A Different World

Sports are different in Chicago than other places.  Joel Quenneville fired is more popular than whoever coaches the Rangers.  If Matt Nagy guides the Bears to the postseason in his rookie season, he will have more clout than any three Jets’ and Giants’ coaches combined.  If you have to ask what clout is, then you’re not from around these parts.

I get a sense other cities are one- or two-team towns—Cardinals; Yankees and Knicks; Steelers and Penguins; It’s as if fans have only so much room in their hearts for a team or two.  But here it’s as if each franchise helps define a part of the civic fabric.  Our blue-collar identity is reflected in the Bears, Blackhawks and White Sox, our white-curtain sensibilities and insecurities (again, if you have to ask…) in the Cubs.  The Bulls remain however Michael Jordan defined them, and Jordan was a demigod on a par with Ted Williams.

If you have South Side roots like I do, you live and die with the Sox and feel a vague yearning for the Arizona ne St. Louis ne Chicago Cardinals, who once upon a time played at Comiskey Park.  Baseball here does not produce “Chicago fans” but partisans of the North and South Side versions of the game.  The other sports lend themselves more to a citywide following.

Maybe we take sports so seriously because of our “Second City” complex.  Everything, it seems, comes so easily to New York; the only things that come with ease here are the cold and the gray (if you have to wonder…).  Sports, then, are our fire, a way to generate heat and light in an otherwise dark and hostile world.  We don’t expect success so much as we do full-out effort.  When the one leads to the other, we give thanks and elevate all those responsible to hero status: Ditka, Guillen, Maddon, Quenneville and maybe Phil Jackson, if only he bothered to visit.

Maybe I should say we’re a Jack London kind of town, where the striving counts more than the having.  That said, I’m all in favor of having the proverbial cake and eating it, too.