First, thank you for saving New Year’s Eve with that ridiculous, last-second, hop-off-one-foot floater from 25 feet that beat the Pacers. The college football semifinals turned out to be yawners. Alabama blows out Cincinnati; Georgia blows out Michigan. The SEC asserts its dominance again. Ho hum. Thankfully, the late-afternoon start to the Bulls’ game gave me an off-ramp from watching college football.
You kind of struggled most of the game, to be fair. But you had the ball in your hands, down by one point, at the end of the game. The obvious play was to drive to your favorite spot at the elbow and either take a 15-footer or kick to Coby White on the wing. But you dribbled near mid-court, seemingly oblivious that the last few seconds of the game were ticking away. But then — finally — you made your move. Dribble, dribble, crossover dribble, hop off your left leg, launch, swish. Winner. I just saw a headline that called your shot “The New Year’s Eve Heave.” I wish I’d come up with that line. On the TV broadcast, Bulls announcer Adam Amin had a wonderful call: “DeMAR! DeROZAN! DeLIVERS!” I only wish Stacey King had made the trip to Indy to call the game — or maybe not. I don’t know that his heart could have survived that finish. So thank you, again, DeMar, for sending out 2021 with a bang. Here’s the shot to beat the Pacers.
Second, thank you for that cool, alliterative name. It just rolls off the tongue. Kudos to your mom, or whomever put that thing of beauty together.
Third, thank you for doing something that has never been done before — hitting a game-winning buzzer-beater two days in a row. (I know, Larry Bird did it in back-to-back games, but he had a day off in between those games.) The pump-fake-first-launch-three pointer from the corner against the Wizards on New Year’s Day made me shout, to no one in particular: You have to be [expletive] kidding me! But you don’t kid, DeMar. You just do DeMar stuff. Here’s the shot to beat the Wizards. Adam Amin Act II: “DeMAR! DeLIVERS! AGAIN!” Good call. (What did announcers Amin and Robbie Hummel do to deserve those two finishes, by the way?) So thank you again, DeMar, for starting off 2022 with a bang.
Finally, thank you for the 26.8 points, 5.0 rebounds, and 4.6 assists you are averaging this year (before Saturday’s game). Somebody recently whispered that you might be a league MVP candidate. We’ll see, but it’s not crazy talk. Your team is 24-10, leads the Eastern Conference, and is — maybe above all else — really, really fun to watch. And don’t let the haters tell you that you and the guys are fattening up on COVID-depleted teams. You and every single one of your teammates has missed time due to COVID, and your win yesterday came without Lonzo Ball and Alex Caruso, your team’s best defenders. Stack wins, that’s your job. And the stack is seven wins high, at the moment.
DeMar and Zach
Now, for the apology.
I did not immediately believe. When the Bulls announced they had acquired you this past offseason, I did not quite know what to think. As more than a casual basketball fan, I knew who you were, of course. I mean, you have averaged more than 20 points over the course of a long career. Your record speaks for itself. But to be fair, you are 32 years old. And it wasn’t exactly clear to me how you fit with Zach Lavine, the incumbent alpha Bull. You are 6-feet-6, Zach is 6-5. And then the Bulls picked up Lonzo Ball, who is 6-6. And Alex Caruso, who is 6-5. And Javonte Green, who is 6-5. And Derrick Jones Jr., who is 6-6.
I should have believed, because your bosses seem like they know what they are doing. You weren’t around, but for most recent years the Bulls sort of wallowed in mediocrity under the leadership of John Paxson and Gar Forman — not-so-affectionately known as GarPax. Pax ascended from clutch shooter during the Bulls first three-peat in the early 1990s to the team’s basketball honcho. Gar ascended to GM from being a scout or assistant trainer or Luv-a-Bulls choreographer or something — he was always a little under the radar. Many years ago, GarPax assembled a legitimate championship-caliber team thanks to ping pong balls bouncing wildly in their favor in the NBA draft lottery, allowing the Bulls to draft hometown hero Derrick Rose with the first overall pick. And, to their credit, GarPax hired an actual competent NBA coach in Tom Thibodeau at one point, and he brought a certain identity to the team under which it thrived for a time. GarPax also had a knack for drafting guys who exceeded or at least met expectations to become very solid NBA players, or better — guys like Jimmy Butler, Taj Gibson, Joakim Noah, and Luol Deng.
