Aaron Hernandez

Sportswriters looking to explain the apparent suicide of ex-Patriots tight-end Aaron Hernandez and the events that precipitated it seem to think that losing his father at the age of 16 played a significant role in all that transpired afterward.  I don’t know why.

My father was thirteen months old when his father died.  His mother remarried when he was 3-1/2, but it didn’t work out.  This is an understatement akin to calling the Grand Canyon a ditch.  My grandmother was Polish and Catholic; that she instituted divorce proceedings against her second husband can only mean that scandal was preferable to marriage.  For all but five months of that second marriage, she raised three boys on her own.

Elizabeth Bukowska pulled her middle son Edwin—my father—out of school when he was thirteen.  In other words, my dad never made it past seventh grade.  Instead, he started work, going from the family bakery to the Ford assembly line on Torrence Avenue to the Chicago Fire Department.  Then he “retired,” taking a part-time job as a truck driver for a couple of years.  In all that time, I’m not aware of him ever being indicted or convicted of murder, as Hernandez was.  Nor did my father, who was an avid Chicago Cardinals’ fan, ever sign a $40 million contract, as Hernandez did.

For that matter, neither did my father-in-law, who lost his father at the age of five.  A few years later, his mother found it impossible to raise two young boys—twins, at that—on her own, so she put them in an orphanage.  When he grew old enough, my father-in-law went into the foster-care system.  Oh, and he had a fun year on the front lines in Korea.  To this day, he can tell you the fastest way to get off a hill that’s under fire—you roll down.

I’ve wanted to kill my father-in-law on several occasions, which is another way of saying he must’ve wanted to kill me more than once; to the best of my knowledge, that didn’t happen.  No, what did happen is that Ed Bukowski and Bob Harris took the cards that life dealt them and left the world a better place by virtue of the families they raised. 

I can only imagine what these two men might have accomplished given the chances Aaron Hernandez wasted.    

On Further Review...

…Rajon Rondo is not a cancer in the clubhouse.  In what has to be the most up-and-down season any professional athlete has ever had in Chicago sports, Rondo has come back from the dead (at least three times by my count) to claim the role of starting point guard.  On Tuesday night, Rondo was a rebound short of a triple double as the number-eight seed Bulls beat the top-seed Celtics 111-97, to go up two games to none in their opening-round playoff series.

Rondo is both proud and difficult; you wouldn’t want to suggest to him that he’s slowed a step at the age of 31, unless you had a sudden urge to visit the dentist.  All I really knew about Rondo when the Bulls signed him in the offseason was that he had a reputation for mouthing whenever the mood hit; little did I or Bulls’ management realize their new player would do so on opponents and teammates—see Dwayne Wade and Jimmy Butler—alike.  Here’s the thing about Rondo, though.  He does the walk after the talk.

Whether benched, relegated to the second string or returned to the starting lineup, Rondo has been a revelation with the younger players, leading both by example and instruction.  In many ways, Rondo reminds me of ex-White Sox A.J. Pierzynski, a smart pain-in-the-butt sort of guy an opposing team never wants to go up against.  Only A.J. was never that popular with his teammates.  Rondo is, Wade and Butler excepted.

Maybe.    

Almost a Really Fast Game

But for a ninth-inning error and a strike call or two, last night’s White Sox game at Yankee Stadium was on track to finishing on the good side of two hours.  Factor in that error and a pitching change, and the game still only took 2 hours and 16 minutes, a Sox 4-1 win over the Yankees.

Fast is how I like my baseball.  The Sox managed all of three hits, two of them home runs.  That was enough for starter Miguel Gonzalez, who needed 88 pitchers to record 25 outs; Gonzalez threw all of 59 pitches through seven innings.  By way of contrast, Sox closer David Robertson needed 19 pitches to record two outs for the save.  David, the secret to a long and successful career is economy.  I only wish all those young pitchers the Sox have drafted and traded for could’ve watched Gonzalez pitch.  The four strikeouts meant he “pitched to contact,” as the saying goes.  But I’ll take that any day, if it comes with Gonzalez’s one walk and two double plays   

Avisail Garcia hit a three-run homer on a slow, 83-mph slider that was up and in; last year (and all the years before), Garcia was lucky to foul that pitch, let alone hit it fair.  Right now, Garcia is leading the world in hitting, but it’s April, and the sample size is way too small to get excited over.  Still, beating the Bronx Bombers with Matthew Broderick and Jimmy Fallon in attendance is always a good thing.   

Dead-tree Sportswriting

I grew up on the Sunday sports’ section, filled with columnists and feature stories.  I still look forward to it, if less and less.

Take this Sunday (please).  The Blackhawks, Cubs and White Sox had all played the day before, while the Bulls were getting ready for their playoff opener in Boston.  So, what filled the entire back page of the Tribune sports’ section?  Why, the upcoming draft for your 3-13 Chicago Bears, specifically whether the Bears would be drafting a Brett Favre clone from Texas Tech.  The Bears and quarterbacks are sort of like Russia and democracy—the two don’t mix, or haven’t so far in their respective, long histories.  This was a story better suited to April Fools’ Day, not April 16.

