We're Going to Win So Much You'll Be So Sick and Tired of Winning

On Frederick Exley's "A Fan's Notes"

There’s a YouTube video I like to watch whenever I need a laugh. The video – simply called “Dallas is Going Down” – achieves in 45 seconds what Waiting For Godot is supposed to do over two and a half hours. It is a perfect encapsulation of human hope in the face of all contrary evidence. 

Jay Johnstone, a host of some obsolete program called “The George Michael Sports Machine,” lunkily introduces the video. “Before the Dallas Cowboys defeated the Buffalo Bills in Super Bowl 27, we talked with a few fans of each of the cities. And that is when we met up with this enthusiastic fellow.” He turns towards the totemic football player statue behind him and deadpans, “Wait’ll you hear what this guy says, pal.” Suddenly we whip cut to Mark Miller¹, only identified as “Buffalo Bills Fan,” who is mid rant, surrounded by fellow fans in, I think, a parking lot. He is white and beefy, with a mustache and early ‘90s haircut that might make purply writers reach for the  words blue-collar. 

 Says Mark: “… goes for the Dallas Cowboys, and we’re the Bills! And I can’t wait to rub this in his face, he’s been telling us this for over ten years about Dallas, now it’s the Bills! [And here he makes a noise at the camera that can only be represented, onomatopoetically, as Huuuuaaaaaaarggghhhhh!!!! Huuuuuaaaaaa!!!!!] Buffalo all the way this time! Three times! The third time is the charm! [A flag briefly hits him in the face, but he is unflappable, and he punctuates his fine words with a pumping fist]. Dallas is going down, Gary! Only Buffalo is going to win! Dallas is going down! [And then he actually makes a noise like someone in the movies falling off a cliff – DAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH – before going for high fives with the people around him].” 

As Mark helpfully notes in the video, it was the Bills’ third straight appearance in the Super Bowl; they had lost the first one on a missed field goal, and the second one they were never particularly close to winning. But Mark, drunk, stupid, or both, knew better before the game. Third time is the charm, and this would finally be the year the Bills took it home. Here is a man bravely? foolishly? looking into a bleak history and unintelligibly screaming back at it. Mark has a kind of hope that is kept out of most other spheres – the political, the cultural, the personal – as unrealistic, steered toward something pragmatic; so this is a hope that is only really publicly expressed through sports.

The Bills went on to lose that game 52-17. As if to highlight the pure absurdity of the video, of a man giving the most doomed pump-up speech of all time, whoever uploaded it doesn’t end it on Mark fading out in a pose of victory, his adoring crowd cheering – they instead leave us with one and a half seconds or so of whatever “The George Michael Sports Machine” went to next, which is grainy video of a guy riding a camel along a racetrack with surfer-vibe guitar music playing over it. Mark’s 10 years of pain at the hands of Gary – and who among us does not have some sort of Gary looming above us, needling us, a constant enemy? – are recontextualized as just another lark. That’s sports, yuk yuk yuk, and now here’s this camel.

But you take Beckett as your voice of existential futility – “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” – and I’ll take Mark, who beats even the master of brevity: “Dallas is going down, Gary!”

I was born 10 days after that 52-17 loss, and the Bills would, in my first year of life, make it to a fourth straight Super Bowl, losing again to the Dallas Cowboys. I was born in Chicago, which, by the theoretically geographical rules of sports, would make me a fan not of the Bills but of the Chicago Bears. But my dad grew up near Buffalo, and was a big enough Bills fan to flatly refuse naming me “Emmitt” or any varietal of that name because 10 days earlier Emmitt Smith had played a key role in the Cowboys beating the Bills 52-17. 