But before handing over the reins to New Management in April 2020, GarPax had run its course, like a stubborn, too-long-lingering common cold. After injuries derailed the destiny of the Rose/Thibodeau Bulls, GarPax did weird stuff – maybe none weirder than paying an over-the-hill Dwyane Wade a gym full of money to play with Jimmy Butler and Rajon Rondo during the infamous, short-lived Three Alpha Era of Bulls history. That didn’t go so well. So GarPax blew things up, traded Butler for guys and draft picks, one of whom was Lavine. GarPax was really good at acquiring pieces, but not so good at fitting those pieces together. It seemed like the last five years of the GarPax Era was all about collecting pieces that formed teams that never approached being as good as the sum of those pieces. Otto Porter, Wendell Carter, Lauri Markkanen, Kris Dunn. Nice players, but collectively mostly a mess. And it didn’t help, of course, that Jim Boylan, Vinny Del Negro, Fred Hoiberg, and Jim Boylen were the coaches that preceded and followed Thibodeau. I mean — can you believe it, DeMar? A Jim Boylan and a Jim Boylen. And neither of them could coach a lick.
Look, the Bulls have an actual NBA-caliber head coach again!
I should have believed in you, DeMar, because New Management – basketball operations chief Arturas Karnisovas and GM Marc Eversley – went out in September 2020 and hired an actual, bona fide NBA coach in Billy Donovan, a pretty good sign that they knew what the hell they were doing. The AK-Eversley-Donovan trio tinkered last year, when the games were played at local YMCAs without fans, if I recall correctly. They acquired big man Nikola Vucevic from Orlando in a mid-season trade. Hmmm. An actual All-Star center. I thought, this is interesting. But I wasn’t sure how Vucevic fit, exactly. He’s another good piece — but clearly he and Lavine were not enough. As a Bulls fan, the GarPax Era left me skeptical — call it PGPSD, Post-GarPax Stress Disorder. It certainly wasn’t obvious to me that Lavine-Vucevic could elevate the Bulls from also-ran to contender.
Well, it turned out I was right, Vucevic was just another piece. But New Management had a plan to build around the talents of Vucevic and Lavine, without pretending Vucevic and Lavine were some sort of Big Two that could carry the team over the top. This Big Two needed help; in fact, this Big Two needed to become part of a Big Three or Big Four. That’s where you came in, DeMar. New Management acquired you and Lonzo — guys who would not necessarily defer to Vucevic and Lavine, but might actually make them more effective by reducing the need for them to carry too much load. New Management seems to value guys who will guard the perimeter on defense and can score on all three offensive levels. The team reminds me a lot of my favorite college basketball team of all time – the 1988-89 Flying Illini squad that lost to Michigan in the Final Four. That team, like your team, was relentlessly athletic. Every guy was basically the same length – within an inch or two, from point guard to center. The Illini didn’t have anyone comparable to Vucevic, but it had a bunch of versatile, bouncy, athletic guys who loved to play basketball and did it really well together.
I’m sorry, DeMar, because I didn’t realize you were the key to this whole thing. The knock against you was that you took too many difficult, mid-range, two-point shots in an era when analytics say shoot layups, dunks, and threes, and nothing more. But you have that old school mid-range game, you distribute, you rebound, and you get to the free throw line.
What I love about your game is that I imagine it was forged not just in gyms at AAU tournaments, but on the blacktops of Compton, California, where you grew up. “Playground basketball” has a negative connotation, to some. But to me, playground basketball doesn’t mean needlessly fancy passes and one-on-one play. Playground basketball is about toughness; it’s about driving to the rim, absorbing contact, and still getting a shot off — with no ref nearby to blow a whistle. It means getting your shot blocked back in your face, getting the ball back, collecting yourself, and going right back at the guy who blocked it. You are a playground baller, DeMar. I am embarrassed I did not believe in you.
I’ll admit this: I cursed you when you took a crappy shot at the end of the game against the Knicks in the Bulls first loss, early in the season. I thought, “shouldn’t that have been Zach’s shot?” But I realize now you were marking your territory, and it didn’t really matter if that shot fell or not. You missed it, but left no doubt you’d keep taking that shot, if needed. That Zach was not alone any more. You’ve convinced me, DeMar. The Bulls have two guys capable of taking control of fourth quarters, and two guys capable of closing games. You are not afraid to take big shots, and not too proud to let Zach do it. Forgive me for doubting you, DeMar.
