The Wrong Lesson

An aerial photo from the 1930s shows Comiskey Park flanked by parking lots on the east and west.  Most of the buildings to the south of the park across 35^th Street were gone by the time I started attending games in the early 1960s, or at least I think they were.  What I do know for sure is that we never ate at the ballpark, and there was no place to eat right outside.  My father always had a hot dog stand or cart we could go to, which was fine by me.

When Jerry Reinsdorf got his new stadium, he wanted even more parking rather than development.  The idea was for fans to come to the park and spend all their money there.  Twenty-five years later, and the area still looks like a shopping mall awash in parking.  So, why are the Cubs making like Reinsdorf? 

I’m not talking about the team’s longstanding feud with the rooftop owners.  Those guys banked on peeping-tom protection in the Constitution, only there is none, as courts have ruled.  Too bad.  But now the Cubs are developing a plaza/beer garden outside Wrigley Field which will compete with area establishments, of which there are many.  On top of that, early this week, the team floated the idea of a 100-foot security perimeter extending from the park out onto Clark and Addison streets.  In other words, two North Side thoroughfares would be squeezed, damn’ the ripple effects, to keep the mad bombers away and, just maybe, serve as an extension of the plaza.  Did I mention it’s going to serve drinks?

The Cubs are the beneficiaries of not one golden goose, but two, Wrigley Field and Wrigleyville.  Kudos to the team for staying at Wrigley, and shame on them for trying to siphon away business from the neighborhood.  Lose a goose, and you could end up with the same emptiness that surrounds the Cell.      

Player's Remorse

Yesterday, former Steelers’ receiver Antwaan Randle El told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that, at the age of 36, he sometimes has to go down stairs sideways and has memory problems.  As for regrets over his choice of sports, Randle El said, “If I could go back, I wouldn’t” play the game that made him famous.  A 14^th round draft choice of the Cubs in 1997, Randle realizes he “could still be playing baseball.”

I wonder if baseball is listening.  Randle El regrets the choice he made as an athlete.  Does Brian Jordan, who was a Pro Bowl alternate at safety for the Falcons only to walk away for baseball?  I doubt it, not if a 15-year career with over 800 rbi’s means anything.  MLB is forever talking about making baseball relevant again to African-Americans.  But would the commissioner dare include the stories of Antwaan Randle El and Brian Jordan?  I would.   

Get Real

Many if not most sportswriters are sloths with typing skills.  That was obvious when a columnist in the Sunday Tribune sports’ section decided it was time to explore the idea of a second team for the third largest football market in the NFL.  He apparently thinks the Jacksonville Jaguars would be a perfect fit for the Windy City.

Why?  Well their owner went to school at the U of I Champaign-Urbana.  Oh, and everything is so unsettled now what with the Rams moving and maybe the Chargers and/or the Raiders, so why not the Jaguars, too?  But who’s going to build this fantasy stadium?  Why, the Jaguars’ owner, of course, because he’s a billionaire.  And did he get that way by putting up his own money or other people’s?  So much for following the who/what/when/where/why tenets of good journalism.

The columnist thinks that the Rams are going to pony up nearly $1.9 billion to fund a new entertainment district with stadium in the LA suburb of Ingleside.  And I am the walrus.  But if I’m not, and all this moving around can be done without involving public funds, then go at it, I say.  But just remember this, which our sloth columnist found too much of a bother to find out—the Jaguars presently play in a municipally-owned facility.  If you’ll pardon my metaphor, why would they want to pay for a billion-dollar cow when they can get the milk for free, if not in Jacksonville then someplace else?           

Picture Perfect

This is how football should always be, like the divisional playoff game Saturday night between the Packers and my (well, almost) Chicago/St. Louis/Phoenix/Arizona Cardinals, won by the Cardinals 26-20 in overtime.  Holy Johnny Unitas, what a game.

