Hey, Angel Fans: Enjoy This Team

The young couple stood in front of the ticket window at Edison Field Saturday evening and debated. Should they buy tickets for the Angels against the Texas Rangers at the end of the month? Or should they wait? “There’s no way the Angels are still going to be in it,” the man said. “Be optimistic,” said the woman. “Maybe if we buy tickets, that will be lucky.”

Buy the tickets, Angels fans. Buy them now. Buy them loudly and proudly. Go ahead and get your hopes up and, yes, maybe you’ll get your hopes dashed. But maybe you won’t and that’s the wonderful thing about sports. You just never know.

The summer of 1969, that’s the summer of my pennant race. It was the summer before I went to high school and the summer that my team, the Chicago Cubs, were finally going to be in the playoffs. By August the Cubs were eight, nine, 10 games ahead of the New York Mets, still the expansion Mets in our minds and finally, wonderfully, magically, the Cubs would be in a World Series.

Every car radio was tuned to WGN all summer. Every time Ron Santo or Billy Williams hit a home run it was as if our town was a grand, operatic chorus and the refrain came from Jack Brickhouse--”Back, back, back . . . HEY HEY”--Brickhouse would bellow and by the end of August everybody was hoarse and everybody was shouting, “Back, back, back . . . HEY HEY.”

Then it turned to September and there weren’t many more home runs and the radios weren’t turned on so much and the Mets passed the Cubs and the autumn was awfully silent.

I couldn’t look at the World Series on TV that year, not even a little. Yet still I’ll never forget the excitement of August, which is so much more memorable than the disappointment of September.

So don’t be afraid to be excited, Orange County. That’s the thing about being a sports fan. You get goose bumps from the thrills. You get headaches from the disappointments. You start over again the next day.

From my mom I had received the gift of loving the written word on a page. From my dad I had received the gift of being a sports fan. The collision of those two loves brought me to unbelievable places.

To being in the stands at the Omni in Atlanta and clutching a scalper’s ticket so that I could watch my alma mater, Marquette, beat North Carolina for its one and only national basketball championship, so that I could cry when Marquette’s coach, my coach, Al McGuire, walked off the floor with time still left in the game because he was crying so hard.

To helping hoist Dan Jansen’s daughter, Jane, over our heads so that Jansen could dance with his baby girl, the one named after his dead sister, after he had finally won the Olympic gold medal in his last race, in his least favorite event, in a world-record time in a skating oval in Norway, where the noisy cheers were warm enough to make ice melt and sportswriters cry.

To watching in wonder as Pete Sampras vomited, served, vomited, hit forehand winner, vomited, wobbled, and still won a tennis match at the U.S. Open.

To Barcelona, where the first U.S. Dream Team improbably captured hearts because of Michael Jordan’s smile and Larry Bird’s courage and Magic Johnson’s grace and Charles Barkley’s goofiness. That’s the thing. You never know when sports will surprise you and that was a surprise, that enjoyment could come from an event where the result was so predetermined. Yes, of course, the Dream Team thundered to a gold medal, but who knew how cool it was to see athletes from other teams ask for Jordan’s autograph or how the president of Lithuania would sob in his country’s locker room after his tiny country beat Russia for the bronze medal?

Having been in Orange County only a couple of weeks, I’m getting a sense of something here. A sense of a charming baseball team that would never understand why two fans wouldn’t buy tickets for a big series in late September because they don’t understand that they aren’t supposed to be winning.

A team where the leading home-run hitter has 24, which is what Mark McGwire had last spring, wasn’t it? And no talk about how McGwire coulda been an Angel because he’s not, but then his team isn’t in a playoff race either. A team that seems to receive a major injury every day before lunch but then goes out and wins after dinner.

It is a team to be embraced totally and cheered unconditionally because it is a team. Nothing but a team. No egos, no stars, no single hero but many different heroes. What a great team to find, hidden away behind the glamour of the home-run hitters and the glitter of the New York Yankees and, yes, behind the nail-biting journey of those Cubs trying to hang on for dear life to a wild-card spot.

I’ve got those baseball goose bumps again. For my Cubs and, day by day, for these Angels and--How crazy is this thought?--Angels vs. Cubs in the World Series.

So I hope that couple bought those Texas tickets. It’s time to get excited. Go ahead, take a chance.