Let’s get on with the rest of the season, now that the whole damn Bulls roster — and Donovan — have taken their turns in quarantine. I am interested to see whether a team can contend for the NBA championship without two or three no-doubt Hall-of-Fame caliber guys. There is no Steph Curry here, no Lebron, no Kevin Durant, no Greek Freak. But color me intrigued by what your bosses have put together – a team that seems to be more than the sum of its parts. Very, very intrigued.
Let me finish by saying Happy New Year, DeMar. And, belatedly, welcome to Chicago. I don’t know how long this will last, but for the time being, Da Bulls have become De Bulls.
If you ever met my Mom, you probably heard The Story. But you didn’t get the whole story.
Imagine this. You are a woman and married at 18, to a man roughly two years older, recently out of the Marine Corps. He had barely a high school education and an uncertain future, but he was handsome and a bit of a rake, and you were about to start a journey together that would last six decades.
You start having kids at 19, in 1950. First a girl. Then a boy, and a girl … and a boy. And then a run of four more girls. (With two miscarriages sprinkled in for good measure.) By 1960, you are the mother of eight children, from newborn to 10 years old. Somehow, you and your husband had just lived through a blur of a decade of baby bottles and diapers and jobs and half-baked business ventures.
After your eighth child is born, you become pregnant again. That’s just what you did. You carry another child nearly to term, but late in the pregnancy you feel something’s not right. The baby isn’t moving. The doctors confirm your fear, and you give birth to a stillborn baby girl. You return home to the house full of eager big brothers and big sisters ready to add another to their brood, but without a baby. The crib that had been readied got banished to storage, or somewhere else.
At that point, a doctor counsels that your child-bearing days are over, that your body cannot take any more, and that another pregnancy could threaten your life. Though you were heartbroken to have lost that little girl, you follow his advice and have a tubal ligation performed. That’ll do it, you think.
And then, in late 1964, when you start feeling a little off. You tell your husband, “if I didn’t know any better, I would think I am pregnant.” You visit the doctor and a pregnancy test confirms the unthinkable. You are pregnant, again. After having decided on a procedure that would prevent you from ever hearing these words again, you hear them loud and clear: “you’re pregnant.”
Imagine that.
If you’ve heard the abridged version of The Story, you know the punchline: the person on the receiving end of that news was my Mom, and I was the surprising addition to the family. Number 9. And I am typing these words because she made a decision to give me a chance at life.
* * *
My mother died on Memorial Day. She was 90 years old. Her last two weeks or so were spent at home, in her bedroom, under hospice care. A series of chronic medical issues, mini-strokes, falls, and a pandemic that confined her to her apartment for the better part of 15 months sapped what remained of her physical health and her will to live. She was ready to go, and my siblings and I all came to the conclusion that it was time to let her go. She died peacefully, having lived a full life. She is reunited with my father, who died in 2009, and the third oldest of my siblings, Elaine, who died in 2015.
* * *
My Mom spent the last couple decades of her life in Park Ridge, Illinois, first in the condominium she shared with my Dad, and for the last two years in her own apartment in a nice, new assisted living facility that she jokingly called “The Home.”
Though I’ve made the drive from my home to “The Home” many times, last Wednesday’s drive was different. On that particular drive, The Story came rushing to the front of my mind and wouldn’t go away. I’ve heard The Story dozens of times, usually when my Mom had cornered some unsuspecting neighbor or colleague on the occasion of some gathering. The Story was one that my Mom never hesitated to share, no matter the audience or occasion. The Story became her shtick.
And that was okay with me, though I rolled my eyes a lot. Truth be told, throughout my life, The Story never really fazed me. OK, my Mom was done having kids, I snuck through. Thank goodness for medical malpractice. On rare occasions, a sibling might have said, “you were a mistake” or “you weren’t even supposed to be here” – to which my Mom would always say, if she heard, “don’t listen to them, you were a blessing.” I was never fazed because I did not much care how it all came down. It was always good enough for me to be alive, if not anticipated.
* * *
What hit me on that drive last Wednesday was a realization that the frail, dying woman I was about to visit had faced a gigantic decision more than five decades ago, and I owe my very existence to the choice she made at that moment in time. My Mom was baptized and confirmed a Lutheran, but she did not regularly attend church as an adult and no one would peg her a “religious woman.” I am certain that her decision to give birth to me was not compelled by dogma or fear that terminating her pregnancy would lead to her eternal damnation – maybe in part because Lutherans aren’t big on dogma or eternal damnation. But I am equally certain that her decision was supported by a simple, almost quaint faith that God’s will would be done. That is, against evidence and professional counseling, she followed her instincts and gave it up to God. That kind of thought process is the very definition of faith. Despite the prospect that it would all end terribly, or worse – she carried on with a little bit of faith.
