Scott Simon on baseball and the power of art
Baseball’s defending world champions have no greater fan than our Contributor Scott Simon of NPR, author of the new book “My Cubs: A Love Story”:
My Uncle Charlie is at the center of a great American painting. And he hated it.
“The Dugout,” by Norman Rockwell, was the September 4, 1948 cover of the Saturday Evening Post. Charlie Grimm, the old Chicago Cubs manager, who was married to my Auntie Marian, is the forlorn face in the middle of the bench.
Charlie thought that Rockwell had made him look like a basset hound.
Rockwell started sketching during a double-header between the Cubs and the Boston Braves in May 1948. The Cubs lost both games and would finish last in the National League. (They usually did.)
The downcast batboy was a Boston kid who had to be cajoled into wearing a Cubs jersey -- for art’s sake.
The painting plays in our imagination. Who knows what Cubbie clumsiness has made Uncle Charlie and his boys grimace? Even the towels and glove on the dugout wall seem to droop.
“The Dugout” shows the power of art. Rockwell’s painting made the Cubs’ image as loveable losers into an icon. And in the decades that followed, they played like their painting. So when a black cat strolled by the Cubs dugout, or a fan reached for a foul over a Cubs fielder, it looked like whatever farce that made Uncle Charlie wince had come back to life.
It was the Cubs’ image that stuck -- until last year, when they won the World Series for the first time in 108 years.
- From 1989: Bill Geist, long-suffering Cubs fan (“Sunday Morning,” 09/24/89)
- Wrigley Field, the “friendly confines” of baseball’s lovable losers (“Sunday Morning,” 07/06/14)
- Gallery: Curses of the Cubs
- Bob Sirott: Some of us will miss our losing Cubs (“Sunday Morning,” 10/30/16)
- Gallery: World Series 2016: Chicago Cubs’ victory parade
Now I’m overjoyed to see the Cubs win. But I also worry a little if those of us who are fans will be as loyal to a team that doesn’t seem to need our love as much, now that they’re national darlings.
Uncle Charlie, by the way, was actually a dapper guy -- no basset hound! -- who finally made his peace with Rockwell’s painting.
Charlie Grimm didn’t make it to the Hall of Fame; but he knew that Rockwell’s portrait put him into history.
For more info:
- “My Cubs: A Love Story” by Scott Simon (Blue Rider Press); Also available in eBook, Digital Audio Download and Audio CD formats
- scottsimonbooks.com
