Sam Adams: The Man Who Cried Woo

I was walking down Clark Street, a half block north of Addison, the bright sunny day instinctively prompting my horrible, winter-hangover habit of yearning for the coming baseball season even though I know it means I will spend another 162 days (165, if lucky) following a bunch of overpaid bums I mindlessly worship….

When who should I run into but Ronnie Woo Woo.

It’s mid-February. Thirty-eight degrees. The Cubs haven’t even played a single spring training game yet. But to Ronnie, you’d think we were in the heart of the pennant race.

He’s decked out in his trademark full regalia: Cubs home jersey (“Woo Woo” on the back), matching white pinstripe pants, blue-fitted Cub hat and white sneakers.  There’s something troublesome about this scene, but I don’t linger on it.

Instead, I return to the burning question I’ve been asking each winter since I was five:

“Yo, Ronnie — how are the Cubs gonna do this year?”

“World Series,” he says, as he cordially extends a firm handshake.

“What’s that?” I ask, not so much out of surprise (because, hey, it’s so damned pleasantly sunny that maybe Next Year has finally arrived) but because a guy whose primary vocabulary consists of the word “Woo” isn’t always the easiest to understand.

“World Series,” he says. “Back to back….”

Now that’s a hopeful prognosis if ever I’ve heard one. Perhaps the perpetual mascot has had a few too many Cubweisers – he is after all walking out of a bar at two-thirty in the afternoon. But, no, he’s sober – or at least as sober as a rabid Cub fan can be. Maybe Ronnie has a purer, more persistent strain of the virus that seeps into our Cubbie-blue blood streams causing us to have fantastical dreams around this time of year.

Immediately, I text Arturo, my longtime die-hard Cub comrade.

“Just bumped into Woo Woo,” I wrote. “He predicts back to back World Series – my nipples are hard!”

Immediately, Arturo – who clearly has nothing better to do because he’s as unemployed as I am — responds:

“He’ll die before that win and that might be one of the saddest things I have ever thought of. What kind of life is this for us?”

Good question. But today I have no answers. Even if Ronnie’s World Series prophecy is as hopeless as Benny Jay’s ability to handle a computer, I choose to believe it. After all, Opening Day is only thirty-five days away.

See you in the bleachers, Ronnie….

by Sam Adams