Meet Dave, enemy of Cubs fans everywhere.
Dave comes from church-going stock in Peoria. Dave went to Iowa because his dad and brothers did. Dave came to Chicago to show his family he could make it big in the big city.
He’s 28, single, making $38,500 a year repping for a cell-phone company. He lives with his buddy Ted in a Wrigleyville apartment and takes the “L” to work. He has no tattoos or facial hair. If you saw him in his coat and tie, you’d hardly imagine him a menace to society.
But after dark Dave can be an unholy terror inside the Friendly Confines. Drunken Daves are the reason I would like to see the lights permanently turned off at Wrigley Field. No more night games. No more invitations to barfulls of Daves to get wasted after work, stumble across Clark or Addison and try to impress their buddies and dates by provoking John Rocker into a fight.
If the Cubs won’t provide uniformed police for night games–they would mar Wrigley’s charm for some–I’d at least like to see the maximum 18 night games a season cut in half. By day Wrigley can be the most peaceful place in sports. By night its proprietors are victims of a unique eat-drink-and-chase-Mary neighborhood and the Harry Caray Memorial tradition of bar-hopping.
More Top Picks Best Mobo Triton Tricycle Alternatives For Adults
Like his hero Harry, Dave wants to be “a Cub fan and a Bud man.” Between his apartment and Wrigley, Dave walks past 31 drinking establishments. He makes frequent stops. When Dave attends the odd afternoon game, he bar-hops only on his way home. But before night games . . .
“We have seen an increase in the number of male fans 25 to 32,” said Mark McGuire, the Cubs’ VP of business operations. “This can be a date crowd. And they are prone to drink before coming to [night] games.”
McGuire said “several” Dave-types were judged to be intoxicated during the first inning of Tuesday night’s game. They were removed from the park, McGuire said, by a beefed-up security force that included about 50 new members, including two units of off-duty policemen in plain clothes.
That’s the best news yet. The most irrelevant news is that Cubs are restricting late-inning beer sales by vendors. That’s like bringing Kerry Wood in to pitch the eighth and ninth trailing 14-2. What’s one more sheet to the wind? Only restricting pre-game sales at hotspots like the Cubby Bear and Murphy’s could cure what ales night games.
Obviously that won’t happen. Neither will breathalyzer tests at the gate. So why not cut back after-dark starts? Wrigley hasn’t changed much, but the original 8-8-88 reasons for adding lights have.
Now that Wrigley has gone from nearly extinct dinosaur to tourist shrine, the Cubs don’t draw any better by night than day. WGN-TV, once “America’s best sports network,” now finds that “Buffy, the Cubs-slayer” and other WB programming draw bigger prime-time audiences than baseball. Does anyone besides Ernie Banks still believe the ’69 Cubs wilted because they played too many afternoon games in the dog-days heat? Now we’re sure the lights work for the next playoff game.
Sure, an occasional night game might be required following a road night game. But generally the only fans who would miss night games are those who look forward to watching them on TV after work or school.
Baseball-cherishing season-ticket holders whose sections are invaded by roving bands of party animals wouldn’t miss them at all.
Dave doesn’t care that much about the game. He prefers bragging to women that he “can’t remember much about last night” because he was so polluted. Some guys mellow out after four or five beers. Dave gets loud, profane and fearless. A Dave-type power-snatched catcher Chad Kreuter’s cap, igniting the brawl with the Dodgers.
That made him a hero with his buddies at the Cubby Bear, but only for a day or two. Dave remains lost in the boozy fog between frat house and adulthood. Wasting away in Wrigleyville.
His job is starting to bore him. His parents are pressuring him to find the right woman and settle down. For now Dave lives for place-to-be night games when he can change into his prized Iowa ballcap, T-shirt and shorts, use his boss’s tickets, smoke and drink until 4 a.m. and still make it to work despite his badge-of-honor hangover.
By day Dave is as tame as a 1:20 p.m. start at Wrigley. By night he and his kind are a threat to ruin a beautiful thing.