In Real Time

A couple of weeks ago, a Sun-Times’ columnist did a piece on villains in Chicago sports, and I thought, Big deal.  Where was he when the villains were mucking things up?

 

It’s one thing to call out Sammy Sosa thirteen years after he’s retired, and quite another to raise questions about Slammin’ Sammy’s physique back in the day.  And that’s the thing—virtually nobody in Chicago sports did.  Without exception, sportswriters perpetuated the myth that Sosa had hit the gym before he hit all those homeruns.  And fans believed it.

 

I’m not throwing rocks here.  Back in the early 2000s, a number of White Sox players took a stand, demanding PEDs testing with teeth, as it were.  The irony is that Jose Canseco played for the Sox before that happened and Manny Ramirez played on the South Side after.  That kind of puts me in a glass house, doesn’t it?

 

It’s more than fans and players.  For reasons I can’t understand, Chicago fans show loyalty to teams—and, by extension, their owners—beyond all reason.  Bill Wirtz should have been run out of town the way he ran Bobby Hull out of town.  Ditto George Halas for sending Mike Ditka into Philadelphia exile—and for refusing to recognize what the rest of the NFL did, that the forward pass is a good thing.  Sadly, the old man passed down that prejudice to his descendants. 

 

But Wirtz was feared, if not respected, down to the time of his death, and Halas is still revered, again for reasons that escape me.  Which brings us to Jerry Reinsdorf, the owner in the spotlight thanks to “The Last Dance.”

 

Reinsdorf should’ve been sent packing for throwing his support to Jerry Krause against all comers; letting Michael Jordan walk; letting Phil Jackson walk; and failing to allow a dynasty—a dynasty of breathtaking accomplishment, by the way—reach its end where it should, on the court, not in the front office.  And yet the Chicago media by and large stayed in the shadows, this even though Reinsdorf was just as troublesome as owner of the White Sox.

 

This was the man who helped make sure there would be no World Series in 1994 and the owner who fired people/let them go without bothering to give a reason why. (See: Larry Himes, Jeff Torborg, Gene Lamont, Ron Schueler, Ozzie Guillen.)  This is the owner who signed Albert Belle to play in Chicago.  Enough said.

 

They talk about Ronald Reagan being the Teflon President; Reinsdorf was the Teflon owner.  Sportswriters made him that way, and fans, too.  That’s just how we are in Chicago.  Go figure.