LJ Archive - 10/30/05 : Na Na Hey Hey...!

Here it is, a full day after the thrilling final out, and I’m still deliriously happy in a bittersweet spin. This World Series flew by too quickly to sink in. How, after waiting for 88 years, can 5 days be too fast? It wasn’t supposed to be this easy, of that we were certain. Cautiously, nervously, we told ourselves to expect a game 5 or 6, doctoring the ubiquitous SoxFan Ulcer, respecting the other team while selfishly looking on the bright side: maybe they could finally clinch one of these mystic October affairs back in Chicago, for the hometown crowd on the South Side.

But as the infield ball blooped over Jenks’ head to a ringing Uribe, across the infield to Paulie’s waiting glove, they went and swept it anyway. How dare they? Who told them they could do this? Ozzie… man, that guy has some cajones. And to think the All-Latino team didn’t have a manager!

Eighty-eight years of strife and heartache, scandals and flubs, curses and cursing were obliterated in a 5-day whirlwind. But hey, at least we got a wild and epic Game 3 out of it.

And so for myself, displaced to Kentucky where the only Chicago baseball team they know of is that other one that, 2 years ago, forgot a postseason series is 7 games and not 6, I jumped. I whooped, I yelled, I slid and shuffled across the kitchen floor – in what else but my white socks - I searched for the phone and rang up my family knowing they’d be too busy being there to answer, and I called them anyway. I cheered with my wife and our new little Sox fan who, God willing and umpires notwithstanding, will get to see this again, someday.

I did it for the memories of the first game my parents took me to in 1983, on the cusp of Winning Ugly – a game whose tattered souvenir pennant still survives now on my daughter’s wall, its oft-maligned cartoon-hitman logo a retro link to my own innocence, lost like the autographed ball I once played used in a neighborhood pickup game.

I did it for the memories of other games attended – the prayers for homeruns to explode the scoreboard and hotdogs flavored with summer magic, the cheering crowds and the traffic jams as Na-Na-Hey-Hey-Goodbye blasted from car radios tuned to postgame festivities.

I did it for the heroes that kept me awake listening to the calls on WMAQ 670. Blackjack McDowell’s quest for the Cy Young. A young punk they called The Big Hurt. Bobby Thigpen’s save streak. And if it hadn’t been for those accursed Oakland A’s…

I did it for the crowd at Harry’s this past weekend who saluted me for driving “…all the way from Kentucky to see the game here?! That’s hardcore!!”. I did it for people who honked and cheered upon seeing my decorated car along the way home. Instant friends of a common link be they – the rarest and most cherished kind.

I remember the commercials: “The Last Season at Historic Comiskey Park: Years from now, you’ll say you were there.” And if I couldn’t be at the Series, I was there for that night fifteen years ago, that bittersweet victory under the towering lights of the whitewashed brickhouse. They gave some fan the privilege to “be the last one to turn out the lights” – and did it during the 7th inning stretch. Two hours later, stuck in the parking lot after the game as the unfamiliar shape of New Comiskey loomed in the background, they went off for good. Almost all of the crowd was already gone and didn’t see that final wink.

Representing the South Side wherever I roam with my well-worn Good Guys cap that I bought as my new fiancé shopped for her wedding dress, I may not know all the trivia, not have all the knickknacks and souvenirs, but I’ve always been a Sox Fan and a damn proud one. Proud of what they’ve done when they’ve contended. Proud of how they’ve handled their defeats. Proud of their taking their heavy-handed share of lumps without clinging to excuses and mystical hexes. Proud of their heritage – representing the working class, the beater crowd, the workers and the streetsoldiers. The ballplayers may be long removed from that caste, but prima donnas have never been honored here: Frank Thomas finally figured it out, and he’s never had more fun despite his setbacks.

They’ve done us all proud. They’ve done Grampa proud. I jumped and yelled and honked at nobody on my way to work especially hard for him. You knew this was going to happen – you just knew he was gonna pull some strings - proud and peaceful in his Sox colors for his final goodbye…

Na na Na na, Na na Na na, Hey hey hey, Goodbye... To 88 years in 5 days.

Victory champagne couldn’t taste this sweet.

And we will always have our sweeter memories, and Oh, there will forever be joy, from Chicago to Kentucky, from Venezuela to Mudville.

What a year, what a run.

Thank you White Sox!!!!