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Sleeping with the (baseball) enemy – Chicago Tribune
As a lifelong Los Angeles Dodgers fan, Bob Higgins relished Sunday’s Game 2 victory over the Cubs.
And for the sake of his marriage, he relished Saturday’s Game 1 loss.
“I did text him during the game,” Bob’s wife, Jo Higgins, told me, “saying if he brought home a Los Angeles victory, the locks would be changed.”
The Higgins, who live in Hinsdale, share a deeply rooted love for baseball and a devout allegiance to the Cubs — except when the North Siders face Bob’s beloved Dodgers. On Saturday, Bob watched the game at Wrigley Field with their son (a Cubs fan), while Jo watched from home.
“Separate counties,” Bob joked.
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These are trying times for couples with divided loyalties. The Cubs are on the cusp of heading to the World Series for the first time since 1945. That has an awful lot of people feeling giddy … and a few spouses at odds.
For folks who’ve spent a lifetime rooting against the Cubs, it can be particularly vexing to watch their Cubs-loving spouses revel in the mounting victories.
Maurizio Ursetta is a South Side-born, Bridgeport-dwelling, dyed-in-the-wool White Sox fan. His wife, Deanna, adores her Cubs.
“I just want it to be over with,” Maurizio said. “It’s overtaking the house. It’s, ‘Cubs this’ and ‘Cubs that’ from the moment she makes the coffee in the morning to the moment she goes to bed.”
“Our son just lost his tooth,” Deanna said, “and the tooth fairy brought him a Cubs pennant.”
Naperville’s Kris and Jeff Ploense are in a Cubs/St. Louis Cardinals marriage. Cubs, her. Cards, him.
“He likes to remind me when we’re watching the games, ‘It’s playoff baseball — anything can happen,'” said Kris, an account executive at a collection agency. “I know he does that because the Cardinals have been there so many times, but this is my time. I know all about the Cardinals — the winning, the playoffs …”
“The world championships,” Jeff, a mortgage loan officer, chimed in. “Eleven of them, but who’s counting.”
Bob Higgins, an attorney, is in the enviable position of truly liking the Cubs, even as they head into Tuesday’s Game 3 against his Dodgers.
“I know I’ve got a dog in the fight for the World Series,” he said. “And that feels great.”
Bob has loved the Dodgers since he was 8 years old, when his older brother took him to Milwaukee to watch Dodger Sandy Koufax pitch against the Braves.
“My mother was a widow raising five children, and we had one car,” Bob said. “If you were a 17-year-old boy taking your little brother to a baseball game, you could get the keys to that car.”
Bob and his brother caught every game that Koufax pitched in Chicago and Milwaukee until his brother left for college. Those memories forged a forever bond between the Higgins boys and the Dodgers. (Though Bob says his brother switched his allegiance to the Cubs when he opened a bar near Wrigley.)
Jo Higgins, for her part, is delighted to cheer on the Dodgers … to a point.
“We go to spring training every year, and I’m happy to root for the Dodgers when they’re not playing a Chicago team,” she said. “But I’m a Chicagoan, not an Angelian. When we’re at the ballpark, I order a Chicago dog, not a Dodger dog.”
Manteno couple Donna and Andy Ertel met at a Cubs/Cardinals game in 1989 at Busch Stadium (the old one). She’s a Cardinals fan, and he was rooting for the Cubs, but they still managed to strike up enough of a conversation for sparks to fly.
A few months later, Andy invited Donna and her two sons to Chicago for a Cubs game. They ate at Harry Caray’s restaurant afterward.
“I could remember Harry announcing for the Cardinals when I was a kid, and I had always been a fan,” she said. “Just as we were about to have dessert, one of his entourage asked if the boys would like to met Harry, so we even got to meet him.”
A year later, Andy proposed to Donna at that same Harry Caray’s. All that was enough to convert the boys to temporary Cubs loyalists, but not Donna, who grew up in central Illinois with an entire family of Cardinals fans.
“I’ve been through hell the last 26 years over this baseball team,” said Andy, who works as a pipe fitter. “Her family is the worst. I’m trying to set a good example by not gloating, but they absolutely hate the Cubs. They pray to see the Cubs lose.”
Donna, a recently retired high school teacher, concurs.
“Some of them can be kind of vicious,” she said. “Andy hates to be rude. My dad’s 88, and my mom’s 85, so he just has to sit there and take it, and I can tell that just kills him.”
No one’s sitting there and taking anything in the Ursetta household.
“Tell her about the time you left me at the Sox game,” Deanna Ursetta, a stay-at-home mom, said to her husband.
“Back when our 13-year-old was 5 or 6, we went to a Cubs/Sox series game at Cellular Field, and my wife decided to wear a Cubs hat,” Maurizio Ursetta, a general contractor, began.
“We were in the bleachers,” Deanna added. “I let my son know, ‘I’m going to root for the Sox. We’re going to be a united family.’ But the Cubs were hitting homers left and right, and I’m making friends all around me, cheering, high-fiving everyone.”
It was more than Maurizio wanted to sit through. He and their son walked the five blocks home.
“I don’t think we talked for a week after that,” Deanna said.
Their son is 13 now, and they have 7-year-old twins, a boy and a girl. The oldest is solidly in the Sox camp, but the twins waver between Cubs and Sox.