"Any team can have a bad century"
About this Quote
“Any team can have a bad century” lands like a deadpan curveball: the sports cliché of “bad day” inflated to absurd, almost cosmic scale. Jack Brickhouse, the longtime voice of the Cubs, isn’t just cracking a joke about losing. He’s smuggling in a whole worldview about fandom as endurance sport, where hope isn’t a rational assessment of odds but a habit you practice through humiliation.
The line works because it performs two emotional moves at once. On the surface it’s gallows humor, a broadcaster winking at listeners who already know the pain. Underneath, it’s a protective spell. Stretch the suffering to “a century” and you paradoxically shrink it: if the drought is that monumental, then it’s not your fault for caring, and it’s not even really the team’s fault in any ordinary sense. It becomes weather, fate, tradition. Something you live inside rather than something you fix.
Context matters: Brickhouse spoke for a franchise that turned lovable failure into civic identity long before analytics and “trust the process” gave losing a strategic gloss. This isn’t the polished optimism of a PR department; it’s the working-class candor of a guy narrating summers for people who keep showing up anyway. The subtext is Chicago resilience with a grin: we know it’s ridiculous, we know it’s maddening, and we’re still here. In seven words, Brickhouse turns embarrassment into belonging.
The line works because it performs two emotional moves at once. On the surface it’s gallows humor, a broadcaster winking at listeners who already know the pain. Underneath, it’s a protective spell. Stretch the suffering to “a century” and you paradoxically shrink it: if the drought is that monumental, then it’s not your fault for caring, and it’s not even really the team’s fault in any ordinary sense. It becomes weather, fate, tradition. Something you live inside rather than something you fix.
Context matters: Brickhouse spoke for a franchise that turned lovable failure into civic identity long before analytics and “trust the process” gave losing a strategic gloss. This isn’t the polished optimism of a PR department; it’s the working-class candor of a guy narrating summers for people who keep showing up anyway. The subtext is Chicago resilience with a grin: we know it’s ridiculous, we know it’s maddening, and we’re still here. In seven words, Brickhouse turns embarrassment into belonging.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sports |
|---|
More Quotes by Jack
Add to List