Who really could have blamed her if she had made a different decision? Eight kids at home, all under 15. And then, “you’re pregnant”? Could anyone have blamed her for choosing to be done – forever – with baby bottles and diapers? Could anyone have blamed her for wanting to avoid the prospect of enduring the crushing disappointment of a second stillborn child? Could anyone have blamed her for wanting to avoid the tragedy of leaving eight children motherless trying to give birth to a ninth?
My oldest sister – who was 15 when I was born – does not recall any hesitation on my Mom’s part. And knowing my Mom as I did, I doubt that she made a show of the decision. After the initial shock of “you’re pregnant,” she most likely quickly decided to forge ahead with the pregnancy without a second thought. But beneath the surface, she must have been terrified of the prospect of a another stillborn child. In fact, I am told she did absolutely nothing to ready a room for an infant. No crib. No changing table. No diapers. Nothing. She lived in fear of being enveloped again in the darkness of a stillborn, or worse. She could not prepare herself for the joy of a newborn baby against the prospect of that darkness.
Once the news came back from the hospital in July of 1965 that she had given birth to a healthy, 5-pound, 7-ounce baby boy, friends and family scurried about setting up the house for my arrival. The darkness averted, my family prepared to squeeze one more child into the bungalow on Sacramento Avenue. With eight kids packed into two tiny bedrooms, I have no idea where they put me.
* * *
For reasons that now leave me feeling a little selfish, until last Wednesday I really had not thought much about the moment when my Mom was told, “you’re pregnant.” How did she react? Did she cry? Did she laugh? Did she curse the doctor who apparently botched the tubal ligation? I know now that she was terrified that she might carry another child to term, go into labor, leave for the hospital to give birth, and come home empty-handed. I never really, truly appreciated the gravity of the moment. Eight kids at home. A stillborn daughter. Tubal ligation. A high-risk pregnancy. No more diapers. No more bottles. Every kid off to school. Finally, she had started to see light at the end of a tunnel full of babies and toddlers. And then, out of the blue, “you’re pregnant.” Mom did not flinch. She made a decision, endured what must have been an excruciating pregnancy, and brought me into the world.
* * *
My Mom’s last few months (heck, years) have been a roller-coaster ride – for her and for her children. In recent weeks, after her umpteenth fall and hospitalization, she was intermittently in pain, agitated, always tired, mostly sleeping. For brief stretches, she rallied and communicated coherently. About 10 days ago, she noticed I was wearing a golf shirt and asked if I had played. “Yep,” I said. “How’d you do?,” she said weakly. I said, “not so good, but I made a birdie on 18.” With my wife as my witness, my Mom’s face lit up and eyes got wide and she said, “You made a birdie!?! Good.” (Apparently, she understood the rarity of such an event.)
By last Wednesday, she was seemingly nearing the end, and she was resting. No pain. No agitation. Just the labored breathing of a dying woman. At that moment, I closed her bedroom door and we shared a room no more than a mile or two from Lutheran General Hospital, where she brought me into the world. Just the two of us, alone. Though I had thanked her many times for many things, I don’t think I’d ever thanked her – specifically – for making the choice that led to The Story. For soldiering through a high-risk pregnancy. But I did it. I said it out loud, through more tears than I’ve shed in a long, long time. And it felt good.
I cannot be certain that she heard me, but I’ll die believing she did. And I’ll die only because I lived, and I lived only because my Mom decided that I should have that chance. She was willing to face the prospect of darkness – or even death – to give me a chance to see the light of day.
* * *
Rest in peace, Mom. And forever, and finally, thank you.
This won’t be immediately obvious, but this post celebrates what is – by far – the most memorable University of Illinois basketball season in 16 years, and maybe the most likeable Illinois team I have ever followed, in any sport. So if you’re here for Illini content, stay with me. And if you’re not, stay for the movie quotes.
In the Summer of 1981, I turned 16, and a few weeks before my birthday the movie Stripes was released. It was one of the top five movies at the box office in North America that year, a careening comedy starring Bill Murray and featuring Harold Ramis, John Candy, John Larroquette, Judge Reinhold and a bunch of other recognizable actors.
Stripes is one of those movies teeming with sticky lines. Teenage boys who saw the movie over and over and over through their college years have become middle-aged men who frequently recite its many memorable lines.
