Tom Humphries/LockerRoom: As a staunch heathen, it was interesting to watch Eamon Dunphy's televised dog and pony show on Friday night. The hierarchical positioning of the various items was instructive.
From a discussion about the tribal venality of Fianna Fail we moved to an item on the general failure of the health services as provided by Mother Theresa in Calcutta and then to P Ó Sé explaining his unusual decision to get away from football by managing Westmeath.
From the unwashed to the beatified to the godlike in three easy intros. Nobody else could be so light on their feet.
Most fascinating was the Ma Theresa business. According to Christopher Hitchens and other sources - one of whom was there on the couch, was a native of Calcutta, was a medical doctor and was the author of a serious book on the subject (qualifications which rendered him shamefully ill-equipped to make any judgments, according to some devout callers) - the little walnut-faced madonna believed wholly in the sanctity of suffering. Suffering would be a stairway to other things.
This is good news for some, including Páidí, who thought he had it bad in Kerry. It was also great news for the readers of this column who - despite knowing they will be fast-tracked to the five-star accommodation when they go to their eternal reward - still draw scant consolation from the fact that there is as much suffering going into the writing of these columns as there is in the reading of them.
Bad cess to them all, as we say around here when they write in. Readers have a choice. As somebody once told me: reading this column isn't an addiction, it's a sort of horrible fascination born out of a cringing sense of embarrassment for the wretched author, a belief that there but for the grace of God etc., etc . . .
And you know, the Sports Editor was right. His point was that readers have a choice. They can walk away from this hideous freak show and live out lives of quiet dignity if they choose.
Your columnist has no choice. He was indentured at a young age. He knows no other existence. He is the sweet-suffering John Merrick of sports hackery. He has suffered uniquely and lengthily.
Just look at the record. Apart from belching out a weekly column's worth of sourly-fragranced gases, he is a member of several social groupings to whom the phrase "long-suffering" is mandatorily applied.
He is a "long-suffering" Dublin hurling fan and a "long-suffering" Leeds United fan. His sufferings have been long, too, in the business of the national soccer team. Imagine how the past few weeks have been for a man with those afflictions. Imagine if he were also rugby-intolerant.
He knows, of course, that when it comes to suffering there's always somebody worse off than yourself, and not a day goes by when he doesn't thank the gods for sparing him an affection for Shamrock Rovers.
The general point is that your columnist knows suffering.
As you'll have guessed by now, this is a column about baseball. It was decided to use the technique of a lengthy preamble about other subjects just to lure the unwary in. Generally if you start scribbling a column about American sport the first shrill emails of protest have reached the computer before the second paragraph has been started. The hope today is that, confused by the early paragraphs and unable to avoid gliding over the smooth segue into baseball talk, you will suffer on until the end.
This is a column not just about baseball but about the longest suffering fans in the world, fans of the Chicago Cubs. If they weren't so cursed, hexed and dogged by bad luck I would blame myself for everything that happens to them. But I only got interested in their affairs a few years ago. They'd been poxed for a long time by then.
It's scary how suffering can creep up on a sports outfit. In 1908, the Chicago Cubs were so scarily good that some people thought they should be broken up for the good of baseball. They'd won two World Series in a row. In 1906, they'd set a record which still stands of winning 116 regular season games. Their shortstop, Joe Tinker, secondbaseman Johnny Evers and firstbaseman Frank Chance, had made such a speciality of the double play (a complicated, quick-thinking bit of defensive play) that they had been immortalised in poetry by a heartbroken New York Giants fan:
These are the saddest of possible words
Tinker to Evers to Chance
Trio of bear cubs fleeter than birds
Tinker to Evers to Chance.
That was 1908. The Cubs haven't won a World Series since.
If you are ever in Chicago you should duck under Michigan Avenue to Hubbard Street near the bridge and see the Billy Goat Tavern, a good newspaper pub which many believe to be the cause of the Cubs troubles.
The Cubs reached the World Series in 1945 and had won two of the opening three games by the time the series moved to Wrigley Field in Chicago. The city was agog. The proprietor of the Billy Goat, one William Sianis, presented himself at Wrigley Field for games four and five in the company of his goat. He had box tickets for both himself and the goat, whose name, should you be asked, was Sonovia.
William Sianis was asked to leave. He stuck a curse on the Cubs, and when they lost that series he sent a tart little telegram to Philip Wrigley, the Cubs owner. "Who Smells Now?"
Since then the Cubs have found new and more inventive ways to lose every year. Sometimes they'll make a run in spring and look so good that Chicago starts to believe. Then they'll go the month of July without a win. Other years they'll just stink the place out all year. Then you get years like this year when they do things in style.
Last week we couldn't stay away from the Internet coverage. The Chicago Cubs were a couple of games away from the World Series. To get to a series and lose it would be a triumph at this stage. They had two home games left against the Florida Marlins and they were three-two up in the best of seven series. What could go wrong?
Game six, the eighth inning of nine. Cubs ahead by three runs to nil. The World Series so close you could smell it. The Florida Marlins, looking beaten, hit a foul ball. Now, foul balls are the ones which, loosely speaking, go behind the batter. They don't count for runs for the batter's team, but if they are caught without bouncing on the turf the batter is out. The Cubs defenseman, Moises Alou, poised himself under the dropping ball. It dropped slowly out of the north Chicago sky, Alou adjusting his stance as it came, moving himself closer and closer to the perimeter wall.
And then, with his left arm stretched skywards and his glove awaiting that familiar thud, the curse struck. A lifelong/long-suffering Cubs fan called Steve Bartman reached out and tried to catch the ball as a souvenir. Alou was flummoxed.
The Marlins got off the hook and went on to score eight runs. Bartman had to be escorted by police from the normally friendly confines of Wrigley Field. Inevitably, the Cubs lost Game Seven.
And Chicago writhed in agony about The Curse, but deep down we all know the truth. Get as much incompetence as possible into a set-up and you don't need curses. The Cubs have always had that going for them. Leeds United have never been free of it even in good days. Dublin hurling takes a step forward and two back.
Suffering seldom has anything as glamourous as a curse at the heart of it.
