Mac attack: 'I ain't never been no Cub fan'

October 24, 2005
Minutes before Game 2 of the World Series, and here comes Bernie Mac strolling down the hall behind the skyboxes on the second floor of Sox Park. It was a slow walk, exuding a strong and cool presence.
And he's wearing a White Sox jacket.
"I ain't never been no Cub fan," he said. "They hate us, and we hate them."
We wrote here Sunday that it seemed strange that Mac, of ''The Bernie Mac Show,'' was here as a Sox fan. Celebrities at times pull for whichever team is on national TV. The Sox supposedly turned away John Cusack -- Buck Weaver in "Eight Men Out" -- for having been a Cubs fan
But Mac sang "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" during the seventh-inning stretch at Wrigley Field in Game 6 of the 2003 NL Championship Series. The Bartman game. Minutes later, the Cubs collapsed. And here he was at Sox Park, a Sox supporter?
"The Cubs asked would I do it, would I sing," Mac said. "I said yeah. I'm from Chicago, and we've finally got a winner and I didn't want to not support them."
Instead of singing, "root, root, root for the Cub-bies," he sang "for the champs'' or "champions," depending on whose memory you tap. He got ahead of himself, the theory goes, and cursed the Cubs out of the World Series.
"The Cubs are always blaming somebody," he said. "First, it was the goat. And in 1983 against San Diego, it was what?"
It was Ryne Sandberg spilling Gatorade on Leon Durham's glove, leading to a crucial blunder.
But this was a tell. Mac might really be a Sox fan. The San Diego series was in 1984, not 1983. Every Cubs fan knows that.
Was it Mac's Sox-fan aura that cost the Cubs?
"Maybe," he said. "No, the shortstop [Alex Gonzalez] choked, and their best two pitchers [Mark Prior and Kerry Wood]."
But why did he sing "champs" instead of "Cub-bies?"
"Because they should have been champs," he said.
If they are sticking to loyal Sox-fan celebrities only, then why have they taken Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" as a theme? Journey also has played Wrigley Field.
It's raining, it's pouring ...
When it's raining for hours leading up to the game, there's nothing much going on. Fans are arriving slowly, and the beautiful people don't want to get their hair wet so they don't mill around in public. The teams didn't take batting practice, so no one was on the field. Dozens of writers and TV types huddled in the dugout to blab.
Music review
Going with the music, the word is that Saturday night at The Lodge, a longtime haunt of baseball writers, umpire crew chief Joe West was pushing his CD. He fashions himself a country and western singer. They played the music for quite some time. How was it?
Not bad, one writer said. "But someone said, 'What is this? I want Frank Sinatra.'"
You got Joe West.

Source: http://www.suntimes.com/