Bear Down, Chicago Bears...

Some people are social drinkers, I’m a social football fan.  Either way, the idea is to look normal.  It’s important to do that, in Chicago, in September.

By all rights, I should be a Cardinals’ fan.  They were, at one time, the South Side team, even playing at Comiskey Park.  But of all the underachieving franchises in the long, sorry history of Chicago sports, the Cardinals may be the worst.  They squandered their fan base here and moved to St. Louis in 1960.  Not content to break hearts just once, the team relocated to Arizona in 1988.  And in all that time, they’ve been controlled by the same family.

But the Bidwells were not meant to be, for me, unlike the Bears of George Halas, a man my father loathed for being a cheap SOB.  When the Bears played and lost, my father smiled, the way a worker does when the boss gets his comeuppance.  But the losing, especially to the Packers, usually made me feel bad.

I managed to talk myself into seeing parallels between the White Sox and Bears.  Both teams were good at keeping the opposition from scoring and bad at doing it themselves; think Hitless Wonders and Bobby Douglass.  The real problem for me was roster turnover.  Why root for Austin Denney or Mike Hull if he wasn’t going to stay around as long as Hoyt Wilhelm or Tommy McCraw did?  And football box scores left something to be desired.  Seeing that Bobby Joe Green had eight punts for a 41.3 yard average wasn’t much of a pick-me-up at breakfast on Monday of my senior year in high school.        

The one Bears’ game I attended happened to be the last one ever played at Wrigley Field, on December 13, 1970.  It was the Colosseum in longjohns, the highpoint coming when Dick Butkus literally bounced Bart Starr off the infield dirt en route to a 35-17 Bears’ win.  After that, I’ve never felt the need to attend another NFL game.

By way of karma, Clare has spent the last two years training with one of the Elmhurst football coaches and dating the starting center.  Now an assistant o-line coach/grad student at North Central College, he says he wants to pursue a career in coaching.

One more thing—his middle name is Douglas.

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Yesterday was the start of fall practice, complete with the requisite puking.  As I recall, Clare managed to keep her cookies down her freshman year through sheer force of will.  She’d drag herself back to her dorm room after practice, collapse on the floor and call us to say how miserable she felt.  That was three years ago.  She just ran a 5K this morning.

            Times change.