Flashback 2009: For his pride & joy, dad Bears down

View from our seats

     My younger son is getting married this weekend, so I thought I would look at a few of his cameos from past columns. Such as this, when I figured, heck, let's go to a Bears game. This was written before the fact, which begs the question: so how was it? Honestly, I don't recall. Let's put it this way: we never went to another. 

     When a professional sports franchise has a season as spectacularly lousy as the Bears are having this year, its fans begin searching for occult explanations. The Cubs have their famous goat curse, athletes on the cover of Sports Illustrated face the cover jinx. But what have the Bears done to invite this doom?
     While fans scratch their heads and puzzle — what could be different about this season? — I feel like Jonah, sleeping below deck on the storm-tossed ship, shifting uneasily in my hammock as my fellow sailors clasp their hands over their heads, pleading with their gods in despair. What have we done, O Enki, to displease you so? Who among us is unworthy in thine eyes?
     Ummmm, sorry Bears fans, but that would be me. You see, I did something a few weeks back completely out of character, something I have never done before, nor has my father, nor his father, nor any Steinberg in an unbroken chain going back to Creation. Something that, I'm beginning to suspect, was so far out of keeping with the cosmic order that it has upset the laws of nature, rended the time/space continuum and drawn doom down upon our hapless home team.
     I bought Bears tickets.
     My younger son started lobbying for them last year, pointing out that I'm always taking his older brother to the opera, which the younger boy is cool toward. Yes, I took him instead to baseball, basketball and hockey games, and even indoor arena football. But we had never gone to Soldier Field to see the mighty Bears, for the simple reason that everything I find interesting about football — the commercials, being able to see the action, having someone explain what is happening — is found on TV and lost attending a live game.
     I'd rather clean the garage.
     But I am nothing if not a doting father, so last year I logged onto StubHub, figuring I'd score a pair of ducats to the Packers game and endure the enforced boredom.
     Great Caesar's Ghost! Have you ever tried to buy football tickets? They were $175 apiece, or more. As much as I love my boys, both Primus and Secundus, I couldn't see shelling out $400 by the time we got done with parking and hot cocoa and souvenirs just to watch 22 big guys slam into each other.
     For that kind of money, you want somebody to sing.
     But my younger lad kept dropping hints, and the sentence, "My dad never took me to a Bears game; I hated him for that," formed in my mind. So this season, I gritted my teeth, dug in my pocket for $136 and bought a pair of tickets — lousy tickets, I assume, given the hoots of ridicule I've received when I tried to gripe about the expense to people who actually attend games.
     "A hundred and thirty-six dollars for both?" a co-worker snorted in the tone a neighbor would use if you said that you just bought a new car for $250.
     The game is against the Philadelphia Eagles Nov. 22 — again, more bad ju-ju, the anniversary of that dark day in Dallas. To get into the football mode, I've watched nearly an hour, spread out over several weeks of course, of staggeringly inept Bears football the way football's supposed to be watched — on TV.
     I've also read sports reporters as they struggle to convey the magnitude of the weekly civic shame and compound professional disaster. Read Mike Mulligan's column Friday about Thursday night's five-interception humiliation in San Francisco and pick out the adjectives: "painful," "frozen," "self-destructive," "blown out," "shocking," "flat-out idiotic," "wretched". . . well, you get the idea.
     Of course winning isn't everything ("It's the ONLY thing!" said, ah, some famous coach).
     No matter how blundering the action on the field, the important part is the father/son dynamic, right? To sit in Soldier Field, which I imagine will be draped in black bunting by that point, and join in the desolate, hopeless keening of the fans as they tear their hair and wail and shake their fists at the sky as the PA blares a slow funeral dirge.
     "So you like this sort of stuff, eh?" I'll say or, one hopes, not say.
     Or heck, maybe our presence will be just the offering the Great Wheel of Sports Karma demands, and the Bears will do great. My brother went to one game once and Nathan Vasher ran 108 yards for a touchdown. But he's always been lucky.
     Either way, the boy wants to go, so we're going. And if it hails frozen frogs that evening, and Jay Cutler gets spun around, runs the ball into the wrong end zone for an Eagles touchdown then smacks into the goal post and shatters like glass, well, you'll know who to blame.

       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 15, 2009