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Baffoe: I Found My Joy During The Cubs' White House Celebration

By Tim Baffoe--

(CBS) I need to get something off of my chest: I've been a liar.

Since the Chicago Cubs won the World Series, I've been pretending to participate in the group celebration of Cubs fans far and wide who are basking in this glory. But it hasn't been totally honest. Every single day since Nov. 2, 2016, I had yet to feel like it actually happened.

Chalk this up to a certain numbness that comes whenever a life-changing event occurs, positive or negative. It may not hit home until weeks, months or even years later.

The Cubs winning it all is certainly life-changing for a lifelong fan. All that emotional baggage of the past and the stereotypes and jokes and being accustomed to being let down -- all gone like an amputation. But I had still been feeling that phantom limb in meantime. I didn't feel different, no matter how often I saw highlights or heard people talking about it or tweeted daily that the Chicago Cubs won the World Series as a figurative pinch to reality.

I was immediately emotional after the final out of Game 7, and there were spasms of teariness during the parade and rally, but mostly because I was crying for other people crying and not organically. I've been worried all along that I wasn't feeling what it looked like so many other Cubs people were. Frightening it was to think that something was psychologically wrong with me (more so than the usual). Why didn't it feel like a team I've loved more than any other in sports had accomplished the impossible?

On Monday, though, the team showed up to the White House to be honored by President Barack Obama in his final week of eight years as Commander in Chief. And I told myself that this was going to be cool and very dad-jokey as typical of this president, but it was more hollow self pep talk desperately trying to feel something, anything that I was supposed to be feeling about the biggest sports achievement of my lifetime.

"They said this day would never come," Obama opened. "Here is something none of my predecessors ever got a chance to say: 'Welcome to the White House, the World Series champion Chicago Cubs.'"

President Obama honors Cubs: 'Special' championship rewarded fans' loyalty

And I laughed, but this laugh wasn't some chuckle at a benign poke at infamous Cubs history. I started to feel something almost immediately when seeing the players stand behind Obama. It was a sudden rush of joy. An overload, a convergence of such happiness and epiphany that this all really is real that the brain's only reflexive understanding is to cry. And to laugh.

"It took you long enough," Obama continued in mock scolding. "I've only got four days left."

The live audience in the East Room roared with laughter, and my giddiness melted into it from my couch at home. The mood of the event went from celebratory to a recognition of finality, but it wasn't sad in any way. This room with these players and coaches and executives next to the executive branch exuded joy that was palpable through my television.

"Even I was not crazy enough (in 2008 when he was first elected president) to suggest that during these eight years we would see the Cubs win the World Series," Obama said, "but I did say that there's never been anything false about hope."

And it was like an entire lifetime of that hope -- that religious watching of awful teams in the 1990s and mowing the lawn with headphones plugged into a Walkman and organizing my baseball card collection during the Brant Brown dropped fly ball and every internal organ exiting down a South Side bar urinal after Game 6 in 2003 -- felt rewarded. What's two more months in more than 30 years of unrequited rooting, huh?

"Yes, we can," someone called out from the gallery.

"Yes, we can," Obama echoed with a smile, an homage to his 2008 presidential campaign slogan during a playoff sweep at the hands of the Los Angeles Dodgers that both now seem like a bygone era in American history. This thing of his was about over, and he seemed at peace with it all, which gave the Cubs honorific an even more relaxed jovial-ness.

Obama's playful White Sox preferential ribbing was a given, but even the world's most famous South Sider couldn't bring himself to try to put his favorite team ahead of the Cubs on Monday.

"FLOTUS is a lifelong Cubs fan," Obama noted. "In the eight years that I've been here ... Michelle has never come to a single event celebrating a champion. Until today. And she came and shook hands and met with every one of these members of the Cubs organization and told a story about what it meant for her to be able to see them win because she remembers coming home from school, and her dad would be watching a Cubs game, and the bond and the family, the meaning the Cubs had for her in terms of connecting with her father and why it meant so much to her."

And there I was, walking home from school a bit more briskly in the spring to catch the second half of a 1:20 p.m. start that would be playing in my house because my dad worked from home. Me giving him live updates even though he could hear the TV plenty well from the next room.

"It's more than just sports," Obama about what this celebration at the White House was for.

