Can Northwestern follow the lead of the curse-breaking Cubs?
EVANSTON, Ill. — It was an offhand comment, the type any diehard fan might casually let slip — before worrying, instantly, that he might have just jinxed something.
Chicago had just disposed of the San Francisco Giants to advance to the National League Championship Series when Northwestern coach and avid Cubs fan Chris Collins made a bold prediction. We were sitting side-by-side at a table during Big Ten media day, killing time and joking about how he’d given Michigan coach and avid Cardinals fan John Beilein a hard time about his team a few minutes earlier.
Collins turned to me and said this would be the year his Cubs won the World Series — and it would be the (academic) year Northwestern would make its first-ever NCAA tournament. He looked at my notepad and told me to write it down.
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I laughed.
“You know, however the Cubs manage to blow this one is going to hurt worse than all the ones before,” I told him, “because they’re clearly the best team in baseball.” The Northwestern piece of the puzzle seemed so far out of the picture I didn’t even address it.
Yet here we are, nearly six months later, and the Cubs have had their big parade to celebrate the breaking of their 108-year curse. And Northwestern is on the precipice of its first-ever NCAA tournament.
And it’s gotten me thinking — what those Cubs might have to do with these Wildcats, and what that synergy might mean for those Chicagoans doubly cursed as both Cubs fans and Northwestern alums.
“I haven't had as much stress in a year in my life,” said Michael Wilbon, co-host of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption and a 1980 graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern. “To go from the Cubs — the stress of that started in spring training because, coming off the previous year, so many of us thought OK, this might be our year. So, I had that stress starting in March.
“And now, here I am, it's a year later (with Northwestern). I'm too old to have this kind of stress. And people will ask you every day. Tony (Kornheiser) asks me, ‘What's more stressful?’ You know, I don't know. I mean, they're both forever. They're both 108 years on the one and never on the other.
“So many people who have that in common, that daily double of the Cubs and Northwestern — and Chris, the coach is one of them. … We’ve had a stressful year. I just want to get in the tournament and get out of this cycle of being freaked out.”
Collins, for his part, hopes to use the Cubs — and the freed-up way they played, despite the burden of 108 years of history — to motivate his Wildcats, who are 20-8 (9-6 Big Ten) and projected to land a No. 9 seed in the NCAA tournament come Selection Sunday.
“I know it's been played out, but we just saw it with what the Cubs went through here,” Collins said. “They had a bunch of young guys. They didn't need to be thinking about a hundred-year jinx and all that. Just play in the moment and enjoy it. We've talked about that, not recently, but during their run, I used them as an example: Look at the joy they're playing with; they're not playing with tension. They're not playing with stress. Because the moment we start doing that, it's gonna go south.”
So far, that strategy has paid off. Collins has used little goals, stacked on top of each other, to motivate his players to play well. And, one by one, the bigger pieces of history began falling. The first win in Columbus since 1977: Check. The first win over a top-10 team since 2010 (Wisconsin): Check.
Still, no matter how many milestones are reached en route to the ultimate bucket-list item — that elusive NCAA tournament bid — Northwestern fans accustomed to disaster will be expecting, well, just that.
“I read the other day one of the players saying they were particularly inspired by the Cubs and that it was like, ‘Oh, why not us?’ mentality and, ‘The Cubs did it, so we can do it,’ ” said Rachel Nichols, a 1995 Medill grad and host of ESPN’s The Jump. “I understand that that's sort of the attitude you might take. The pessimist side of me would say, 'Hey, the Cubs used up all of the luck the entire area of Chicago would ever have for the next century and Northwestern's in trouble,’ but I like the team’s approach better. It's more positive, and I think we're gonna go with their approach to it — and not the scared, pessimistic approach.”
CHICAGO CUBS WORLD SERIES CELEBRATION
