Looking Backward

The appearance of a grandchild may have something to do with it, or just the aging process. Either way, with sports I find myself looking increasingly backward than ahead. As for the Bears, can you blame me? Why bother with a bad team full of anonymous players when I can think of bad teams that had the likes of Gayle Sayers and Dick Butkus on them? The Bulls don’t look to be nearly as helpless, yet where are Jerry Sloan and Norm Van Lier, or Bob Love and Tom Boerwinkle? I read The Athletic; hold my nose and look at MLB.com; plow through two sports’ sections daily, all in pursuit of baseball news. Only every story I read of a possible lockout or how much this free-agent shortstop will sign for leaves me feeling slightly more alienated from a game I’ve loved since childhood. Maybe it’s age, and my grandson will see baseball for the sport while being oblivious to the business. I was like that once. I get as much baseball out of eBay as anything. Most every day I check for “White Sox press photos”; “Comiskey Park photo”; “1930s [and 1940s and 1950s] White Sox”; “Moe Berg photo [and Minnie Minoso]”; “White Sox 1962 ticket stub”; and a few other categories. Never once has a labor dispute gotten in the way. A few weeks ago, I bought a negative of Minnie Minoso from 1960; for Christmas, I asked Clare to develop it as an 8”x 10” photo I’ll frame; with luck, he’ll be in the Hall of Fame by then. I also bought a White Sox yearbook from 1954, a year I would’ve been toddling about our South Side bungalow. The Comiskey family still owned the team, and, if you believe Arch Ward—he wrote the copy and was the sportswriter who came up with the idea of the All-Star Game—that team was close to toppling the hated Yankees. I didn’t know Ferris Fain had his own fan club. In Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy wrote the story of a young man who fell asleep one day in the late nineteenth century only to wake up over a hundred years later. Lucky for him all the problems of the world had been solved during his time asleep. I’d be happy to wake up and find the Sox starting a homestand against Casey Stengel and his crew. Until then, there’s eBay.