Young boys who think their fathers are invincible, or, at the very least, the best person on planet Earth, will do anything to get closer to them, so I became from a young age a fervent fan of the Bills and Buffalo’s hockey team, the Sabres. Dad had gotten a satellite TV hookup right when the NFL’s “Sunday Ticket” package came out so he could watch the games at home – set up in what was nominally my mom’s office, on the top floor of our house – instead of going to a bar and having to deal with fans of the other team, where one might get caught in an increasingly aggressive clap-off with an asshole in a Miami Dolphins jersey. 

Dad and his hometown friend, Ned, who also lived in Chicago, put up with me - probably around the age of 5 – crawling around and annoying them as they watched the Bills game. I could think of nothing funnier than throwing a blanket over Ned’s head as he watched the game. (Ned put up with that annoyance gently, in a way I now find incredible.) To keep me occupied, Dad would throw a full size football from his perch on the couch across the room – not a very big room – and I would have to use my whole body to catch it. If that failed, I would be instructed to perform any number of good luck rituals for the Bills, like crawling three times backwards around my mom’s office chair, or running all the way to the basement to grab Ned and Dad a beer.

The Bills of the mid to late 90s never made the Super Bowl again, but they were competitive. The earliest clear memory I have of them – I think this is the first, and anyway, this start date makes for a better story – is from early 2000, as the Bills played in the opening weekend of the playoffs against the Tennessee Titans. I was going to a birthday party that day, but was able to watch nearly the entire game before I had to leave the house. The Bills had taken a 16-15 lead with only 16 seconds to go, and then kicked off to the Titans, who pulled off a trick play on the return – something that works maybe 1 in 1,000 times – to win the game as the clock ticked towards 0. As my mom came to collect me to drive to this party, the play was under review, and my dad was sure the play would be overturned and the Bills would win, so I left with the same understanding. It was only later I learned that the Bills had actually lost, that the play that came to be known as “The Music City Miracle” had stood after review. 

It is a clarifying signpost, one that indicates, retrospectively, that I would be a lifelong fan of a team that would not only lose, but lose in the most ingenious and excruciating ways, in ways that often earned capital lettered nicknames. Before my birth, there was the missed-field-goal Super Bowl Loss – or just “Wide Right” – and my memory begins with The Music City Miracle and after that year there was The Drought, where the Bills failed to reach the playoffs for 18 straight seasons, either by being simply awful or falling just short, like in the 2004 season when they couldn’t beat a team of backups to make the playoffs in the last week of the season. 

And that sort of losing extended to my other favorite teams; the Sabres lost the Stanley Cup in 1999 (I remember watching, and falling asleep to, the deciding game) on a controversial foot-in-the-crease call in the third overtime of Game 6, otherwise known as “No Goal,” nearly went bankrupt soon after that, lost (with the best odds) the draft lottery for best-player-since-Gretzky Sidney Crosby, made it within one game of the 2006 Stanley Cup before losing a Game 7 because all their defensemen had been injured in escalatingly more ridiculous ways and, yes, because of another controversial call, this time a puck over the glass penalty, and then fell short of the Stanley Cup again the next season. They haven’t made the playoffs since 2011, and have repeatedly finished dead last in the league after intentionally bottoming out to get the best odds in a lottery they did not win.

Since Buffalo didn’t have a baseball or basketball team, I could root for the Chicago teams – the Bulls and the north-side baseball team, the Cubs. The Michael Jordan led Bulls finished off a run of 6 championships in 8 years during my early years, and I can barely remember watching them at all; their success was more mythic than anything else, something I was told happened more than something I experienced. By the time I was becoming a person, the Bulls had broken up their dynasty and settled into being a highly profitable brand rather than a competitive team, bad but with the weight of recent history on them. Their last brush with success was led by Derrick Rose, a kid from Chicago, the proverbial hometown hero: he took home an MVP trophy in 2012, but the team was defeated by LeBron’s Miami Heat juggernaut in the playoffs. After another stellar season, Rose crumpled after a seemingly routine layup, his ACL torn. He would never again regain his athleticism, and the Bulls never evolved into anything more than a fringe contender.

