Skip to content
  • Chicago Cub fans gather outside Wrigley Field to celebrate the...

    Nuccio DiNuzzo / Chicago Tribune

    Chicago Cub fans gather outside Wrigley Field to celebrate the Cubs clinching Game 4 of the NLDS.

  • Fans celebrating after the last out near Wrigley Field after...

    Nuccio DiNuzzo / Chicago Tribune

    Fans celebrating after the last out near Wrigley Field after the Chicago Cubs clinched the NLDS.

  • Fans celebrating outside Wrigley Field after the Chicago Cubs clinched...

    Nuccio DiNuzzo / Chicago Tribune

    Fans celebrating outside Wrigley Field after the Chicago Cubs clinched the NLDS.

  • Fans inside Sluggers celebrate the final two outs of the...

    Nuccio DiNuzzo / Chicago Tribune

    Fans inside Sluggers celebrate the final two outs of the Chicago Cubs clinching Game 4 of the NLDS.

  • Chicago Cub fans gather outside Wrigley Field to celebrate the...

    Nuccio DiNuzzo / Chicago Tribune

    Chicago Cub fans gather outside Wrigley Field to celebrate the Cubs clinching the NLDS.

  • Cindy Mariscal, watches the ninth inning of game of of...

    Nuccio DiNuzzo / Chicago Tribune

    Cindy Mariscal, watches the ninth inning of game of of the NLDS.

of

Expand
Author
PUBLISHED: | UPDATED:

You have to be in your mid-70s, at the very youngest, to remember the last time the Cubs were even in a World Series (that would be 1945).

You would have to be well over a century old to remember 1908, the last time the Cubs won the World Series. Chances are you don’t know anyone in that category.

Fortunately for all Cubs fans, the team might be on the verge of snapping its infamous title drought.

The experience of being a fan of a team that has gone 108 years without a championship is a multigenerational exploit. Yet it’s worth asking whether today’s young fans—Millennials and Generation Y, as they are called by sociologists—see their team the same way as older generations.

Do 20-something-year-old Cubs fans even see them as “lovable losers”? Or is the “Completely Useless By September” acronym just forgotten history?

With the playoffs set to begin, RedEye connected with younger adult Cubs fans to learn what their baseball experience is all about.

‘Like a family friend’

Adam Yakush, 28, says he got serious about being a Cubs fan during the team's 2003 run to the NL Championship Series.
Adam Yakush, 28, says he got serious about being a Cubs fan during the team’s 2003 run to the NL Championship Series.

Adam Yakush says being a Cubs fan is ingrained in his being.

“My mom grew up near Wrigley, and the Cubs were always just part of the culture here,” the 28-year-old Downers Grove resident said.

But it wasn’t until he was about 14, during the 2003 season, that Yakush made an effort to “get serious” as a fan.

“I made an effort to learn every player’s name and stats,” said Yakush, a high school industrial arts teacher. “I’d never just watch random TV shows. If the Cubs were playing, I’d be watching.”

Attending college in Ohio didn’t curtail his fervor, thanks to cable TV. Fishing trips with friends in Montana or elsewhere would include road stops in Des Moines to catch the Iowa Cubs or in Knoxville to see the Cubs’ double-A affiliate, the Tennessee Smokies.

His Cubs relationship got “more serious,” he said, when he started dating his future wife, Samantha.

“Our first date was at a Harry Caray’s, no surprise,” he said. “Dating meant going to Cubs games, or grabbing a seat at Buffalo Wild Wings to watch.”

Also not a surprise: Adam and Samantha got engaged at Wrigley in April 2014 in front of Ron Santo’s statue. The Cubs won that day.

While being a Cubs fan isn’t all roses all the time, agony isn’t part of his experience.

“The ‘lovable losers’ thing doesn’t really stick for me,” he said. “Sox fan friends give us a hard time, but win or lose the Cubs are the hometown team. Like a family friend, really.”

Vacationing at Wrigley

Cara Cooper’s fandom started at age 5, when she just happened to join a tee ball team in her rural Virginia hometown called the Cubs. Like for generations of fans before her, watching the Cubs on WGN after school, during day games especially, became a ritual.

“I knew and liked all the players in the late ’90s and 2000s,” said Cooper, now 26. “I loved [Sammy] Sosa, and Kerry Wood was a favorite.”

By the time she was a teenager, Cooper’s fandom became a family affair.

“My brother and I bugged our parents about a Chicago vacation,” she said, angling for visit to Wrigley Field. Eventually her dad, Virginia born and bred, became an equally big Cubs fan.

When it came time to choose colleges, Cooper, now a sportswriter in Martinsville, Va., said Northwestern University had the edge. After all, it was just a few train stops from Lakeview, and regular attendance at Cubs games would be a must.

Cooper also likens her Cubs fan experience and the magnetism of Wrigley to a calling, much like the way Austin, Texas, draws music fans, or how art lovers flock to New York’s Greenwich Village.

“Sometimes I just had the urge to get off the ‘L’ for no reason at Addison, and just walk around, just to feel the spirit around the Friendly Confines,” she said.

Drive-through autographs

Anyone who lives in North Center knows about the shortcut toward the Kennedy Expressway. To avoid traffic, you shoot west down Berteau Avenue, past Western Avenue, to Rockwell Street and head south.