For whatever reason, an early scene in Stripes is one I remember vividly. In that scene, loser-in-life and soon-to-be U.S. Army recruit John Winger (Bill Murray) returns home after quitting his job as a cab driver. As he walks up to his apartment, his car gets re-possessed, and he drops a pizza he is carrying onto the street. Having an all-time bad day, he staggers dejectedly into his apartment. And promptly gets dumped by his girlfriend, Anita (Roberta Leighton).
Murray desperately attempts to keep Anita on board with a combination of flattery and humor. He tells her, “you’re a sexual dynamo! Most guys couldn’t even handle you. I’ve been reading books on the outside just so I can keep up with you!” Anita is unmoved. She tells him: “It’s not funny. You’re going nowhere, John. It’s just not that cute any more.” And then – with John on his knees and Anita on her way out the door – came the exchange that inspired the title of this post:
Anita: Look, I like you, but I need something more. I need somebody who is going to develop with me, someone who is going to grow with me. Goodbye.
John: Who could grow more than me? Talk about massive potential for growth! I am the little acorn that becomes the oak! You can’t go! All the plants are gonna die.
stripes, 1981.
A Return to Relevance
What does any of this have to do with Illini basketball, you ask? Well, there has been a noticeable uptick in chatter about my beloved Fighting Illini this year, and just about every time I’m asked my thoughts about this team, I summon that word: growth.
Through the steady guidance of fiery Head Coach Brad Underwood, the Illinois basketball program is the little acorn – okay, maybe a sapling? – that is becoming an oak, right before our eyes. Illinois – now ranked #3 in the nation – has returned to relevance in a sport in which it should be relevant, given history, proximity to great high school basketball talent, and other factors. The barriers to building a sustainable, competitive football team do not exist when it comes to basketball. And Illinois, ranked #16 in college basketball history in wins and generally considered a Top 15 program based on its accomplishments, really should be an NCAA tournament team year in and year out, even playing in the uber-rugged Big Ten.
Coach Underwood and Giorgi B.
And not too long ago, it was. Between 1981, when Stripes was released, and 2011, Illinois made the NCAA tournament field 24 times. It made Final Four appearances in 1989 and in 2005, when it lost to North Carolina in the title game. Lou Henson. Lon Kruger. Bill Self. Bruce Weber. All kept the train moving forward.
But, as John Winger said to himself in an empty apartment several seconds after Anita left him: “And then, depression set in.” The energetic and earnest John Groce coached the Illini for five seasons (2012-2017), and delivered a whopping one NCAA tournament appearance, in his first year coaching Weber’s leftovers. Not good enough. Illinois athletic director Josh Whitman took the flickering torch of the basketball program from Groce’s hands and searched for someone to bring the flame back.
Enter Underwood. I heard the news of Underwood’s hiring on a chilly Saturday afternoon in March 2017, while watching my son’s high school baseball game. I remember thinking, “Brad Underwood? I know the name … but where does he coach, again?” I quickly caught up on his story. Hard-nosed coach from the Bob Huggins/Frank Martin coaching tree. Decades-long dues payer as an assistant at various colleges. Junior college coach. Got his shot at Stephen F. Austin and had enormous success and two NCAA tournament appearances. Got hired by Oklahoma State and led the Cowboys to the tournament in his one year at that school. And then he got sideways with his AD and felt underappreciated, giving super-hero AD Whitman the opening he needed to strike fast and spirit him away to Champaign on a private jet. That’s how super-hero athletic directors roll.
Underwood came in with a reputation for fast-paced, efficient offense and high-pressure defense. The coach Underwood replaced, Groce, had actually lined up a stellar recruiting class on his way out the door, including two current Illini (Floridian Trent Frazier and Illini legacy Da’Monte Williams) and two standouts from the Metro East area on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, Jeremiah Tilmon and Javon Pickett. But when Groce was fired new Missouri coach Cuonzo Martin pounced, flipping Tilmon and Pickett to his side. In an early recruiting win, however, Underwood did convince Mark Smith of Edwardsville, Illinois’ Mr. Basketball, to join the Illini. So the new guy could recruit a bit. Good start.
Who is that masked man?
