Culturally illiterate though I am, this one poem stuck with me when I had to recite it in sixth grade: Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” It’s about a band of British soldiers who lose a bloody battle in the Crimean War.

“Storm’d at with shot and shell / boldly they rode and well, / Into the jaws of Death, / Into the mouth of Hell / Rode the six hundred.”

With those words ringing in my head — and the Cubs on the road — I hopped on the El on Tuesday night and rode into the mouth of Hell: U.S. Cellular Field, the home of the Chicago White Sox.

Sox fans hate Cubs fans. The conventional wisdom as to why goes like this: Blue-collar Sox fans in the south resent lakeshore elitist Cubs fans. Cubs fans, though, don’t really care about the Sox. After all, what’s to envy about the South Side?

Still, I wanted to get an explanation straight from the biggest Sox fan I know, Weinberg senior Ryan Sullivan.

“True Cubs fans, I have no problem with,” Sully told me. “It is the fair-weather, bandwagon, go-to-the-game-but-not-even-watch-it people that I don’t like.”

To an extent, Sully is right. Plenty of people go to Wrigley Field not for the game, but for the Wrigley experience: the bars, the characters, the friendly confines.

But is that so bad?

“Baseball is supposed to be fun, not a papal Mass at the Vatican,” English lecturer and former Daily columnist Bill Savage told me. Savage might as well be Mr. Chicago. He knows everything you could possibly want to know about the city — and is even teaching the course “Baseball in American Narrative” this summer.

“My guess is that there are 18,000 die-hards at both Sox and Cubs games,” he said. “The difference is that the other 22,000 come out to Wrigley because they have a good time.”

The Sox game I went to, however, was not a good time. Only 18,310 people showed up for a well-played game against rival Minnesota. I could have prepared a Thanksgiving dinner in the time I spent on the El. The stadium is sandwiched between the Dan Ryan Expressway and a wasteland of parking lots. Worst of all, the entire experience has a plastic feel to it — “mall ball,” as Savage calls it.

The Sox know they are competing with the Cubs for relevance. To compensate, it’s as if five guys sat in a room and said, “Hey, people love Wrigley. Let’s copy it!”

U.S. Cellular — gaaak! It pains me to even write that — has a pathetic patch of ivy in center field. Management is replacing the blue-colored seats with traditional green. The roof and bleachers section look cheaply similar to Wrigley.

Having a retro feel is one thing. Ripping off your rival is something much lamer.

Moreover, you’re bombarded with sights and sounds that distract you from the game: dopey scoreboard gimmicks, T-shirt tosses and the like.

Irony, anyone? Sox fans like Sully resent people who don’t go to games for the game itself. But the Sox organization thinks only tedious diversions will attract those same people.

“It’s fine to do that stuff at a minor league game,” Savage said. “But not when you’re a major league team that’s relegated to minor-league status.”

With every “Cubs Suck” shirt I saw Tuesday night, the minor-league status hit home. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a “Sox Suck” shirt at Wrigley. Who would care enough to wear one?

I respect fans like Sully for their devotion. But, as Savage said, “the rivalry is a tempest in a teapot — and a one-way tempest at that.”

Assistant forum editor Christopher Kenny, Weinberg ’05, can be reached at [email protected].