And the Cubs, the lovable losers themselves, were also a very profitable brand rather than a competitor for much of their history. As I grew up, I fell in love with many Cubs teams who knew exactly how to let me down, as they had done for so many decades – they hadn’t even made the World Series since 1945, and hadn’t won, famously, since 1908, a drought that stretched to 100 years and beyond as I reached my adolescence. In the 2003 NLCS, with only six outs between them and their first World Series in almost 60 years, they blew a 3-0 lead in the eighth inning. The white-hot fury of Cubs fans everywhere was focused on poor Steve Bartman, a fan along the third base line who reached for a foul ball and theoretically prevented the Cubs’ left fielder from catching the ball and getting an out. He was escorted from the stadium by security and had to enter witness protection after receiving scores of death threats. Never mind that the Cubs’ pitcher had been left in too long, their shortstop made a huge error that same inning, or that the Cubs still could’ve won Game 7 the next night – it was all Bartman. Bartman, who did what any fan would do — reached for a souvenir.

Two years later, Chicago’s other team, the White Sox, won the Series easily, and I had to watch as others celebrated the glory I so desired. In 2007 and 2008, the Cubs won their division and looked primed to make a World Series run before ignominiously getting swept in the first round, both times; I remember watching one of those deciding games, in 2008, with a girl who I had a crush on but was too scared to kiss, my personal failures dovetailing with every ineffectual Cubs groundout. After that, the Cubs mostly just sucked, at first expensively and half-competitively and then, after the team was bought by new ownership, they were on-purpose bad, punting away seasons so they could acquire better talent in the draft. 

Whenever I could, I watched these games – any game, really – with my Dad, and when my Dad began traveling more for business, it felt like a special treat to watch. With him, I learned the rules of the game, a number of inventive swear words, how to aggressively clap, and eventually inherited a particular inflection on the phrase “god fucking damnit,” sometimes stressing the second word, sometimes the third. I realized at some point that my mom took my younger sister for long walks during any Bills game because my dad’s yelling shook the house, but that just seemed part and parcel of watching the game. Dad’s mood depended on the games; if, for instance the Bills managed a win, Dad might take me to the park to throw the football – a cherished ritual –  and actually talk during family dinner. When they more frequently lost, the passes Dad threw at the park stung my hands, and he morosely gritted his teeth through dinner. 

But despite the teams I loved being awful, I stuck with them, and with Dad. I was madly in love with sports, with the superhuman athletes who performed athletic marvels with ease, and possessed a reservoir of hope – like Mark Miller, but not as loud – that the next game, the next season, the next year, would be the one. The losses stung, but I grew to think of them as downpayment towards the great psychic salve that winning a championship would bring. All the disappointments, all the times when my teams had made me want to go straight to my room and lay on the floor in pure, numb pain, would make that eventual win – whenever it came – that much sweeter. That far-off promise energized my obsession.

I learned how to read with the sports page, gathering and devouring the Tribune, Sun Times’, and eventually the Times’ sports section each and every day. Besides fantasies of being an athlete myself, there seemed nothing better than being a sports writer. You got paid to go the games! And then paid to write about them, your sage opinion becoming talking points, your knowledge of the game deeply respected. If you were a columnist, your face was in the paper with the players! When I was somewhere in my single digits, age-wise, I tried to synchronize the act of watching and participating in sports. In all caps IMPACT font, I typed out an imagined week of football, making up the scores between the teams, and then I would act them out by myself, at the same time narrating their highlights. My basement became the stadium, and I would toss the ball slightly in front of me, running to catch it before it hit the ground. (My older brother had presumably better things to do, and my sister must’ve been too young to credibly throw a football with.) The Bills won these imagined contests every week, of course, but I kept the others realistic. I was at once the quarterback, the receiver, and the announcer taking it all in, which tempered my athletic hopes with the idea that I could at least be a great observer of the game.  

