HOW THE WHITE SOX-CUB RIVALRY CHANGED NELSON ALGREN’S LIFE.

HOW THE WHITE SOX-CUB RIVALRY CHANGED NELSON ALGREN’S LIFE. The Crosstown Cup, as it is now known, is going on this week with White Sox fans and Cub fans seated peaceably together. Nelson Algren’s life is evidence of how intense the Cub-White Sox rivalry was in 1920, long before the teams played regular season games against each other. In CHICAGO, CITY ON THE MAKE, Algren tells of how his life changed when his family moved from the South Side (White Sox territory) to the North Side (Cub territory) in the summer of 1917 when he was eight. He was surrounded by Cub fans and when the Black Sox scandal broke in 1920, he became a pariah. This essay by Andrew Hazucha in BASEBALL, LITERATURE, CULTURE: ESSAYS 2002 – 2003 edited by Peter Carino (on Google books) relates Algren’s experience as an isolated White Sox fan to Algren’s lifetime affection for the underdog and the outcast. (The essay is entitled “Nelson Algren’s Chicago: The Black Sox Scandal, McCarthyism, and the Truth about Cubs Fans”.) In his book written 30 years after the scandal, Algren compared the Cub fans in his neighborhood to the Senate committee that was then investigating organized crime.