Instant Karma

I’m starting to think that the only way to win a sports championship in Chicago is by deal making, as with the devil, and he never plays fair. Take a look at the Cubs. They break a 108-year championship drought in 2016, and then what? Theo Epstein has all but disappeared; ditto Joe Madden managing the Angels. Do you think any of those free-agent ex-Cub core people—Baez, Bryant, Rizzo, Schwarber—is going to add a second World Series ring? I don’t. The Bears are another perfect example. The last, and only time, the Munsters won the Super Bowl was in 1986. Anyone care to venture how long ago that was? The cost of that deal seems to be in the form of ownership. The team will forever be controlled by the McCaskeys. Read it and weep (and at some point, you may want to do the same with the Ricketts). And now we have the Blackhawks, winners of the Stanley Cup in 2010, 2013 and 2015. Everything is suddenly, and maybe irrevocably, tarnished in light of the Kyle Beach allegation surrounding former video coach Brad Aldrich. The scandal has cost Stan Bowman and Joel Quenneville their current jobs, if not their careers. In true Chicago fashion, the curse may include “forever” ownership: Ricketts, McCaskey, Wirtz, what a rogues’ gallery. The Hawks have gotten off to a terrible start, so bad that a 13-year, 535-game home sellout streak ended last month. After going 1-9-2, they fired Jeremy Colliton as head coach, which got me to thinking about the White Sox. Maybe Charles Comiskey made a deal with the devil to win championships in 1906 and 1917, maybe not. Either way, the Black Sox scandal devastated the franchise. Recent scholarship argues that Comiskey was anything but a tightwad and the active fixers among his 1919 squad anything but angels. No matter. After Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis laid down his lifetime ban against eight players, seven of them starters, Comiskey never found a way to replace the talent lost, and that pretty much continued long after his death in 1931. It took the team forty years to get back to the World Series and another forty-six to win one. Time will tell with the Blackhawks, but right now it sure looks like they’ve got that bad Chicago sports’ karma coming their way.