Where are the
Cubs and White Sox in today’s Sunday Tribune sports’ section, you may well ask.
Why, they’ve been exiled to page 13,
which can only mean one things—the Bears are back in town.
The season’s
kickoff at Soldier Field is a reminder, if anyone needs one, that Chicago is a
football town. It will always be Ditka
before Banks, and I don’t really know why.
Chicago once offered work for muscle, the kind of trade a lot more
common in football than baseball (think Luis Aparicio). Chicago now resembles Silicon Valley and Wall
Street more than it does the verses of a Sandburg poem, but the muscle thing
has stuck over time. New Yorkers never
identified with the Giants the way we do with the Bears.
Yes, metro New
York has two teams, and so did Chicago, the Arizona nee St. Louis Cardinals longtime
denizens of the South Side, playing their home games at Comiskey Park. This was my father’s team and probably would
have been mine if the Bidwell family hadn’t been so incompetent. George Halas ran them out of town after the
1959 season. How best to describe
Halas? Think of a jerk with a little bit
of smarts and an oversized ego. Add a
fedora for the complete picture.
Listen to Bear
fans, and you’d think everyone should’ve stopped playing the game after Super Bowl
XX. We are the Bears, watch us shuffle…to
the list of one-year wonders. The ’69 Cubs
can hold their heads high compared to these guys, starting with Da Coach. Never has a man turned himself into a cliché for
the sake of a few extra bucks the way Mike Ditka has.
That said, I did
try to become a true Bears’ fan back in high school. I memorized the roster, listened to games on
the radio (Jack Brickhouse and Ivr Kupcinet, two priceless foot-in-mouth
announcers) and learned to hate the Packers, which I still do. Then came the next season, and half those
names I memorized were gone. Jim Cadile
and Rudy Kuechenberg, anyone?
Now, I pass for
a social football fan, lest someone accuse me of belonging to ISIS. It’s pretty much the same for Clare, who has
to know about the game because of her boyfriend Chris. He’s a graduate assistant for one of the top
Division III programs in the nation, which basically means working 90 hours a
week during the season to help coach the offensive line. The pity is he also grew up playing baseball,
with a solid catcher’s build and mentality.
If he were my kid, he would’ve stayed behind the plate.
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