By Mike Danahey

I harbor no ill will toward the Cubs and their fans. But you guys get all the publicity. Your team's cute and cuddly and lovable, yet losers. Everyone pays attention to you. And the frat boys fill the bars by your park, which you call quaint, which is just a euphemism for having to piss in a trough owned by a billionaire.

Sorry, but I am a White Sox fan, and there is not a damn thing you or I can to about it.

Though I am pretty sure it's not a genetic condition--like being bald or having a full head of hair, or being straight like George Clooney or gay like Elton John--it's close. No, not close to being Elton John, Cubs' fans. Besides you guys are the ones who idolize a guy with funny glasses.

While not in your blood, maybe the team you root for is imprinted, like what happens to a baby duck that sees some goofy-ass grad student instead of Mama Duck and winds up getting a degree in biology rather than being killed by a hunter in Wisconsin, which would be its true fate.

But fate had me go to my first game at old Comiskey Park; seeing that grass for the first time through the tunnel leading to the seats…it had me hooked. It might be why I live in the suburbs and have a lawn that one day I swear I will cut to have cool geometric patterns in it.

Actually fate had it that my Lithuanian immigrant grandfather took to baseball, courtesy of friendly neighbors who brought him to his first game. Sure, Chicago's the city of neighborhoods, but back then that meant you pretty much stayed among your kind, segregated by parish, ethnicity, race or the side of the city which you called home. In other words, the Cubs might as well have been playing in a different country.

As a very young boy I would sit in the back room of the Tumsis grocery store in Roseland listening to Sox radio broadcasts with Grandpa Joe. I'm no Frank McCourt so there is no photo-like certainty to any of these memories of a not-so-miserable (spoiled, in fact) Irish childhood. But I have been reminded by my mom that Grandpa Joe would get very nervous when the Sox were losing and would actually turn off the radio at such points in the game. He was jinxing them: as if Luis Aparicio was unable to concentrate because he was thinking about some immigrant who escaped the Bolsheviks because his parents were able to send him to the United States and his brother to Argentina.

Me, I knew little of this. I was a fat and happy kid, glad to be eating smoked fish, sweet rolls and sour cream with my grandpa. The hell with the candy store--I had access to the full range of groceries. And, yes, I should weigh 300 pounds by now.

Which reminds: one of my favorite players was Wilbur Wood, the rotund knuckleball pitcher who, of course, went by the nickname of Woody, and who would amble to the mound to the sounds of the theme from the Woody Woodpecker cartoon. Actually, Wood probably wasn't any fatter than I am right now when he was pitching - he just seemed that way - and, like many Americans, wound up chubby.

I was as much a Sox fan for bat day and other freebies as I was of Tommy John and Tommy Agee. And I loved Bobble Head dolls, the old fashioned ones with the round faces, NOT the new kind that are supposed to look like a player but seem like some type of quasi-Satanic ritual item.

I was the little nerd who brought a painting to the park I made on cardboard with Tempura paint of Woody Woodpecker wearing Wilbur Wood's uniform in the hopes of getting on TV or that Wood would notice me. Neither happened--and to this day I am surprised I didn't get teased more as a kid doing stuff like that. I even made a groovy painting of slugger Dick Allen that I have somewhere in my basement to this day, and which I must have worn on earth shoes to create.

It is the only vestige of my support for the Pale Hose, being raised to think that toys were to be played with then discarded, not stored away as investments. Silly parents. They even let me play outside, by myself --a lot.

Thus, without an ancient scorecard to my name I just have my vague memories of when the good guys wore red or royal blue, then, egad, clam-diggers.

The Cubs--they really only entered my consciousness when we moved to the suburbs and got our first color TV. Out there, one of the nuns at school was a Cubs fan, which did make me wary of liking them. You just couldn't enjoy something a nun did. Plus, for some reason I recall she was glad Joe Frazier once beat Muhammad Ali, which is neither here nor there, but raises all sorts of questions about her judgment--and why she was talking to grade school kids about this is beyond me.

Way beyond, being even further south and out of the city, was Wrigley Field. These days I frequent the North Side. I have napped in the bleachers, even taken field trips with busloads of kids to the friendly confines. Still, the Cubs still seem distant to me and my Sox-uality.

Mike Danahey, a writer for the Chicago Sun-Times News Group and Detached Retina, is a Guest Loser. He's working on his first novel, "Landlocked," a comedy about ill-fated love, the Internet, ghosts, autism and all sorts of strange things that happen in Chicago and its ever-expanding suburbs.