Athletically I was nothing special, and realized that more and more as I grew older. I want to say it was third grade when I snuck out of my room one night and heard, from downstairs, my dad talking about how bad I was at (flag) football. I wore khakis to the games instead of sweat pants, and ran around disinterestedly; after hearing whatever it was my dad (probably) drunkenly said, I ran around the field in my khakis like a dervish, pulling flags wherever I could, trying, of course, for dad’s approval. That burning motivation made me an inspired flag football defender, but I played the line on offense, which was a nothing position. The teams I played on distressingly followed the script of my favorite pro teams; on my fifth grade flag football team, we even made it to the championship. Down a touchdown late in the game, the coach called a play where the offensive linemen – me! – flared out for a route during the play, and the ball actually, incredibly, came to me. I initially bobbled the ball, fell down, and caught the ball from my back. It was a triumphant moment, my brief summiting of the athletic world, before we eventually lost the game.

In most sports I tried hard but rarely succeeded. Playing baseball, I was terrified that opposing pitchers would hit me, since when I had pitched, I really had no idea where the ball was going to go, so I had no belief that the other kids had any sense, either. I gave up soccer, football, basketball, baseball, tennis, and swimming in middle school before reluctantly rejoining the swim team once high school rolled around. By my senior year of high school, four years into a undistinguished career, I had an existential realization that swim practice involved swimming great distances without actually moving anywhere at all, which frankly terrified me. The only point for most of the swim team was training for the upcoming water polo season, so I joined that team, too. For a small school of 110 or so kids per grade, we were pretty good, but we lost in the sectional finals each year I played to much bigger Catholic-school rivals. Like my flag football days, my shining moment came in defeat; junior year, I scored the tying goal with a minute or so left in the sectional final. We promptly gave up a goal on the next possession to lose, 8-7; the team we lost to made it to the state finals. In the picture my brother took of my goal, I’ve released the ball and my eyes are shut — the telltale sign of a scuffler, chucking and hoping. 

Photo by Harry Mason Dent IV

Twinned with my love of sports was a love of literature, a love that my writer mother fed as fervently as my father stoked my passion for sports, letting me borrow any book I wanted from her vast library. The shelves in Mom’s office seemed to contain the entire canon. I read, and read, and read, at first imagining my future career as a sportswriter, and then just as a writer in general, someone who would write The Great American Novel. I was in high school when she decided I was old enough to read Frederick Exley’s ‘fictional memoir’ A Fan’s Notes, a much loved cult classic first released in 1968. The book, then and now, on a recent re-reading, seems eerily prophetic, a text that lined up my love of sports with my profligate dream of being a famous writer, a text that is at once a comfort and a warning.

50 odd years after its release, A Fan’s Notes is still the best novel ever written about sports.² Most sports novels are bad; writers of fiction have not yet found a way to credibly represent the experience of an athlete, so instead find in a sport only a useful metaphor. Male writers wanting to project toughness love writing about boxers, those avatars of punishment, who can be handily analogized to the artist themselves. And the signifiers of baseball – all its association with a kind of Old Timey Americana – make it a ripe territory for Literary Fiction, a useful shorthand for some national character to be examined, which leads to treacly and maudlin tomes devoted to baseball teams that would never exist in the real world, like, say, Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. 

Exley’s novel, as the title suggests, is focused on the experience of being a fan rather than an athlete; Exley drops the pretense adopted in other sports novels of appreciating an athlete from the perspective of an athlete. No, crucially, Exley is a self-conscious appreciator, his fanhood a condition to be thoroughly explored. Over the course of the story, he comes to the hard-won conclusion that “it was my destiny … to sit in the stands with most men and acclaim others. It was my fate, my destiny, my end, to be a fan.” It is this long acquiescence into the company of “most men” that makes up the trials of the book. A Fan’s Notes is a long chronicle of failure, of Exley’s persistent, and sometimes noble, fuck ups. He is a man born too soon, an artistic type who could’ve thrived in the 70s, but came of age in the 50s, in the staid, still conservative world of commerce. He has a doomed desire for fame, to be known in an America that viciously, and repeatedly, rejects him. 