Then it hit me how 20^th century the whole thing is, the Sunday sports’ section and my reaction to the stories in it.  The only reason my daughter ever looked at the sports’ section was to check the box scores, sometimes.  Or she could just get them on her phone, along with in-game updates.  Maybe I should mention here the Blackhawks-Predators playoff game started at 8:30 last night, and neither Chicago newspaper had the results.  How many young Blackhawk fans didn’t know the exact moment the game ended, or get an update on their phones?

The first thing I want from print journalism is the news reported in a timely fashion; the second thing I want is the news written well.  With sports, the NFL excepted, I can’t get what I want when I want, which isn’t all that demanding given that I’m willing to wait until the next morning.  We won’t have the newspaper around much longer to line our bird cages with, I fear.  How sad.

Playgrounds

Growing up, I used to go over to the playground at Sawyer School, a few blocks from our house.  I remember it as huge with monkey bars, merry-go-round and a slide attached to something we called a toboggan run.  All of it was an invitation to serious injury.

Lose your footing on the monkey bars, and you could hit your head hit multiple times on the way down to the ground, which had stones everywhere.  Get dizzy on the merry-go-round, and you might lose your grip and fall off; if you were standing and running on the inside in that open area between the seat and the axle in order to make things go round, you could hit the dirt and then get hit in the head by the metal piping passing overhead.  As for that slide, let me just say that it was attached to this oblong wooden structure (think a long right triangle on its side) that had to be 25-30 tall at the top.  From there you climbed up the slide, putting you 30-35 feet above ground.  The place was triage waiting to happen.

I’m not sorry Clare never got to experience that kind of playground; I really do think there are emergency-room records buried away that would make a person gasp to read.  Twenty years ago, when our daughter was at her playground peak, everything had turned to soft surfaces and gentle climbing.  Clare being Clare, she wanted more of a challenge, so I would take her to this thing where you grabbed an overhead bar to move eight feet or so from Point A to Point B.  We turned that into an Olympic event.  Then there was Willie the Whale.

Willie is a piece of granite or marble, I’m not sure which, sculpted into the form of a whale.  Better yet, there’s a sprinkler for a blow hole.  I cannot tell you the joy produced by running—or watching a child run—through that sprinkler.

We left Willie behind in Oak Park when we moved to Berwyn, but Clare dealt with the loss OK because we had a playground at the end of the block, all swings and bridges.  The playground may have made all the difference in our parenting; I dread to think of what we would’ve had to do otherwise to tire out the child of perpetual motion we had.  I feel sorry now for those parents around here with their own versions of Clare.

The city of Berwyn, in its infinite wisdom, is turning the playground into a parking lot for some new fast food places that have gone up.  Off in Oak Park, Willie the Whale sheds a tear.

Time Ever So Cruel

Two years ago, Lou Brock lost part of his left leg due to diabetes.  Now, he’s been diagnosed with bone cancer.  This is one of those times when you have to conclude life sucks.

Brock is to the Cubs what Babe Ruth was to the Red Sox, a supremely talented player who got away.  With the Cubs, he was a young outfielder who showed flashes of talent over the course of 2-1/2 seasons on the North Side.  Traded to St. Louis for nobody in particular (alright, Ernie Broglio, Bobby Shantz and Doug Clemens) just days before his 25^th birthday, Brock blossomed into a superstar.  As a White Sox fan, I shudder to think of Brock in the same lineup with Ernie Banks, Ron Santo and Billy Williams.  Throw in Fergie Jenkines, and you have a team with five future HOFers who should’ve called Wrigley Field home throughout the 1960s and ’70s.

Brock hit .391 over the course of three World Series and scored over 1600 runs in his career while amassing 3023 hits and 938 stolen bases.  He also popularized a version of the umbrella hat, called the “Brockabrella,” which still brings a smile to my face.  Brock even spent a season doing color on White Sox games with Harry Caray.  Talk about a mispairing.  Lou Brock twenty years gone would know more baseball than Harry Caray in his prime.  

Long story short, bad things shouldn’t happen to good athletes and decent people. 

  

 

Selfish?

For only the second time in NBA history, a player has averaged a triple-double—a minimum of ten points, ten rebounds and ten assists a game—over the course of the regular season.  The Oklahoma City Thunder’s Russell Westbrook joins Oscar Robertson, who did it first in 1961-62.  I wonder if people complained that Robertson was selfish, too.

This has been the knock on Westbrook, that he wouldn’t share with teammate Kevin Durant and was still selfish this season with Durant gone to Golden State.  Oh, please.  The man’s a shooting guard—he’s supposed to score points.  It’s the other two parts of the equation that make the accomplishment so amazing.  Westbrook averaged over ten rebounds and assists a game.  A selfish player can’t do that; he doesn’t want to hang under the basket fighting very big guys for rebounds, and he doesn’t like to pass the ball in order for someone else to score.

Sorry, but you can’t set this record while being “selfish.”  It’s logically impossible.