EVENT
From the New York Times:
With Sox as Champions, Chicago Loses Its Second-City Feeling
By MONICA DAVEY
Published: October 27, 2005CHICAGO, Oct. 27 – Eighty-eight years is a long time for a city to steep in humiliation.
But with one quick sweep of the baseball World Series, the Second City awoke today feeling, for once, not quite so insecure, not quite so predictable, not quite so second.
“We’ve taken so much flak – people just telling us, ‘You’ll never do it,'” said Lanse Nicholas, a waiter, who, like thousands of Chicagoans, gathered in a stadium here Wednesday night to watch the final game beamed in from Houston, and to be absolutely certain they were really seeing what they thought they were.
“I can die in peace,” Pat Rosenberg, a car dealership sales manager, said that he told his wife, after the Sox’ 1-0 victory over the Astros in Game 4.
And Will Long, a teacher, took a broader view. “It honestly,” he said, “means redemption.”
Redemption for all the Chicagoans from ordinary grandmothers to Sox legends like Bill Veeck, the charismatic and quirky former owner – who did not live to see the Sox’ first World Series victory since 1917. Redemption for all the famed collapses and individual failings over the years of this South Side team, so often dismissed by the better known North Side team, the Cubs. And redemption, perhaps, at last, for the 1919 Black Sox scandal, when eight Sox players were barred from baseball, accused of fixing the World Series.
“This certainly removes some of the stain,” said David Fletcher, whose love of the team runs so deep that he got married at home plate of the old Comiskey Park, the Sox’ former stadium. “They have carried into the future all the ghosts of the Black Sox and this whole Second City thing. They have been in the shadow of all of that forever.”
And so, into the early morning hours and all through the day, weary-looking people here went right on celebrating. Crowds screamed in South Side bars and fans gathered outside U.S. Cellular Field, though the team was still hundreds of miles away. One raucous group of men belted out the team’s song from 1959, the year the White Sox last played in the World Series, with its cheery, ever-hopeful lyrics: “You’re always in there fighting and you do your best; We’re glad to have you out here in the middle west.”
“Believe It!” screamed a bold front-page headline in the Chicago Tribune.
The White Sox’ only other Series victory came in 1906. After the Boston Red Sox ended an 86-year championship drought last year, the Sox’ dry spell had been the second-longest in baseball — after the cross-town Cubs, who haven’t won in 97 years.
Hours before the team’s arrival, a crowd waited at Midway Airport – fittingly, the city’s less known, South Side airport – ready to cheer the new champions. And White Sox gear, not always so popular, sold like mad, while downtown skyscrapers lit up with “SOX PRIDE” as if to assure the locals that, yes, this really did happen.