Goodbye, Mark; Hello, Ayo
In Underwood’s first year, the Illini were 14-18, and won all of 4 games in the Big Ten. Four! And at the end of the year, Smith transferred to … wait for it … Cuonzo Martin and Mizzou. Based on tidbits I’ve picked up in my Illini hoops reading over the years, it seems Smith and his parents were not enthralled with Underwood’s tough love coaching style, and maybe even less enthralled with Smith taking a back seat to Frazier, who made the All-Big Ten Freshman team and was second on the Illini in scoring. Oddly, Smith’s departure may have kickstarted the ascent of the Illinois program. And that’s not necessarily a knock on the kid – he was unhappy and had every right to transfer, and Illinois did not stand in the way of his pitch for immediate eligibility at Mizzou. He has gone on to have an okay career. He’s not a star, but he’s okay (and, maddeningly, has beaten Illinois three times in the annual Braggin’ Rights matchup!#$!).
In hindsight, Smith’s departure worked out well for Illinois because it made it easy for Underwood to hand the reins of the program to the highest-rated Illinois recruit in a decade, Ayo Dosunmu from Morgan Park High School in Chicago. Dosunmu was a big, big get. A top-tier recruit who stayed home, ending the exodus of Chicago Public League standouts to blue blood programs like Kentucky and Duke and Kansas. At 6-5, he arrived as a wiry 170-pounder, soaking wet. Mediocre jump shot. Average ballhandler. Underdeveloped physically. But it was apparent from Day 1 he could play. From the start of his college career, you could see Ayo had it. Like all great basketball players, he was unafraid of the big moment. He glided around the court with his head on a swivel, he had good court awareness. He found ways to score. Not a jump-out-of-the gym type, Ayo just had a knack for finding the ball in his hands with the game on the line. He embraced pressure. He embraced the role of Face of the Program. He wanted to be great, and he wanted to put in the work to be great.
Still, even with Ayo on board – as well as the effusive and surprisingly effective Giorgi Bezhanishvili, another freshman – the Illini limped to a 12-21 record, improving to seven wins in the conference. Ayo flirted briefly with turning professional after his freshman year (all great high school players think that “one-and-done” is a possibility when they leave high school).
Enter Kofi
But Ayo wasn’t ready, and help was on the way – principally in the person of a 7-foot, 290-pound Jamaican named Kofi Cockburn (pronounced, KO-burn, for those of you who giggled), who played as a prep in New York and then Virginia. A relative neophyte to basketball, Cockburn has what coaches cannot teach or drill – size. Kofi is a large, large human being.
Cockburn started at center for Illinois from Day 1. And beginning with the 2019-2020 season, Illinois basketball became the Ayo and Kofi Show. Ayo was the lightning fast guard, Kofi was the thunderous presence in the middle. The program was back to cooking with gas. Ayo’s legend grew with game-winning shots on the road at Penn State and Michigan. Kofi – raw as he was – was immediately a factor. The Illini basically flipped their record from the prior season – from 21 losses to 21 wins. From 7-13 in the Big Ten to 13-7. A key piece of that turnaround was senior guard Andres Feliz, a bulldog of a guard who personified everything Underwood wanted the program to become on the court: tough, smart, relentless. Illinois was back, and headed for the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2013. The six-year streak of missing out on March Madness was over. Illinois was entering the post-season on a roll, playing its best basketball of the Underwood era.
And then, just when Illinois had pried open the door and had one foot across the threshold, COVID-19 slammed it shut. First, the Big Ten tournament and NCAA tournaments were cancelled. Then, Ayo announced he was entering the NBA draft. And then, Kofi announced he was entering the NBA draft. Cue John Winger. For Illinois fans – for what seemed like the umpteenth time in the last decade – depression set in.
But this time, depression was short-lived, because not only did the pandemic derail Illinois’ return to the NCAA tournament, it very well may have delayed the professional careers of Ayo and Kofi. Lacking the post-season to showcase their abilities and lacking a normal pre-draft interview/workout process to impress prospective employers, Ayo and Kofi were left with uncertain professional prospects, at best. In fact, most of the pre-draft “mock” drafts had neither Ayo nor Kofi being picked at all in the NBA draft’s two rounds – an assessment that did not surprise me at all. Both remained unfinished products, with lots of room for improvement. So Ayo and Kofi were each faced with the choice of turning professional during a global pandemic with uncertain job prospects, or coming back to attend to unfinished business at Illinois.
