Article source: Thonline.com
It’s a Cinderella story: a first-time writer self-publishing a book for an ailing family member about the world’s most hard-luck team’s drive to end a 100-year championship drought.
But for Rick Brimeyer, “Every Hundred Years … A Typical Cubs Fan Chronicles an Atypical Season,” was worth the time and financial investment. 
In the book, to be published 30 days after the Cubs’ season ends, Brimeyer offers daily observations and commentary on the Cubs’ wildly successful 2008 season. The former Dubuquer, who now works as a business consultant in Ames, Iowa, will donate proceeds from the project to Phil Doll, Brimeyer’s brother-in law. Doll, also a former Dubuquer, has been batting Multiple Myeloma for four years.
Now, all Brimeyer needs is the perfect final chapter. The Cubs began their march to the World Series or their latest playoff heartbreak tour with Wednesday’s National League Division Series Game 1 loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers.
“Phil battling cancer, me as a self-publisher and the Cubs, we’re all three underdogs,” Brimeyer
said.
For Brimeyer, the Cubs’ drive to win the World Series on the centennial of their last championship was the perfect subject for his first book. A former Telegraph Herald sportswriter, he’d long kicked around the idea of writing something. He’s been a Cubs fan for 40 years.
“I always wanted to write a book,” he said. “(Being a sportswriter,) I didn’t know if I wanted to spend the rest of my life covering sporting events and coming home with homework. The idea was always out there.”
Doll’s battle with Multiple Myeloma, a blood cancer of plasma cells in the immune system, provided Brimeyer the perfect inspiration to write. Doll, a father of four and a Little League coach, is a Cubs fanatic who has gotten strength during the team’s run to its best regular-season finish since 1945.
“They’ve been a godsend (for Phil),” said Brimeyer, whose wife Janet is Phil’s sister. “They are a huge part of his life. He’s so positive all the time. You’d never know how serious things are talking to him. He’s the ultimate optimist.”
Brimeyer himself could have been a fan of any baseball team, but he credits and blames his parents for baptizing him a Cubs fan at the age of 7. He jokes that he’s had a couple extramarital baseball affairs through the years. Brimeyer dabbled in other baseball religions along the way to the book. He says he even danced on the dark side for a time during a confused period in his youth.
“I started rooting for the Cardinals once and realized I was starting to smell funny,” he said.
“Every 100 Years” finds Brimeyer speaking as the voice of the typical longtime Cubs fan during the Cubs’ hunt for the World Series. He describes the season’s most memorable victories — from Chicago’s improbable May 30 comeback from an eight-run deficit against the Colorado Rockies to ace Carlos Zambrano’s no-hitter against the Houston Astros on Sept. 14. Brimeyer also shares stories from his youth of playing ball on his local sandlot in Dubuque, being a .222 hitter his senior year for Dubuque Wahlert, and anecdotes about the joy and pain that comes with being a Cubs fan.
Brimeyer calls the this year’s Cubs the best team the franchise has fielded in his lifetime.
“The highlights I’ve seen this season equate to five typical seasons,” he said. “(Cubs manager) Lou (Piniella) has kept this team together for 162 games better than anybody I’ve ever seen.”
For all the misery he’s experienced along the way, Brimeyer is glad he stuck with the Cubs to write the story of possibly their best shot at winning the World Series in the last 50 years.
“I always think the year I give it up is the year they win it,” he said. “It boils down to, in order to get the joy that comes with winning, you have to put up with the pain.”
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