It's a shared history of so many people, shared pain, shared subordination of a lifetime. It's the president's staff members who are Cubs fans as he mentioned taking a few more sick days during the playoffs than usual or one being interviewed at a bar near Wrigley when he was probably supposed to be working. It's Obama recognizing Ernie Banks, Ron Santo, Fergie Jenkins, Ryne Sandberg, Andre Dawson, Greg Maddux and Mark Grace and how those who came before the 2016 team are an integral part of what this all means. Even Michelle Obama's love of Jose Cardenal and her trying to wear a cap over her afro a la him.

Theo Epstein -- who at the White House appeared for the first time in his Cubs tenure to be actually nervous speaking about the team -- would later mention: "Jose Cardenal, who got the longest hug from the First Lady we've ever seen. Her favorite player of all time. You're the MVP today."

Bonds formed through blue pinstripes among otherwise contentious people. The Ricketts family, with the exception of Laura, isn't exactly the Obama-voting type, but partisan politics didn't matter to those in the East Room on Monday, except when Obama self-deprecated and joked about Epstein maybe becoming chair of the maligned Democratic National Committee.

"Tom met his wife, Cece, in the bleachers of Wrigley about 30 years ago," Obama quipped of Tom Ricketts, "which is about 30 years longer than most relationships that begin there last."

The president of the United States even said "Shaggin' Wagon" when talking about manager Joe Maddon. I'm asking myself as I watched "Is this really happening?" while knowing it was finally happening.

It was concrete when Obama said of the final out: "(Anthony) Rizzo gets the ball, slips it in his back pocket, which shows excellent situational awareness, and suddenly everything is changed. No more black cats, billy goats, ghosts, flubbed grounders. The Chicago Cubs are the champs."

I'm losing it. I'm having my catharsis finally. No more phantom limb. And then the president shifts tone a bit.

His has been a presidency attached to the murder epidemic in Chicago. Victims become less identified by name than by how many blocks away from the Obama family home in Kenwood their bodies lie. Our city has been a piñata for pundits and out-of-town Facebook philosophers to point to as full of problems that the people on the other ends of those fingers refuse to acknowledge actual solutions to.

"For a moment," said the Chicago president, "our own town becomes the very definition of joy."

It was a shoutout to us, Chicagoans who love Chicago like the president loves Chicago like Kanye loves Kanye. And I was feeling that joy and civic pride. Which, as the White Sox fan mentioned earlier, is more than just about sports. Same, too, that this event was being held on the day we celebrate the life and legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Way bigger stuff than baseball games. And yet the politics of sports were worth mentioning.

Said Obama: "Today is, I think, our last official event at the White House under my presidency, and it also happens to be a day that we celebrate one of the great Americans of all time, Martin Luther King, Jr. ... It is worth remembering, because sometimes people wonder, 'Well, why are ya spending time on sports? There's other stuff going on.' Throughout our history, sports has had this power to bring us together even when the country's divided. Sports has changed attitudes and culture in ways that seem subtle but ultimately made us think differently about ourselves and who we were. It is a game, and it is celebration, but there is a direct line between Jackie Robinson and me standing here. There is a direct line between people loving Ernie Banks and then the city being able to come together and work together in one spirit. I was in my hometown of Chicago on Tuesday for my farewell address, and I said, 'Sometimes it's not enough just to change laws; you got to change hearts.' And sports has a way sometimes of changing hearts in a way that politics or business doesn't. Sometimes it's just a matter of us being able to escape and relax from the difficulties of our days, but sometimes it also speaks to something better in us. And when you see this group of folks of different shades and different backgrounds coming from different communities and neighborhoods all across the country and then playing as one team and playing the right way and celebrating each other and being joyous in that, that tells us a little something about what America is and what America can be. So it is entirely appropriate that we celebrate the Cubs today here in this White House on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday, because it helps direct us in terms of what this country has been and can be in the future."

Joy, unity, a common cause that was literal and figurative, immediate and transcendent. All that and more was recognized Monday.

And it allowed something better in me to finally emerge. Monday afternoon, it finally felt to me like the Chicago Cubs won the World Series.

It was then that I was no longer a liar.

Tim Baffoe is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not CBS Local Chicago or our affiliated television and radio stations.

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