Let’s do this again, Kofi
The Stars Align
Ayo’s late July announcement that he was returning was quickly followed by Kofi’s announcement that he was returning, too. For Illinois basketball fans, this was nirvana. And to add fuel to the fire of optimism that gripped Illini Nation, in addition to several other key returnees – like Frazier, Giorgi B. and Da’Monte Williams – Illinois was adding two Top 50 recruits in Adam Miller and Andre Curbelo. Finally. The stars were aligning.
But the alignment of stars isn’t ever quite enough. The Illini seemed poised for success, but this wasn’t a Kentucky or Duke deal. Those teams simply re-load every year by signing four or five of the Top 50-100 high school players, usually including one or two each in the Top 10. In normal years, the Coach Ks and John Caliparis of the world roll out the ball, coach ‘em up for a month or two, experience a few growing pains, and then become a problem for everyone else come Spring. Illinois was talented coming into this season, but not that talented. Ayo and Kofi and Miller and Curbelo chose Illinois over other great programs, but not over Kentucky or Duke. The blue blood programs get the NBA-ready guys – like Zion Williamson or Anthony Davis. Not Illinois. Not yet.
Illinois entered the season ranked in the Top 10 because it had taken giant steps forward since Underwood was hired: the talent had been upgraded, sure, but what Underwood really brought was an identity, toughness, and resolve that had been missing for a long time. But it would take more to get to where the Illini stand today: on the verge of a #1 seed in the upcoming NCAA tournament.
The Season
Lots of people get paid to chronicle the college basketball season, but not me. So I’m not going to talk about the games. I’m not going to talk about the losses to Baylor and Mizzou and Maryland. I’m not going to talk about the three straight road wins against ranked teams (two in the Top 10) to end the season, or the outrageous second half at Northwestern early in the year, or the takedown of Iowa at home, or the flawless dismantling of Minnesota at The Barn, or the come-from-behind capstone win in the regular season finale at Ohio State to all but lock up that #1 seed.
Heck, I’m not even going to pause very long to talk about the beatdown of #2-ranked Michigan in Ann Arbor last week. Thanks to Tom Izzo encouraging his players to pretend the basketball court was shaped like a mixed martial arts octagon when Illinois played at Michigan State a couple of weeks back, Ayo’s nose was broken and his brain concussed. So Illinois faced Michigan without Ayo, and the oddsmakers gave the Illini little chance. So what did Underwood do? He unleashed the dogs. Illinois played absolutely suffocating defense, seized every loose ball, dominated the backboards, and won by 23. On that night, Illinois’ basketballers did to Michigan what Ohio State’s footballers have been doing to Michigan for the better part of a decade. Michigan basketball coach Juwan Howard visited the woodshed Jim Harbaugh visits every November, having been taken there not by the Buckeyes, but by the Illini.
The season may end for Illinois with a glorious run to the Final Four, and it may end with a soul-crushing upset loss in the tournament, or with some result neither as glorious or soul-crushing. And that’s why it was important to me to write this right now. For no matter the end to this season, Illinois basketball is back … and I think it’s back to stay. And it’s back to stay because the acorn is becoming the oak.
Becoming the Oak
Underwood grew. Two years ago, he abandoned a defensive style he had long favored because it was simply not working. I like coaches who are “good stubborn” (stay true to core principles) but aren’t “stupid stubborn” (fail to adapt to their rosters). Underwood adapted. He tolerated mistakes from young players. And – this is underrated but a big part of the story – he was forced to do something no college basketball coach has ever had to do: figure out how to guide a group of young men through a college basketball season during a pandemic. Underwood wasn’t alone in facing that challenge, but he met it head on. Perhaps Illinois’ greatest accomplishment this year: zero positive COVID tests since last August among the 30 or so people associated with the program.
The star of stars, Ayo, grew. He worked relentlessly on his game and his body. The skinny 170-pound kid is now a chiseled 205. And his legend as a late-game closer has grown. Junior-year Ayo and freshman-year Ayo have the same “attack the rim” mentality. But Ayo is now finishing above the rim, scoring over much taller players and absorbing contact that allows him to finish what he starts. There is no doubt Ayo will re-test the NBA waters this Spring. This time, mock drafts project him being drafted in the first round. Good decision to return, young man.
Kofi grew – not physically, but in every other way. His stamina is better. His defense is better. His finishing around the rim is better. He still can exhibit a blacksmith’s touch, especially at the free throw line, and has a long way to go to become a certain NBA player. But Kofi will make a living somewhere playing basketball, whenever he wants to take that step.
