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.