Exley writes of his father as a local legend in his small hometown of Watertown, NY, a football star in the hazy, pre-professional days of football. While “[o]ther men might inherit from their fathers a head for figures, a gold pocket watch all encrusted with the oxidized green of age, or an eternal astonished expression,” Exley got from his “this need to have my name whispered in reverential tones … I wanted the wealth and the power that fame would bring; and finally, wanted Love – or said that I did, though I know now that what I wanted was the adulation of the crowd, and that love was just a word that crowded so many other, more appropriate words off the tongue.” Having no athletic talent himself – or, at least, never enough to live up to the titanic image of his father – Exley instead imagines himself acquiring this fame by becoming a writer. “Knowing nothing about writing, I had no trouble seeing myself famous. If, according to a reviewer, So-and-So had written a ‘masterpiece,’ I quite facilely imagined myself as So-and-So. ‘Frederick Exley,’ I read over the review, ‘has written a masterpiece’; then I smiled pleasurably as, in the imperative yet chummy style of so many reviewers, half counseling, half admonishing, the astute critic added, ‘you’d better read it.’” I had – and, embarrassingly, still harbor – similar fantasies of fame, of becoming a writer whose books are pressed into friends’ hands and whose name is whispered reverentially. Even as I’ve grown up and learned more of the grim realities of the world of publishing, there is still the small part of me hoping I’ll be the exception. 

Fame never comes to the fictional Exley – and it only briefly came to him in reality, after the release of the book – but he is dogged in his pursuit. Throughout his misadventures – dead end PR jobs, trips in and out of the sanatorium, electroshock and insulin therapy, multi-day alcoholic binges, a romance with an all-American beauty who renders him impotent, and long, dormant periods living on his mother’s couch – he has a constant and unwavering devotion to the New York Giants. He is a maniacal fan, and I read the book nodding agreeably to his paeans to the team, even when they approach the ridiculous, like when he writes about them in the Nabokovian register of Lolita: “The Giants were my delight, my fall, my anodyne, my intellectual stimulation.” Exley sees in their star running back, Frank Gifford, a sort of parallel figure for his own life, as they attended USC at the same time. Gifford represents to Exley a pure “realization of life’s large promises,” someone who had achieved the kind of fame that he desires. And instead of envying Gifford’s success, he clings to it, uses it as proxy:

“It was very simple, really. Where I could not, with syntax, give shape to my fantasies, Gifford could, with his superb timing, his great hands, his uncanny faking, give shape to his. It was something more than this: I cheered for him with such inordinate enthusiasm, my yearning became so involved with this desire to escape life’s bleak anonymity, that after a time he became my alter ego, that part of me which had its being in the competitive world of men; I came, as incredible as it seems to me now, to believe that I was, in some magical way, an actual instrument of his success. Each time I heard the roar of the crowd, it roared in my ears as much for me as him that roar was not only a promise of my fame, it was its unequivocal assurance.”

Exley is the only author I know of to have put into writing that aspect of being a fan, of putting so much of our lives into the actions of others, in fact, to live and die through the exploits of others.  A life is full of ambiguous contests, a continual barreling forward without definite answers; sports, with their clearly defined outcomes, bring a sense of surety, and, occasionally, a victory, as Exley notes:

“Why did football bring me so to life? I can’t say precisely. Part of it was my feeling that football was an island of directness in a world of circumspection. In football a man was asked to do a difficult and brutal job, and he either did it or got out … It smacked of something old, something traditional, something unclouded by legerdemain and subterfuge. It had that kind of power over me, drawing me back with the force of something known, scarcely remembered, elusive as integrity … Whatever it was, I gave myself up to the Giants utterly. The recompense I gained was the feeling of being alive.”

