Silly Saturday: Ending a 50 year Marriage to Sports

[Mike Bryskier is, like me, another guy trying to make the best of getting older. He’s doing a pretty good job of it, I’d say. You can subscribe to him for free on Substack. SB SM]

I Ended My 50-Year Marriage to Sports

Part one: I thought we were in this together

Mike Bryskier

Aug 22, 2026

https://mikebryskier.substack.com

Sports was my first true love. When I told my friends a few years ago that it was over, they greeted the news with shock and dismay. Frankly, I’m still sorting it out myself. I want to say up front that despite the pain and disappointment, and the way it ended, it was a deeply fulfilling relationship. I have no regrets.

December 12, 1965. I was eight years old when the Kansas Comet, Gale Sayers, scored six touchdowns on a cold, gray Chicago afternoon. I didn’t even see it. I listened to it all on my transistor radio, and it was still friggin’ magical. From that day forward, I was hooked, and sports and I began a love affair that would last most of my life.

I thought about my teams constantly, wondered when I could be with them again, and got genuinely upset when things went badly for them. I couldn’t get enough, but between school, homework, and a nine o’clock bedtime, spending time together wasn’t easy. I rushed home from school at 3:00 to catch whatever was left of an afternoon Cubs game. Evenings, I pretended to do my homework all the while listening with an earphone to everything my love had to say. Back then each word was special, and the details stuck in my brain like flies to flypaper.

Bedtime was the real problem because games rarely ended by nine. My parents had apparently established my bedtime without consulting any of my teams. So that same radio went under my pillow at night. Most nights I fell asleep before the game ended, and I’d wake up disappointed — not just that I’d missed the rest of the night together, but that I’d failed to hold up my end.

I should also confess that in those early years I wasn’t exactly faithful. I rooted for both the Cubs and the White Sox, which around here is unheard of. In Chicago, Cubs or Sox usually isn’t a choice. It’s assigned at birth. But my father wasn’t much of a sports fan, so I never got the talk and did what any eight-year-old would do. I took two pieces from the Halloween candy bowl.

I was young. I didn’t know we were exclusive.

Then life got bigger. I went away to college, and suddenly there was so much more competing for my attention. We didn’t break up; we just saw less of each other. College put some distance between us, but not enough to keep me from getting home for the occasional big game. I had a few flings with college ball along the way, but nothing serious. Then I took a job in Philadelphia, and the relationship officially became long-distance.

Philadelphia did what everybody does when you move to a new city alone: it tried to fix me up. And Philadelphia had a lot to offer. The Phillies had just won a World Series with Pete Rose, and the Dr. J Sixers would soon become NBA champions. So people were genuinely puzzled that I wasn’t interested in any of it. I’d explain that I already had somebody back home, and they’d look at me like I was crazy.

I read the box scores every morning so I’d at least know how things were going back home. Whenever my teams came through town, we’d get together. Whenever they were on TV, I watched.

Any remaining question about whether the spark was still alive was settled by the 1985 Bears. I watched the Super Bowl that January and went absolutely nuts while they destroyed New England. There I was, hundreds of miles from home, screaming at a black and white television wearing rabbit ears. The passion was still there.

I moved back to Chicago in 1987, and whatever spark had survived the long-distance years turned into a bonfire. Michael Jordan had recently arrived.

I couldn’t get enough of Jordan, and I watched every Bulls game for years. Every single one. If a business dinner ran long, the evening didn’t get written off. I’d come home at eleven-thirty, put on the VCR, and we’d have our time then. That’s the part I’d want on the record if anybody asked how serious this was. Nothing got cancelled—things got moved.

There was one other big difference this time around. As a kid, I had given sports everything I had to give: my adoration, my love, a special place in my head, and countless hours thinking about it, watching it, listening to it, reading about it. The one thing I couldn’t give was money, because I didn’t have any. Now I did.

So I got a share of Bulls season tickets. What I bought wasn’t really the seats. It was a standing arrangement—dates locked in months ahead, all of them spoken for, and from then on everything else in my life had to schedule itself around them. Nobody buys season tickets for a fling.

Every long marriage has disappointments along the way, and in ours, losing was the most common. But it never got between us. You don’t file for divorce because you had a bad year. What happened in 1998 was different.

That June the Bulls won a sixth championship, and then, while the trophy was still warm, management began dismantling the team. This wasn’t a team falling apart. It was a team that had just won its sixth title in eight years, broken up on purpose. For the first time in over thirty years, sports hadn’t merely failed to come through for me. Sports had done something to me. There’s a word for this in a marriage: betrayal. It was the first serious wound, and things were never the same after that.

We stayed together because long marriages can absorb things. And the marriage still had heat. That’s what people on the outside never understand about a long, damaged marriage: it can still catch fire. I was never as far gone on hockey as I was on basketball, but when the Blackhawks went on their championship runs, playoff hockey yanked me right back to the old days — screaming at a Bobby Hull slapshot that ended a game in overtime.

Then 2016 happened, and you need to understand what this was. The Cubs and I had been chasing this dream together since 1965. Every couple has something they’ve always dreamed about together: the vacation house they’ll someday buy, the trip they’ll finally take. Ours was a World Series championship. And now, unbelievably, it was finally happening. During that Series, every pitch mattered because any pitch could change the game, and the game could change the series, and the series was the dream. I hung on every single one of them, all the way to the final out, when we finally won and I lost my mind. Fifty-one years of marriage, and sports could still do this to me.

Then, a couple of years later, I was wondering where we stood again. The team had recently explained that there was no money to sign any big-name players. And one by one, the stars I’d watched win it all were gone.

After we finally got what we had wanted most, it felt to me like sports decided things were good enough now and didn’t have to try anymore. Maybe that’s unfair to say, and I know it’s certainly unprovable, but in a marriage, how it feels is the whole ballgame.

It took me a while to notice I had seen this before. In 1998 I told myself the Bulls had made a terrible decision. Almost twenty years later, watching the Cubs do their version of the same thing, I began to understand that what felt personal to me was just business to them. I had spent all these years thinking we were in this together. Sports, apparently, didn’t see it the same way.

2016 was the last really good year we ever had, though we stayed married for years after that. Of course, I can only see that in hindsight, which I now have in bulk.