Josh Close, who grew up in the mid-1980s at Irving Park and Western, remembers that the sports trading card shop at Western and Berteau (now the location of Armand’s Pizzeria) was the place to hang out and catch your favorite Cubs player.

The 34-year-old, who also is a carpenter and lifelong Cubs fan, said that when a road series followed a day game at Wrigley, “Cubs players back then would drive themselves to O’Hare.”

Prime time to catch your favorite player was about 45 minutes after the ninth inning.

“If Ryne Sandberg or Mark Grace hit the red light at the corner of Berteau and Western, then you got ’em,” Close said, adding that the corner made for a great spot to get autographs from players.

“Once when I was about 15, I jumped out almost in front of Grace’s car. He got out, kind of lectured me about safety and then signed my ball anyway.”

Memories like these outweigh any negatives about bad seasons, “no matter how long it’s been,” the Ravenswood resident said.

“You’re either a Cubs fan or you’re not,” Close said. “Now that the Cubs are really, really good, sure you could say ‘There’s always next year,’ but it’s more likely that that saying will soon be retired.”

Thanks, Granddad

Kara Fagan, 25, credits her grandfather with instilling a love for the Cubs in her.
Kara Fagan, 25, credits her grandfather with instilling a love for the Cubs in her.

Kara Fagan remembers growing up in Glen Ellyn as a Cubs fan to the stories of her late grandfather, Donald Olson, also a lifelong Cubs fan.

“My granddad used to talk about listening to the Cubs on the radio before baseball on TV, and tuning in for the 1945 World Series,” said Fagan, 25, who lives in the city and works for Cards Against Humanity.

Thanks to him, Fagan said that at an early age she started watching the Cubs on TV “every single night, if possible,” and that by seventh grade, during the 2003 season, she became even more dedicated, gathering more from the memories and an oral history of the Cubs from her grandfather.

“My granddad used to talk about us younger people being able to take for granted, in 2003 especially, how good the team was,” the Lincoln Park resident said. “Like him, I’m probably more cautious than most Cubs fans my age, always looking for the win, but not getting too comfortable until we’ve got a good lead in the ninth inning.”

‘Yelling at the TV’

Growing up in central Florida has never stopped Lucas Burkley from rooting for the Cubs. Burkley, 24, inherited Cubs fandom from his grandfather, a Chicago native.

“For years my grandma and grandpa used to go to games and sit right at the third-base line,” he said. “I remember he had a box full of foul balls he’d collected.”

Signed balls and Chicago sportswear often became birthday presents. And though Burkley’s grandfather died when he was a young child, he carries the torch.

“My apartment is covered mostly in Cubs stuff,” said Burkley, a Gamestop store manager who still lives in Florida. “But, my mom tells me I’m just like my grandpa was, yelling at the TV when the Cubs lose and going crazy when they win.”

Despite the distance, a Cubs pilgrimage to Chicago is for Burkley a regular thing.

His favorite memory, he said, was a visit to Wrigley in June 2009, when infielder Ryan Theriot hit a walk-off single.

“I wanted all my life to be at Wrigley to sing ‘Go Cubs Go,’ and with the win I lived that little dream.”

A GUIDE TO GENERATIONS OF CUBS FANS

If you crack open old social studies books, you’ll find that historians and sociologists generally talk openly about a couple of major generational cohorts. There are no hard agreements of exactly what year a Millennial, Gen Xer or Boomer was born, but for certain, different generations of Cubs fans have different heroes and distinct experiences.

Baby Boomers

The generation after World War II and the Cubs’ last World Series appearance, in 1945, boomer Cubs fans found 1960s heroes in Ron Santo, Billy Williams and “Mr. Cub” Ernie Banks. Some Baby Boomers would protest the Vietnam War, while others, known as Bleacher Bums, would simply protest endless losing with near-perfect game attendance and rabid fandom. Some are still with us, still watching, still hoping.

Generation X

The first generation born after Major League Baseball introduced the structured playoffs, Gen X came of age during cable TV. As “latchkey kids,” they came home every day from school alone, babysat by Harry Caray, to watch the last few innings of day-only games on WGN-TV. Bruce Sutter, Rick Sutcliffe, Ryne Sandberg and later Andre Dawson and Greg Maddux would give Cubs fans hope, sprung from the unfulfilled playoff seasons of 1984 and 1989. As some sociologists have written about Gen X, they’re still looking for something.

Generation Y and Millennials

Generally born starting in the early 1980s, Generation Y’s Cubs fans could be called Dusty’s Kids, play-ready for the small renaissance that started during the 1998 season, when Sammy Sosa won league MVP and Kerry Wood was Rookie of the Year. They grew up and came of age five outs from the World Series, on corked bats and missed chances.

Like Millennials, Gen Y had a tenuous relationship with angry Grandpa Lou Piniella and that odd, misunderstood neighbor, Steve Bartman.

Millennials, called so because they grew up in the 2000s, were the first to take selfies at Wrigley Field, while Wrigley introduced them in turn to the “old people music” of Billy Joel and some guy from The Beatles. Their Cubs didn’t win remarkably more games, but they have perhaps a brighter outlook.

Generation Z

The youngest generation of Cubs fans is made up mostly of grade school children and also doesn’t have a specific starting year. But it’s safe to say many Gen Z kids have been born since the Sox won their last World Series, in 2005. Still, most Gen Z Cubs fans would rather eat Brussels sprouts than cheer for the Sox.

Andy Frye is a RedEye contributor. @mysportscomplex