Even as I left home for college, and sports lost the aura of a father-son ritual, I still clung to that “elusive” feeling that watching a game could give me, the direct answers it professed to give. I went to college and studied literature, cultivating myself as a sort of aesthete, but I never lost the near-obsession with my teams. And eventually, I even got to see one win.

As I watched the Cubs win the World Series, on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2016, breaking an unfathomable 108 year drought, I felt at first more relief than joy. I had spent the previous four hours of the game having to fight against the repeated lesson I had learned about sports over my entire life – that they would disappoint you. The Cubs were the best team in the league during that year’s regular season, winning 103 games, but that guaranteed nothing once the playoffs rolled around, and still guaranteed nothing once they made it to the World Series, matching up with the Cleveland Indians³. In fact, the Cubs being that good seemed like the perfect set up to further devastate their fans, because there is a special kind of pain that comes with losing when you are that close to the end. There’s being bad, and then there’s being heartwrenching, to give hope and then snatch it away. 

The Cubs could not just win the World Series simply. They fell behind in the series three games to one, and then battled back to force a deciding game seven. In that game, they took a 6-3 lead into the eighth inning. With two outs, they brought in their seemingly unhittable closer – Aroldis Chapman, who could regularly throw 100 mile per hour plus fastballs – who promptly gave up an RBI double and then – oh god, then – the game-tying home run to Rajai Davis, one of the Indians’ worst hitters. 

It was hard not to feel as if History was closing down all around me, as if the gig was now up, and the Cubs would remain the Cubs – losers. They had their chance, and blew it. But Chapman got the next out, and the teams made it through an (excruciating) scoreless ninth inning before a brief but intense rain storm caused a 17 minute delay. Impartial observers could revel in the novelty, the drama, of the game entering extra innings with such a pause. For me, sitting on my couch in New Orleans, I could only feel a deepening and overwhelming dread physically inhabit me. It’s what I imagine being walked to a guillotine was like, or maybe the eternity that Dostoevsky experienced as he faced the firing squad. 

And yet, the Cubs came out of the delay, went up to bat, and… actually won. With everything turned against them, with absolutely none of the momentum, they scored twice in the top of the tenth. The Indians scratched back a run in the bottom half of the inning, but went down to their last out, and up came truly their worst hitter. The Cubs pitcher, a lanky left hander acquired midseason, threw a curveball that elicited a weak grounder towards third base – a likely out, but not an easy out, by any means. Kris Bryant, the NL MVP that year, charged towards the ball, picked it up, turned towards first to throw … and his feet began to slip. No, no, no, no – I think these were the slowest seconds of my life. The ball arced across the field, rising, rising — but Anthony Rizzo was tall enough, reached up and snatched the ball away from its fluttering ascent, from yet another Cubs collapse. He brought it down, made sure his foot was on the bag, and then even put that ball – that ball that was seemingly sailing towards infamy – and put it in his back pocket as he ran to celebrate with his team. 

What a stunning shift, to see a championship. I could only sit back and breathe for the first time in hours, like so much weight had been lifted from me. I was hugging my then-girlfriend and texting my friends from back home and calling my Dad but most of all just repeating to myself “they actually did it,” the mantra, it seemed, for some new avenue in my life. It had finally happened.

The next couple of days were airy. A big dumb smile was stuck on my face as I adjusted to what felt like a different reality. I wore Cubs t-shirts (now the one that grimly said Always at the Top … Or Near It was suddenly triumphant) and nearly strut down the street. A day or two later, I took a walk to the grocery store, midday, breaking up some time spent ‘writing’ and watching, again, highlights of the victory, or videos from the bacchanalian victory parade. As I walked toward the checkout aisle, an older man, noticing my shirt, stopped me to talk about the Cubs. As the conversation went on, and we exchanged pleasantries about the win and the city of Chicago itself, it became clearer and clearer that he was a classic New Orleans drunk, hanging out in a grocery store till he could scrounge enough money to buy another beer, and that this was a conversation to bail on. He was wearing an Alabama hat and shirt; Alabama was about to play LSU that weekend, which was always a huge deal in Louisiana. He was a man in enemy territory, and as I made my move towards the cashiers, he asked me if I had a favorite college football team. No, I didn’t, really – Chicago doesn’t have a local team, and I went to university in Canada. He pointed at the script A on his hat, and said, “You’ve got to get with Alabama now. You know, now, you’re a winner.” 