Green Bay got the ball on their own four-yard line down by seven with 55 seconds left in the game and their season.  Not to worry, not with Aaron Rodgers at the helm.  (Is it possible to both hate and admire a player at the same time the way I do Rodgers?)  With time expiring, Rodgers let go a 41-yard Hail Mary in the end zone.  Of course, his receiver caught the ball.  We’re not talking the Chicago Bears here.  Score tied, the game goes into overtime.

Enter the Cardinals’ Carson Palmer, who in quarterback years is more than twice as old as I am.  On the first play from scrimmage, Palmer scrambled to his right, threw against his body and hit receiver Larry Fitzgerald, who proceeded down the side line for a 75-yard gain.  Two plays later, Palmer underarmed a five-yard shovel pass—let me repeat, a shovel pass—to Fitzgerald for the winning touchdown.  The forces of evil will now go into hibernation until July, give or take a few voluntary team workouts.

There may be people out there who felt the game lacked sufficient violence, but not me.  At the risk of repeating myself, I like football best when concussion-like hits can be avoided.  For examples, see above.

And far be it from me to make fun of any of the 65,089 fans in attendance, but why did they go?  I had a perfect seat on the couch, unlike that half of the crowd sitting opposite of the Rodgers’ and Palmer touchdown drives.  You could argue it’s the same for baseball, and maybe it is.  But an infield seat (lower deck only) allows me to see the hitter-pitcher duel up close along with all the infield play while an outfield seat lets me watch the outfielders up close and still get a decent glimpse of the action happening in the infield.  Maybe it all depends on what sport you love most.

Wet Behind the Ears

 The White Sox have just hired Jason Benetti to replace Hawk Harrelson in the broadcast booth for home games this year.  At the tender age of 32, Benetti was all of seven in 1990, the last year the Sox played in Comiskey Park.  That means virtually all of his I-remember stories will date to the Cell.  Benetti will have next to no memory of watching a game under the left field grandstands in the Picnic Area or how the smell of fried food wafted up to the stands or how taking three or four steps in from the entrance on 35^th and Shields brought you within sight of the field in all of its emerald-green majesty or…

But this is the way of the world and certainly no fault of Benetti, who has a chance of becoming the voice of the franchise if he’s any good.  All of my daughter’s memories of the White Sox are tied to the Cell, too, for that matter.  The Big Hurt, Paulie, Gordon—their only context for Clare comes with a concrete saucer.  It’s her loss, and mine.

As Different as Night and Day

 Here’s the difference between Cubs’ fans and White Sox fans: Say some Cubs’ fans find themselves on a latter-day Titanic.  They’d all be telling one another, “Hey, half of the ship is still above water.”  Standing next to them is a couple of Sox fans.  One looks to the other and sighs, “The good part of this tub’s already sunk.”

Yesterday, the Cubs Convention opened downtown.  Fans were crawling out of the woodwork to line up and drink the Cubbie Kool-Aid.  Next weekend is SoxFest.  Right now, people in the Sox front office are drawing straws to see who has to go on stage first; nobody wants to face a room full of hungry, grumpy lions.  It’s that or the deep blue sea.

Spoiled Rotten

Former college great and NFL running back Lawrence Philips, age 40, died in a California prison yesterday.  Officials believe that Philips, convicted of domestic abuse and trying to use his car as a weapon as well as being a suspect in the murder of his cellmate, committed suicide.

My guess is that the convict was no worse a human being than the college or NFL player.  It was talent on the gridiron that most likely kept Philips out of jail.  But once that ability to shed tackles and score touchdowns left him, Philips was destined to end up where he did.  This is what happens to athletes who never mature.

I remember a softball tournament where a star player was holding court.  As I recall, she was a pitcher who’d had a really good game, probably a lot of strikeouts and rbi’s to stoke her college dreams (and, no doubt, her parents’).  What struck me first was how this 13- or 14-year old was all buddy-buddy with adults, joking around and slapping backs.  Then she went out for the seventh inning and got rocked, the big lead turning into a loss.  After that came the yelling and swearing; the girl threw her glove almost as hard as opposing batter had hit her pitches.  Lawrence Philips couldn’t have done it better at that age.