The Original Curse Read Online Free Page B

probable shutting down of the game for 1919), it should be no surprise that this was the year when the baseball-gambling link began to unravel. It was in the 1918 season—not in the fixed 1919 World Series—we can say, for the first time with utter certainty, that there was game fixing in baseball.
    That fixing might have spilled into the World Series. But, before judging the alleged fixers, we should get to know them, to know how the world looked at the time. It’s not hard to muster empathy—those times were similar to our own. There was war abroad and fear at home, a stumbling economy and rampant corruption. There wasn’t Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, but there was Doug Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. In baseball, writers of that time, as in our time, pined for the good old days, when players were not overpaid, when the game wasn’t dependent on specialists and dominated by commercialism, when wealthier teams could not simply buy pennants. And in 1918, baseball was seeing problems crop up from the gambling issue it had ignored and covered up for the previous 15 years or so—the same pattern ofdenial that has defined baseball’s approach to today’s problems with performance-enhancing drugs.
    We can’t prove that the Cubs threw all or even part of the ’18 series, but we can wonder—if they did, would reasonable, moral people have done the same in their situation? If participation in that World Series left both the Red Sox and Cubs franchises with curses to carry into the following century, if the baseball gods can’t find them worthy of forgiveness, at least, maybe, we mortals can.

TWO
Luck: Charley Weeghman
C HICAGO , S UNDAY , D ECEMBER 9, 1917
    It was still dark. Lucky Charley cinched the buttons of his waistcoat. He smoothed the bottom of the waistcoat with both hands, dropped his watch into his pocket, squeezing the fob into the opposite pocket. He slid into his overcoat, pressed his derby over his forehead, and grabbed his kit and bag. He took a deep breath and looked in the mirror. Natty, he thought, smiling. They’d called him a natty dresser as far back as his days at King’s diner down in the Loop, where he was a $10-a-week waiter hustling eggs and doughnuts and mugs of Postum to the midnight crowds, mostly newsmen. But that was 20 years ago. Gray hairs had presented themselves in the interim. Charley patted his waistcoat again. Still thin. Now he was one of the best-known businessmen in the city, owner of a chain of lunchrooms, a movie theater, a billiard parlor. Lucky Charley was a millionaire, president of the Chicago Cubs.
    Millionaire? Charley knew better. He was no millionaire, but the papers liked to speculate that he was, and he’d done little to discourage them. He hadn’t really been a waiter at King’s either—more like a night manager—but Charley had spent enough time around Chicago’s newsmen to know that what they wanted was a good and splashy story, details be damned. So he’d let them believe he was a waiter-turned-millionaire.
    Charley knew how to work newsmen, and he was planning to do it again this week. When he got to New York, he was going to give Chicago a story, a big story. A Cubs story. He’d give them the greatest pitcher and catcher in baseball today. Perhaps, too, the greatest young hitter. Yes, there was a corker of a story in New York.
    Charley stopped in to kiss his daughter, Dorothy, on the forehead before he left. He did not kiss his wife, Bessie. He took the elevator to the lobby of the Edgewater, 1 and when he got there he gave a wink and a thank-you to the deskmen who had, with alacrity, brought him the telegram hurrying him to New York today, Sunday, rather than tomorrow. 2 The boys gave Charley goofy smiles. Charley loved playing the part of baseball magnate. The lobby boys did not care a whit when the well-to-do lumberyard owners and doctors and auto parts suppliers who lived here at the Edgewater Beach Hotel received messages. But when Charley got a