I scurried off to pay for my groceries; I didn’t have the hear to tell him that rooting for Alabama, to me, was like rooting for Darth Vader. Alabama, who had come to dominate college football over the past decade with a regime of pure efficiency, who seemed to take pleasure in removing joy from the truly wild world of college football. Alabama football wins by attrition, actuarily. I had never rooted for a team like Alabama, and in fact I felt morally disgusted by it. What kind of person would approach a season, a game, with entitlement, with expectations? And suddenly, because the Cubs had won, I was in league with them? 

Alabama beat LSU, 10-0, on Saturday the 5th; that night, a couple Cubs players took a victory lap on Saturday Night Live. And on Tuesday, the 8th, I watched as Donald Trump was elected president. Less than a week later, the universe had had its revenge on me. The dread of the World Series rain-delay paled in comparison; here was a deep and settling despair as I watched my country confirm every bad thought I had ever had about it, as I watched it commit itself to at least four years of rank stupidity, of heartlessness and cruelty, of pure reactionary conservatism. The most vile people I had ever seen had won, too. 

Winning was ruined for me within a week. In fact, I began to think of winning as at the root of so many ills. Donald Trump’s entire campaign seemed to be based on his self-burnished image as a winner, as a success, and his attendant group of supporters could always point to the fact that he was a rich man. He was famous in a way that Exley once wrote of Gifford: “he became unavoidable.” Anyone could say the racist things that millions of Americans wanted to hear, but he had the platform, the level of respect that America will give to any seemingly famous or successful person, to propel him. Donald Trump looked like a winner to enough people, and enough people wanted that kind of winner to be in power. Nothing else mattered – not his behavior, not his, when comprehensible, abhorrent policy, because success is elevated to such a pedestal to erase any concern about how they got there, or what, exactly, was won. In the immediate aftermath of his election, as protests broke out across the country, Trump could always pull out the electoral map and, with that ludicrous grin of his, remind us all that he had won. Get over it. It was the sort of obdurate result Exley wrote about, sickening in its clarity. At a campaign rally, he had promised that people were going to get sick and tired of winning; that comment could elicit a laugh with each ever more stupid and craven controversy of his presidency, but it has also eerily rang true on a personal level. 

The Cubs had gotten to where they were with hard work, sure, and with some inspiring players, but also through some less-than-perfect means. The team had been bought by the Ricketts family, life long Cubs fans who also happened to donate much of their money to abhorrent political causes. The team had tanked a couple of seasons, purposefully putting out dreadful teams to paying customers day after day, to get most of their good players – Kris Bryant included. They had kept Bryant in the minor leagues for an extra couple of weeks so they could get another year of his labor for less than market value. They coldly fired their manager – who was doing pretty well, all things considered, and had shepherded them through the tank years ably – when a better one became available. The team had traded, midseason, for Aroldis Chapman, who had spent the first twenty-five games of the season suspended by the league after threatening his girlfriend with a loaded pistol. These were all things I was aware of, and had accepted as the price one has to pay; no sports team could ever be pure, and, again, the winning would make up for it. But I had finally seen a win, and these facts only screamed out louder at me.

