CHICAGO CUBS
WHY 2016 MATTERED: WHAT 108 YEARS OF CUBS FANDOM CAN TEACH US ABOUT MEMORY, IDENTITY, AND BRAND
An Independent Culture Study
There's a photograph of my dad walking through a concrete tunnel beneath Wrigley Field.
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My younger brother is holding one of his hands, I'm holding the other.
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We're walking away from the camera, so you can't see any of our faces. There's nothing particularly remarkable happening. No baseball game, no players, no celebration. Just a father walking through a ballpark with his kids.
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But I think that photograph explains the Chicago Cubs better than almost any championship could because before my brother and I were old enough to decide what the Cubs meant to us, they already meant something to him.
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And he was passing it down.
Sports fandom is strange because we often inherit it before we understand it.Â
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A child doesn't need to know a team's history to recognize that something matters. They notice that their dad watches every game. They learn which shirt gets worn on game day. They recognize the ballpark before they understand what happened there.
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They hear the stories.
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Eventually, those things stop belonging exclusively to the generation before them, they become theirs too.
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That's what makes sports brands different from almost anything else we choose to associate ourselves with. Most brands spend enormous amounts of time trying to become part of someone's identity.Â
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Sports teams can become part of it before that person is even old enough to understand what identity means.
YOU LEARN THE FEELING BEFORE YOU LEARN THE HISTORY
108 YEARS IS A LONG TIME TO PASS SOMETHING DOWN
The Cubs didn't win a World Series between 1908 and 2016.Â
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It's an almost absurd amount of time.
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Long enough for generations of people to be born, become Cubs fans, have children, bring those children to Wrigley Field, grow old and pass the team along without ever seeing the story reach its end.
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Over time, losing became more than an outcome. It became part of the mythology.
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There was always next year. There was always another explanation. Another collapse. Another story about what happened the last time they got close.
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Eventually, Cubs fandom wasn't simply about supporting a baseball team that hadn't won. It was about supporting a baseball team because you continued to support it anyway.
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The waiting became part of the identity, and the identity was inherited alongside everything else.
That's the part of the Cubs story I find most interesting.
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The organization didn't create all of the meaning attached to the team. People did.Â
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A grandfather listening to games on the radio.
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A father taking his children to Wrigley.Â
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Families sitting in the same section every summer.
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Someone keeping score beside their mom.
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Someone else learning the names of players because their older brother knew all of them.
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Millions of individual memories accumulated around the same uniform, the same ballpark, and the same unfinished story.
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No single one defines the Cubs, together they all do.
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That's what happens when a sports brand lasts long enough. It stops belonging entirely to the organization whose name is on it, part of it belongs to everyone who has carried it with them.
A BRAND MADE OF OTHER PEOPLE'S MEMORIES
THEN THEY WON
On November 2, 2016, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series.
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On paper, that's the important part. A baseball team won four games before another baseball team did.
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But that doesn't explain what happened afterward.
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People cried. Strangers hugged in the streets. Families called one another. People brought photographs of relatives who hadn't lived long enough to see it to Wrigley Field. Names were written in chalk on the brick walls outside the ballpark.
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People weren't only celebrating for themselves. They were celebrating with - and sometimes for - the people who had given them the Cubs in the first place.
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That's why 2016 mattered.
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The championship didn't belong exclusively to the team that won it. It belonged to generations of people who had participated in the story.
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For 108 years, Cubs fans had passed down an unfinished sentence.
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In 2016, one generation finally got to finish it.
But winning created an interesting problem.
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What happens to a brand whose identity has been shaped by losing when it finally wins?
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The loveable losers weren't losers anymore.
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"Wait until next year" suddenly meant something different. An entire mythology had reached its conclusion, and yet Cubs fandom didn't disappear.
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Because the losing was never actually the strongest part of the brand.
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The relationships were. The history was. Wrigley was. Chicago was. The rituals were. The people were.
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The 108 year drought gave those things a particularly powerful narrative, but it didn't create them. That's an important distinction for anyone responsible for marketing a sports brand. Sometimes the most recognizable part of a brand isn't the thing people are truly attached to.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE STORY CHANGES?
Sports organizations talk constantly about building lifelong fans and I understand why. But I think the most powerful version of lifelong fandom is rarely created by convincing someone that a team deserves their attention.
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It's created when someone they love gives them a reason to care.
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A parent brings a child.
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A grandparent tells a story.
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A friend invites someone to a game.
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One person's relationship with a team becomes the beginning of someone else's.
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Organizations can encourage that. They can create places worthy of those traditions. They can protect the history people care about. They can understand the rituals that belong to their supporters. They can make it easier for one generation to bring the next one along but they can't manufacture what happens between them.
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That's the responsibility and opportunity of marketing a sports brand with history.
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You aren't starting with an empty canvas. You're being trusted with something people have already filled with their lives.
YOU CAN'T MANUFACTURE INHERITANCE
Which brings me back to that photograph.Â
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My dad probably wasn't thinking about brand inheritance when he took his two children through Wrigley Field. He was taking his kids somewhere he loved, that's all.
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But years later, I'm still carrying that afternoon with me. So is my relationship with the Cubs.Â
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And somewhere along the way, something that belonged to him became part of me. That's how these brands survive generations. Not because someone develops the perfect campaign but because someone takes their kid to the ballpark.