What it's like to be a White Sox fan when the Cubs are in the World Series

By Blake Schuster / Special to Yahoo Sports

An hour after the Cubs clinched the pennant, I got a text from one of the only other White Sox fans I knew growing up on the North Shore.

“The world is ending,” he wrote. “This is one of the worst days of my life.”

It was the first time I’d heard from him in at least two years, but empathy was vital here and who else could understand these complex emotions?

There are two schools of thought Sox fans like me are dealing with as the Cubs play in their first World Series since the Truman administration. The first: This month has been unbelievably awesome. There may be no sports fan, certainly no baseball fan, who hasn’t imagined what this moment would look and feel like. It is truly amazing to have this happen while I’m alive. I wish I could be back home to see it in person.

The second: Everything is awful. May the Cubs crash and burn.

That’s not because I hate the franchise. I don’t. Once, as a kid, I tried being a Cubs fan. This was mostly for my dad, who grew up in Rogers Park, only a few miles from Wrigley Field. He was always kind with the TV and let me flip to the Sox game if they were playing at the same time. But I knew he wanted to watch the Cubs. So when I was in middle school I started one summer off by following the North Siders instead of the Sox. I hated myself. It felt dirty. It wasn’t my team. I flipped back to the Sox after four weeks and tried to erase that month from my memory. This wasn’t my dad’s fault. My uncle was a White Sox diehard. He couldn’t raise me himself but he was damn sure I’d know who to root for. My father had no chance.

I don’t want the Cubs to lose because of some silly rivalry with the White Sox. As far as I’m concerned the Cubs are just another team. They could be in any other city but happen to share one with my favorite team. This has nothing to do with where they play, either. Wrigley is my favorite ballpark. Its aesthetics remain undefeated.

And how could I hate this specific team? It may be the most exciting group of ballplayers I’ve followed in my lifetime.

No, I want the Cubs to lose — be it six games, seven games, doesn’t matter — for the same reason so many want them to win: the kid in me craves it.

It was torturous growing up a White Sox fan in Cubs country. You get other-ized. You get bullied for your allegiance. You are an afterthought. This whole week I won’t be able to stop reliving childhood arguments with kids at school who laughed at me for being a Sox fan.

Which is really why my friend texted me. All those faces kept flashing up in his memory, too. And as cool as it is watching all of this unfold, neither of us wants those kids to get their rings.

I don’t hate all Cubs fans. That’s important to note. A diehard North Sider is marrying my sister in a few months and he couldn’t be a better guy. I have family and friends who live and breathe for the Cubs and I wish them nothing but joy this October. This has to do with something deeper.

When it comes to sports, the feelings fans develop as kids never fade. Just ask anyone over the age of 40 who’s wearing a Kris Bryant or Anthony Rizzo jersey. Whereas some shed tears over loved ones who went their whole lives without seeing the Cubs make it to this stage, I clenched a fist in anger thinking of all the snot-faced punks from grade school who talked about how their wait would be more worth it than anyone else’s.

“No one can talk about losing because no one loses like the Cubs,” they’d argue. “No one can talk about how good winning feels because Cubs wins are so rare.”

The cognitive dissonance disgusts me to this day. And yes, it’s childish that I allow a group of people I haven’t seen, spoken to or thought of in more than a decade direct my feelings. But sports are childish by nature and it’s acceptable to act like a kid when watching them.

And I will watch this week. I’ll be excited for the city. I’ll hope I’m witnessing history. But if the Cubs win, the excruciating image I’ll get in my head is one of all those kids on our playground celebrating like they caught the final out themselves.

On that worst of days, I’ll be 8 years old again. Outnumbered by a group of children, a town, a whole fanbase. At least I’ve learned from my mistakes. This time I won’t even try to be happy.

Blake Schuster is a journalist based in Washington D.C. whose work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, IndyStar and Detroit Free Press. He’s still living off the 2005 World Series. Follow him on Twitter or e-mail him at Bschuster325@gmail.com.

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