The lingering thought in the back of my head, in the days after the election, was how could you have been so stupid? The signs and signals, with hindsight, were all there for a Trump win, but I had been following the comfortable narrative, the one, ridiculously, where the Cubs won the World Series, the people would elect not-Donald Trump, and things would be OK, if not actually good. I was reminded of Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities, which focuses on a group of Austro-Hungarians before World War I literally trying to find a national identity to celebrate. The characters are engaged in long, deeply thought out, but ultimately intractable conversations about what a nation ought to be in the void of the early 20th century; but this is a nation that would cease to exist after the war, Austro-Hungary being the shining example of pre-war territorial overreach and absurd nation building. Musil was writing the novel after World War I, so there is this grim irony throughout; the characters are in the midst of a great History but unaware of all that is happening around them, or interpreting it in the wrong (with hindsight) way. Sometimes Musil lays it on so thick that you half expect the book to have, in huge type, MODERNITY and THE COMING CATASTROPHE literally looming over the proceedings, but instead it is just the subtext running throughout the massive, unfinished text.

But what Musil’s text speaks to is the unintelligibility of the present moment; everyone, from the smartest person to your average Joe, thinks they know how exactly the world is going, and we are consistently made foolish. The arc of History can only be seen from far off vantages of time and space; but to live within it is to be consistently confused. 

Winners, in sports and elsewhere, enter the record book in pen; they are written into History. And for so long, I desired to latch onto a winning team, one that would stake its claim in time. I would not trade what the Cubs did in 2016 for much – I still get a tingling feeling of warmth when I watch clips from that season. But I think now I have reached a wary alliance with losing. It has come to seem a constant companion, an old family friend that you love for all their faults. Nobody ever likes losing, but, at the same time, contra to what Vince Lombardi said, winning isn’t everything, either. The teams I think I love best are the ones that seem destined to be marginalia, the teams that make runs to the end only to be valiantly crushed by some juggernaut, by the dynasties that will be remembered. Only one team wins a championship, per year; but there are beacons elsewhere, meaning to be extracted from nominal failure. To remember The Other Team is to hold onto something ephemeral, something with potential, that continually generates hope even in despair, even as the cultural memory is taken over by winners, winners all over. 

Exley’s novel ends with him as comfortable as he’ll ever be, settled into a better than nothing teaching job in his hometown, and he is finally groping towards some stability. He has taken to running on the side of the highway for exercise, and is mistaken for a peacenik Vietnam protestor by passing cars, whose drivers roll down their windows and jeer at him as they pass. He describes a recurring dream he has about these runs, where a car pulls up in front of him and out hop a gang of American youths, waiting for him. “They are precisely like one another: all are six feet, two; all have fine, golden complexions … all are dressed in button-down shirts topped by V-necked cashmere sweaters, below which they sport iridescent Bermudas displaying youthful, well-made legs. Looking at them, I see they are the generation to whom President Johnson has promised his Great Society.” They are precisely an image of American winners, the type of people that Exley will never relate to. In his dream, Exley does not run away from these threatening avatars of his failures – he instead runs at them, and fights them. He holds his own in the dream fight until he is “suddenly engulfed by the new, this incomprehensible America.” But try as he might, he cannot change his actions in the dream, he cannot “find the strength to turn and walk on about my business,” he is instead “ready to do battle … obsessively, running” into his downfall. 

To me, this is the clarion call for triumphant losers all over, to head over and over again into certain failure. Exley’s failures eventually led to a great book, a place on the edges of literary history. And so I still write, with diminishing expectations of fame in a country that seems to be becoming proudly illiterate, and still follow my teams, with, I think, a greater appreciation now that the great lie of winning has been dispelled. I can focus instead on the experience of being a fan, those brief moments when I can see that, as Exley says, I am “viewing something truly fine, something that only comes with years of toil, something very like art.” 

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1. Mark Miller got on Twitter and revealed himself to be something of a crank, but we’ll ignore that.

2. Though we might give second place to DeLillo’s panoptic opening chapter of Underworld.

3. Now Guardians, thankfully.