Case Study 35.1: The 2016 Chicago Cubs World Series — 108 Years, the Curse, and the Meaning of Athletic Victory

Background

On November 2, 2016, the Chicago Cubs defeated the Cleveland Indians in Game 7 of the World Series, 8-7, in ten innings. It was the Cubs' first World Series championship since 1908 — 108 years. The gap between championships is the longest in the history of major American professional team sports.

For 108 years, Cubs fans had not simply been disappointed; they had developed an entire culture of failure. The "Curse of the Billy Goat" — a supposed hex placed on the Cubs by a tavern owner whose goat was ejected from Wrigley Field during the 1945 World Series — became an explanatory myth that Cubs fans used to narrativize their sustained losing. By 2016, multiple generations of Cubs fans had been born, lived, and died without seeing a championship. Grandparents told grandchildren about 1945. Parents told children they might never see a championship. The Cubs' identity was inseparable from their losing.

The Community of Sustained Failure

The 108-year drought produced specific features of Cubs fan community that illuminate the multigenerational and identity dimensions of sports fandom discussed in the chapter.

Narrative capital of suffering: Cubs fans had developed subcultural capital around having suffered longest and most faithfully. "I'm a Cubs fan" communicated a specific form of identity — the identity of someone who loves despite the absence of reward, who remains loyal through sustained, nearly absurd losing. This was a form of anti-CORFing taken to its logical extreme: loyalty not just through one losing season but through a lifetime.

Wrigley Field as memory site: Wrigley Field, the Cubs' historic stadium in the Wrigleyville neighborhood of Chicago, is one of the oldest stadiums in American professional sports. For Cubs fans, Wrigley is a memory landscape of accumulated visits across generations. Families who attended Cubs games at Wrigley for three or four generations carried the stadium as a site of family identity, even as it hosted primarily losing teams.

The curse as community narrative: The Curse of the Billy Goat is an explicitly supernatural explanation for losing — and Cubs fan culture embraced it with a mixture of irony and genuine belief. The curse served community functions: it explained losing without attributing blame to specific players or management decisions, it gave losing a narrative shape (cursed, not simply bad), and it created a shared mythology that was itself a form of cultural production. Cubs fans' curse narrative is a paradigm case of fan communities creating meaning from the absence of their primary reward (winning).

Generational transmission of grief: The multigenerational transmission of Cubs fandom meant that grandchildren inherited not just team loyalty but a specific emotional orientation: expectation of loss, management of hope, and the specific mix of love and resignation that characterized Cubs fan culture. A child raised in a Cubs household was socialized into a community of managed disappointment.

The Championship and Its Emotional Aftermath

The 2016 World Series championship produced an emotional response from Cubs fans that was qualitatively different from the celebration following most sports championships. The response was not simply joy; it was relief, grief release, and a specific form of temporal reconciliation.

The relief of release: For fans who had carried the Cubs' losing as a chronic grief — a permanent disappointment that formed part of their identity — the championship was not simply a happy event but a release from decades of accumulated tension. Multiple fans described the moment of the final out as producing not exhilaration but something closer to collapse — the letting go of something held for so long that its release was physically overwhelming.

Grief for those who didn't see it: A consistent element of Cubs fan celebration was grief for community members — grandparents, parents, friends — who had died before the championship. Social media was flooded with tributes to deceased loved ones who had never seen the Cubs win. The championship was experienced not just in the present but as a temporal reconciliation of the fan community's entire multigenerational history. Fan Twitter posts included photos of cemetery visits — fans going to tell deceased relatives about the win.

Identity disruption: The Cubs' championship disrupted a specific fan identity that had been organized around loving despite losing. "Cubs fan" had meant, for 108 years, something specific about what you loved and why. Now that the Cubs had won, what did Cubs fandom mean? Some fans reported a period of genuine identity confusion — not unhappiness, but disorientation. The identity had been so thoroughly organized around the absence of a championship that the championship itself required an identity reorganization.

Analytical Implications

On multigenerational fandom: The Cubs case is the paradigm example of multigenerational sports fan identity formation. The transmission of Cubs loyalty across four generations produced a fan community in which shared suffering was literally inherited — where grandchildren grieved losses they didn't experience because their identity was formed through the family's experience of loss. This is fandom as a multigenerational community practice in its most fully developed form.

On the curse as fan creativity: The Curse of the Billy Goat is a piece of fan-produced narrative content — an explanatory mythology that the fan community created, sustained, and modified across decades. It is a form of what Chapter 17 calls "transformative fan work": the fan community transformed the raw material of their experience (losing) into a creative cultural product (the curse narrative) that gave the experience meaning and structure. Fan creativity does not always involve producing stories about the fan object; sometimes it involves producing stories about fandom itself.

On the phenomenology of sports victory: The Cubs championship demonstrates that sports fan communities organize themselves around the possibility of victory in ways that fundamentally structure the fan experience even during years of defeat. The championship is always the implicit horizon — even when it seems impossibly distant — and the accumulated weight of that deferred expectation is what makes the eventual victory so overwhelming. This temporal dimension of sports fandom (the season, the year, the decades of possibility) has no close parallel in most media fandom.

On BIRGing after century-scale losing: The national BIRGing response to the Cubs championship — non-Cubs fans claiming some connection to the victory, journalists writing about "America's team," casual fans presenting themselves as longtime followers — illustrates BIRGing at a culturally specific scale. The magnitude of the story made BIRGing behavior nationally visible in a way that smaller championships do not produce.

Discussion Questions

1. The Cubs fan community developed "narrative capital" around suffering — a form of subcultural capital organized around loyalty through failure. Does this suggest that fan communities can develop coherent identities and meaningful cultural practices around any object, including a losing team? What does this imply about the relationship between fan community vitality and the fan object's success?

2. The sense that the 2016 championship was felt by fans for deceased loved ones who never saw it — the temporal reconciliation across generations — is a distinctive feature of multigenerational sports fandom. Can you think of any equivalent in media fandom, where a community holds a deferred expectation across decades? What does the absence (or presence) of equivalent cases suggest about the difference between sports and media fandom?

3. The chapter argues that the Cubs championship produced identity disruption alongside joy — that fans had to reorganize identities built around losing. Is this a version of what Chapter 8 calls "fan identity crisis"? How does the structural cause of the crisis here (the fan object succeeding where it had always failed) differ from the more typical fan identity crisis causes examined in that chapter?

4. The Curse of the Billy Goat is a supernatural explanatory myth created and maintained by the fan community. It serves the community despite being (presumably) false. What does this suggest about the relationship between fan community narratives and truth? Are there equivalent "founding myths" in media fan communities?