Revival of anthem gets fans through times like Game 2

Thursday night's laboriously long, agonizingly frustrating Cubs' 8-4 playoff loss to the Diamondbacks in Arizona didn't end until the fat lady sang early Friday morning.

Cubs fans are hoping Saturday's home game at Wrigley Field ends with the musical chores handled instead by Steve Goodman. The late Chicago folksinger's "Go, Cubs, Go" song written for that magical 1984 season has been reborn this summer as the Cubs' feel-good anthem. After every home win, 40,000 crazed fans rise to sing the refrain to the heavens.

"Goodman clearly would love all this," says Clay Eals, author of "Steve Goodman: Facing the Music," the definitive biography of Goodman. "But the basis for his love would be the good fortune for the Cubs."

A lifelong, avid Cubs fan, Goodman has gotten so much long-overdue attention this year that Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn has proclaimed today "Steve Goodman Day" in Illinois. In a 1:30 p.m. ceremony on the 15th-floor Blue Room in the James R. Thompson Center in Chicago, Quinn will pay tribute to the 36-year-old folk singer who died on Sept. 20, 1984, just four days before that year's Cubs team clinched the Eastern Division championship. Joining Quinn will be Eals; Goodman's mother, Minnette Goodman; and Goodman's close friend and WGN broadcaster Roy Leonard.

"There are tears in my eyes when they sing," Cubs skipper Lou Piniella said during the Cubs' late-season spark to win the division.

"That song gets more and more beautiful each time I hear it," Cubs legend Billy Williams said after fans at Monday's pre-playoff rally in Chicago busted out an impromptu singalong of the tune.

"Go, Cubs, Go" may have eclipsed the classic "City of New Orleans" as Goodman's most well-known (and best-selling) song. But it's not even his best song about the Cubs.

" 'Go, Cubs, Go' is a straight-ahead theme song for the team that he loved," Eals, 56, said Thursday night by phone while the Cubs were losing. "I never hear that song without thinking about 'A Dying Cub Fan's Last Request.' 'Go, Cubs, Go' would not exist without 'A Dying Cub Fan's Last Request.' "

Goodman, who fought leukemia for 16 years, said the clever, funny and biting "A Dying Cub Fan's Last Request" came to him in a dream. The song, which described an old fan's vision of a perfect cremation and funeral at Wrigley Field, captured the mood of legions of Cubs fans who love their team with all their broken hearts. He finished it on March 14, 1981, and performed in that night in a show at Chicago's Park West, Eals said. Two days later, Goodman performed it on WGN radio's "Roy Leonard Show," and fans loved it. But Cubs General Manager Dallas Green wouldn't let him perform it before a crowd at Wrigley, citing the "negativity" in lines such as Goodman's assessment of the Cubs as the "doormat of the National League," Eals writes.

Goodman wrote "Go, Cubs, Go" after WGN program director Dan Fabian commissioned a new Cubs theme song.

That song's new life this year may help fans discover Goodman's other songs. Fans quoted in Eals' book include Arlo Guthrie, Emmylou Harris, Jimmy Buffet, John Prine, Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Paul Anka, Carly Simon, Rosanne Cash, Steve Martin, Martin Mull, Studs Terkel and Goodman's old classmate at Maine East High School, Hillary Clinton. Even ex-Cub Keith Moreland, immortalized in "A Dying Cub Fan's Last Request" for dropping "a routine fly," said he was honored to be in Goodman's song, and he sang backup vocals with other players in a 1984 recording.

A canister of Goodman's ashes did surreptitiously get sprinkled in the outfield of Wrigley Field, but it didn't provide enough good luck to get the team to the World Series.

"If you grew up in Chicago, you knew everything there was to know about pain by the time you were 10 years old," Goodman told a crowd during one of his last concerts, Eals writes. "That's why there aren't so many psychiatrists in Chicago, because we have the Cubs. If you can learn to forgive your parents and the Cubs, you can save yourself $25,000."

As much as he rooted for the Cubs to win it all (one handwritten verse of "Go, Cubs, Go" actually did have them going "all the way," Eals says), maybe Goodman understood that it wasn't meant to be.

"They're liable to screw it up and win it, just to fix it so I can't sing this song," Goodman once quipped.

If the Cubs do rally from an 0-2 deficit in this best-of-five series and do make it to the World Series this year, that song will need updating.