs bandwagon. Because for every tragedy, there is also a chance for that happy ending, and redemption.
It would be a sporting achievement and a story to savour for the Cubs to wipe away a century of failure, and to give Bartman and the people of Chicago what they truly crave: a World Series ring.
A champion for the people, but also for one man in particular.
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