Playing Fields

I imagine most people think of Chicago as the reincarnation of the Wild West, only with more guns.  The city is more than that, and always was.  I can’t imagine growing up anyplace else, especially Phoenix, where my parents were planning to move when I was seven on account of my asthma.  Things got better, we stayed, and I have yet to come across a rattle snake or scorpion in the wild.  There were plenty of garter snakes in my corner of the South Side, though.

Not to mention chickens and roosters.  Yes, loud fowl, the kind that go cock-a-doodle-doo in the morning.  The people across the alley from us had a coop attached to their garage.  Mind you, we weren’t anywhere close to the city limits and what was referred to then as “the country.”  Somehow, our neighbors kept their flock until I was twelve or thereabouts.  It made for an interesting adolescence.

Five blocks from our house was another chicken coop, behind a field where we all played softball and football.  A line of scrub trees—that for some reason we called “the boas”—lined the south end of the field in front of a house while the chickens took roost behind another house on the north end.  I’m pretty sure I hit a softball through the boas, breaking a window, and I know I nearly broke an ankle playing football.  I got tackled and actually heard a “crunch!” that ended up being a very badly sprained ankle.  You could say I hobbled into my sophomore year of high school.

I’m not aware of anyone who played on the field at 50^th and Christiana ever becoming a professional athlete.  Maybe we would have with the proper venue.  That seems to be the logic behind the push for new sports’ stadiums—we’ll play better in something newer.  Yeah, right.

The Oakland Raiders are pretty much complaining they’re stuck in the boas and want someone to build them a proper palace.  The city of Oakland desperately wants to hang onto the team and has come up with a plan to provide $200 million of a $1.3 billion project, with the city and Alameda County kicking in real estate worth another $150 million.  Poor Raiders, they have to go through the motions of considering the proposal because things in Las Vegas, where owner Mark Davis wants to go, haven’t gone quite as planned.

I bet Kenny Stabler would have been a really good quarterback if only he hadn’t been stuck playing on a field like we did on Christiana.  I wonder if Stabler was the only Snake in Oakland?