The Goose that lays the Golden Pigskin

 The NFL is pure gold.  The league goes through the Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson scandals last season along with allegations (which broke just before the Super Bowl) that the Patriots cheated by using underinflated balls in the AFC championship game against the Colts.   People reacted to all this by making Super Bowl XLIX the most watched program in American TV history.

Two weeks after a draft extravaganza that brought some 200,000 fans to downtown Chicago comes the NFL report on “Deflategate”:  Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady probably knew about the soft balls.  That likelihood will net Brady a four-game suspension at the start of the season (vs. two games initially for Rice knocking his fiancée out cold in an elevator).  Anti-Patriots’ fans are ecstatic (except for some who think New England should have been stripped of its title a la the Jackie Robinson West Little League team) while Patriots’ fans are livid.  I doubt any of this will affect pro football’s popularity. 

What’s the old saying, panem et circenses?  We do seem to love our bread and circuses (and beer).  That would make Roger Goodell the new Caesar, in power for as long as he can satisfy his praetorian guard of team owners.  I guess history really does repeat itself.     

Stuck in Lodi, aka Valpo

 There’s a Credence Clearwater Revival song with a chorus that goes, “Oh Lord, stuck in Lodi again.”  My daughter can relate.

She’s back at Valpo, trying to fashion a summer around softball that, with luck, will include honest-to-goodness D-I recruiting responsibilities.  Too bad Clare’s apartment complex has lousy cable.  No White Sox or Cubs, a blackout last night on MLB Network and no channel that shows a schedule of programs.  Is there anything on TV? someone texted her mother.    

“Tell her Chicago Fire is on at nine,” I kind of joked.  My father was a veteran of 35 years with the Chicago Fire Department, only he ne3ver ate as much smoke in a year as the characters do in half an episode.  But I like guessing where they film the exterior scenes.

And this is what our specific-sports-wired child texted back: I hate soccer.  Oops, wrong Fire. 

Big Hurt, Restauranteur

Big Hurt, Restauranteur       

We celebrated Mother’s Day a little early on Friday when Clare came in from Valpo for the weekend.  Our restaurant of choice was the Big Hurt Brewhouse here in Berwyn.  The food is still good while the service has gotten better.  That matters to me more than the possible presence of a ballplayer or two at the bar.  Clare, of course, wants to bump into Jermaine Dye one day.

Eleven years ago this summer we took an odd little vacation with St. Louis at one end and Galena Illinois at the other; Clare was twelve.  In St. Louis we visited the Gateway Arch and the Hill, the neighborhood where Yogi Berra grew up.  I wanted to eat at Stan Musial’s restaurant, but it had closed by that time, and Mike Shannon’s didn’t have the same cache, at least for me.  In Galena, we crossed over the Mississippi to drive out to the Field of Dreams, where Clare put on a hitting clinic for the corn and the ghosts.  Food isn’t everything.     

Jordan vs. Rose

If the Bulls manage to win an NBA championship this year, that would give Derrick Rose one to six for Michael Jordan.  Comparisons aren’t really fair here.

Jordan was the only guard/forward/center in the history of basketball.  He may not have played all three positions at once, but he played each of them during the course of nearly every game.  The only equivalent I can think of would be Babe Ruth, pitching and hitting his way into the Hall of Fame, but you would need to add another 150 wins to Ruth’s career total of 94.  By contrast, Rose is a very good offensive player whose lost a half of step of lightning after three knee surgeries.  But even at the top of his game, it’s no contest.  Jordan was the better player by far.  Sorry, Derrick (and Babe).

I wonder what Jordan and Rose would have been in other lives.  With Jordan, that drive and on-court leadership would have translated nicely into a military career.  We’re not talking Patton here but more along the lines of Alexander the Great or Napoleon.  That last one would be an interesting matchup, if you could find a way to put the two of them on the same battlefield or add a foot and a half to the Little Corporal.

Rose is harder to figure.  He seems normal to boring off the court, rarely showing emotion in interviews and having no discernible interest in the decadent lifestyle available to pro athletes.  The tattoos may be a disguise for a regular guy who wants nothing more than to step out of the shadow of His Airness just once.

A Change of Venue

 If I were king, or just a despot, I would make professional sports teams play in the facilities I considered fit for them.  If I were king, there’d still be a Comiskey Park and Chicago Stadium.

My ballpark was an oasis amidst the industry and smoke that surrounded it and much of the South Side; the Stock Yards were a couple of miles to the southwest.  You couldn’t hear the order of business from there, but you could sure smell it.

