CHICAGO >> Margaret Pinkston, a 69-year-old housekeeper who lives on the South Side, was waiting for a friend to bring over her breakfast tray at the Valois Cafeteria on Thursday morning when she leaned in conspiratorially. “I’m going to be honest,” she said, lowering her voice. “I don’t know one person who wasn’t rooting for the Cubs.”
Such sentiments are usually hard to find on the South Side. In this city, blessed with two professional baseball teams, where you live usually determines your allegiances.
Here on the South Side, residents tend to favor the White Sox, who play at a nearby stadium now called Guaranteed Rate Field. On the North Side, the Cubs are the heavy local favorite, their jewel box of a park, Wrigley Field, nestled in the Lakeview neighborhood.
But on the morning after the Cubs delivered their first World Series win in 108 years in an epic, 10-inning game, loyalties were briefly scrambled.
At Valois, a Hyde Park institution that is one of President Barack Obama’s favorite haunts, more than a dozen Chicagoans interviewed said many people were setting aside their usual crosstown rivalries and, for the moment, would graciously and magnanimously celebrate the victory of the usually reviled Cubs.
“I’m usually a Sox fan,” Claudia Jones, 89, who lives in the South Shore community, said with a wide smile. “But right now, I’m a Cubs fan.”
Jones (like many Cubs fans) said she was so furious Wednesday night about the pitching decisions of Joe Maddon, the Cubs’ manager, that she gave up on the game and went to bed, tossing and turning. “I didn’t sleep well because I thought they were going to lose,” she said. “But I’m happy today. It’s the fact that we need to pull together now and not be so divided.”
I know the feeling. I’m a native Midwesterner whose extended baseball-mad family is evenly split among the Cubs, White Sox and Milwaukee Brewers, but I share my mother’s devotion to the Cubs — hers so fierce that when we planned vacations, she first consulted the Cubs’ schedule to make sure we could squeeze in an away game.
My father recalls with sparkling clarity my first of many visits to Wrigley: an afternoon in June 1984, the first game Rick Sutcliffe pitched at home for the Cubs. “He struck out 14 Cardinals, the Cubs won 5-0. The Cubs won the division that year. Sutcliffe went 16-1 games for the Cubs and Ryno won MVP,” he texted the other day, referring to Ryne Sandberg. “The game we saw was a turning point in the year.”
What a surreal experience, then, to live in Chicago this year as the Cubs mowed down opponents and raised hopes higher and higher that this was their year — the one that would finally end their championship drought, and with it the talk of goats and curses and black cats wandering in front of their dugout.
“W” flags have blanketed the North Side, hanging from front porches and fluttering from car windows. All summer, no place seemed too formal for Cubs gear. In church, the normally buttoned-up crowd seemed to be letting loose, with Cubs T-shirts peeking out from tweed blazers. I lost count of the girls and boys dressed as Cubs players while trick-or-treating this week.
Even the usually chilly Chicago weather cooperated. During the oddly balmy November nights this week, you could hear whoops and applause floating out of neighbors’ open windows as the Cubs smashed one home run after another.
On the South Side of Chicago — not quite. W flags and Cubs T-shirts have been rare.
But some residents said Thursday that they had taken the Cubs’ victory as belonging to the whole city, not just the North Side. “It’s a Chicago thing,” said Diane Burkley, 67, a nurse, sprinkling salt on her hash browns. “You’re going to root for Chicago, no matter who’s in the playoffs. We needed this. It’s uplifting.” (In New York, this is what Yankees fans say when the Mets have gone far in the postseason, infuriating most Mets fans, who see it as patronizing — and do not return the sentiment.)
Her son, Ronald Burkley, who also lives on the South Side, said he watched the game Wednesday night while on duty as a doorman in an apartment building on the North Side. “This win really boosts the city’s morale,” he said. “It’s something the city needed with all the violence and everything.”
Burkley considered himself a Sox fan but said he became swept up in the Cubs’ excitement this summer, admiring the team’s youth, sportsmanship and clean play. “It was so contagious,” he said. “They really played some awesome baseball.”
Even Obama briefly abandoned his White Sox loyalties to congratulate the Cubs on Twitter.
Josephine Hereford, 65, a Hyde Park resident, said she stepped outside Thursday and breathed in the sunshine and crisp air, feeling giddy. “It just seemed that the universe agreed with the Cubs,” she said.
On Wednesday night, Ken Gray, 64, a retired salesman, watched Game 7 with a group of friends that included Sox fans. One especially devoted Sox fan in the group, he said, surprised everyone by cheering and hooting by the end of the game. “It brings a lot of pride and joy back to the city of Chicago,” he said. “It just makes you feel good.”
After the victory Wednesday night, the White Sox, who won the World Series in 2005, offered their congratulations on Twitter, a little cattily.
“Congrats, Cubs,” the team wrote, “on bringing another World Series championship to the city of Chicago!”
John Brewer, 69, ate breakfast at Valois on Thursday with his wife, saying he was a die-hard Sox fan but had come around to cheering for the Cubs this year. He predicted that the unity would not last. “Right now, we’re all on a high,” he said. “In two weeks, we’ll go back to a rivalry again.”