Not that it mattered to anyone sitting in the outfield grandstands or down the lines; you were so close to the action all unpleasant thoughts—and smells—not related to baseball lost their hold over the course of nine innings.  By my count, I went to a couple of hundred ballgames at 35^th and Shields and never once felt cheated by the presence of obstructing posts.  As for the bathroom lines, I don’t drink.  Call me Mr. Model T, the old man who would bring back the WCTU.

A packed house at Comiskey could be deafening, unlike at the Cell; either architects forgot or ignored that stretching the upper deck away with cantilever construction dissipates crowd noise.  The same holds true for the United Center.  Once upon a time, the Bulls and Hawks played at the Chicago Stadium, nicknamed The Madhouse on Madison for good reason.  The place was a triple-decked sardine can in the best sense of the term.

The Stadium was torn down for the United Center, which looms massive and ugly on the Near West Side.  Last night, the Bulls beat the Cavs 99-96 on a three-pointer by Derrick Rose at the buzzer.  So, you might say it was an exciting game.  That being the case, then why bother with cheerleaders and guys running around with oversized Bulls flags?  Can’t the team generate its own noise?  If not, blame the hangar the team plays in (along with the Hawks).  As king, I would let my subjects be happily stuffed into a Madhouse.  They deserve no less.

Old School, Right On

 White Sox V.P. and former GM Kenny Williams has never been one of my favorite people.  He was fond of trading prospects for over-the-hill players, and HE SIGNED ADAM DUNN.  But even a stopped clock gets it right twice a day, which Williams did in 2005 when he assembled a roster that brought Chicago its first World Series title since 1917.  And I do like how Williams lets his character show when least expecting to.

Several years ago at spring training he yelled at Dayan Viciedo from the stands for failing to run out a ground ball; that’s something my father would have done.  And this week Williams was walking through the White Sox clubhouse when he heard an offensive song blaring away.  How offensive?  Well, the Tribune reported on the story but couldn’t find any lyrics clean enough to quote.  Williams immediately had the music turned off and apologized to a reporter for the anti-woman lyrics.

According to the story, Williams took grief on Twitter and sports talk radio for being too old school.  Holding people to an adult standard of conduct is old fashioned?  Well, I’ll ride that dinosaur any day of the week, and pay Kenny Williams for the privilege.                        

Pick Your Poison

People choose sports and teams to follow for all sorts of reasons.  With me, baseball was a factor of time and place.  In the 1950s on the South Side of Chicago, the Go-Go White Sox were your birthright, Irish or not.  The Bukowskis were part of the “nots” who showed up at 35^th and Shields, especially when the Yankees came to town.

My dad was a fan of the football Cardinals, but they moved after the 1959 season.  He watched the Bears more to heckle George Halas than cheer on the old man’s team, and I inherited that lukewarm affection, which hasn’t grown much to this day.  The people who wear bear heads on Game Day are beyond me.

So are Blackhawk fans; I just don’t get the sport.  A group of us used to play hockey in the alley in winter, without skates; we just ran around and used our sticks to whack one another with.  I kind of warmed up to the teams of Bobby Hull and Stan Makita, but then Bill Wirtz turned into an owner only George Halas could love.  By the end of his life, Wirtz was threatening to disband the team rather than share more revenue with players.

The Bulls came into existence my freshman year of high school and something clicked, though I can’t say exactly what.  Let me put it this way—a squirrel could palm a basketball better than I can.  One of my least favorite high school memories involves “basketball tag,” a game devised by one of our gym teachers; you tried to tag an opponent while dribbling.  Yes, in fact I may have sweat real bullets avoiding said tag.  But I grew to love those Sloan/Van Lier/Boerwinkle/Love/Walker teams as much as I did any White Sox team.

My biggest influence over Clare, of course, was baseball.  Basketball I tried to steer her away from because she had too much of my personality, that of a physical center stuck in Tiny Archibald’s body.  Until college, she couldn’t have cared less about football, but along came Chris the center, and all that changed.  Now, she’s little Miss Safety Blitz, picking up more knowledge of the game in four years than I have in a lifetime.

She also likes hockey.  I think part of the reason is she’s a good ice skater, so she can imagine herself setting up Patrick Kane for a game-winning goal.  And while hockey players are considerably taller than they were a generation ago, they’re not behemoths yet.  Kane stands 5’11”, a size everyday people can relate to.  Just not me.  No, I want to be like Jimmy Butler defending against LeBron James in tonight’s Bulls-Cavs playoff game.  To each his own.