The Veterans – Frazier, Williams, and Giorgi B. – grew. Frazier, after leading Illinois in scoring as a freshman, has become a dominant on-ball defender and secondary scoring option. But he’s still got the offensive juice when he needs it – just ask Michigan. And Williams, a jack-of-all-trades glue guy, became a knockdown three-point shooter. Always a willing and effective defender, Williams’ improvement as a three-point shooter has been nothing short of head-scratching in a really, really good way. His three-point shooting percentages in his four years: .225, .317, .283, .545. Giorgi B. – a surprise as a low-post scorer as a freshman – has essentially become Kofi’s butler and occasional frontcourt mate. There is no more infectiously positive player in college basketball. His performances on the court range from scintillating to maddening, sometimes in the same possession! Schizophrenia in shorts. But he’s impossible not to like.
The Freshmen grew. Miller is going to be a big-time scorer before he leaves Illinois, but in the meantime he has become an excellent defender. Bring your fancy high school resume and your Mr. Basketball award and your state titles, but unless you bring the willingness to play defense, you are not going to play for Brad Underwood at Illinois. Miller figured that out immediately.
Andre the Magnificent
And then there is the other key freshman, Andre Curbelo, All-Big Ten Freshman team pick and the conference’s Sixth-Man of the Year. He is a dead ringer for Welcome Back Kotter’s Juan Epstein, and a special, special player. For much of the season he made two types of play: the spectacular or the boneheaded. I happened to watch a bunch of Curbelo’s high school video clips when he signed with Illinois, and I knew what the Illini were getting: an electric player with way, way, way above average basketball IQ. He is unlike any player Illinois has had during my 40+ years as an Illinois fan. Fully aware I am stepping out on something of a limb here, I predict Andre Curbelo will go down as the best pure point guard in Illinois history, and that his jersey will hang from the rafters of the State Farm Center. In Ayo’s absence late in the season, Curbelo became maybe Illinois’ most valuable player, Jamaican big men included. The turnovers have decreased, the steady and crafty plays have increased. More, please.
And The Other Guys have grown, too. Every great college basketball team has a bunch of unsung guys, most of whom play little but cheer on their teammates like crazy. A few of The Other Guys – namely transfer Jacob Grandison and freshman Coleman Hawkins – have contributed at key moments on the court. But all of the Illini – whether scholarship players or walk-ons – have formed one of the best, most demonstrative benches in college basketball this year. And that’s a big deal when the energy usually supplied by fans is missing. The non-playing Illini have figured that out; especially this year, they can bring energy to their teammates.
Point Guard and Coach
Every Sixteen Years
The Flying Illini in 1989 made the Final Four. Sixteen years later, the Dee/Deron/Luther Illini in 2005 were national runner-up. Sixteen years later, the 2021 Illini have yet to write their final chapter. I cannot get worked up about the debate as to whether 16-4 Illinois deserved to share the conference title with 14-3 Michigan. Josh Whitman wrote an open letter passionately expressing the view that Illinois and Michigan should have been named co-champions. I don’t really care. Win nine straight or even seven straight, and nobody will care.
Illinois fans will be despondent if this team flames out, for good reason. This team is talented, well-coached, and together. That combination normally leads to success in March. But whatever the end for this team, the ride has been a blast. And the ride has been so much more fun because we are two years removed from a 12-21 season. Illinois grew into this, and it didn’t come easily.
Is the oak fully formed and ready to withstand whatever March brings? We are about to find out. But Illinois basketball is back to being relevant, and I have a feeling Illinois fans won’t have to wait 16 years after 2021 for another buzz-worthy basketball season.
On January 24, 1967, the high temperature in Chicago was a toasty 65 degrees. Two days later, it started snowing. Between January 26 and 27, a cold front ushered in a blizzard that dropped a 23-inch white blanket on the city’s streets, still a record single-storm snowfall to this day. I was not quite two years old, and I have no memory of the storm, but I’ve heard about that storm many, many times – anyone who lived through that storm and its 50 mile-per-hour winds and 15-foot drifts will never (let you) forget it.
The Blizzard of ’67 was surely the seminal weather event of that winter, but the seminal political event that winter – at least for my family – was the contest for alderman in Chicago’s 40th Ward in the Albany Park neighborhood. The race wasn’t particularly close or notable, except that the loser was Herb Veith – my father. And – as the photo at the top of this post illustrates – it marks the first and only time I have lent my likeness to campaign literature. Not that I had a choice; I’m the little kid nestled between the bespectacled candidate’s buzz cut and my mother’s sporty bouffant.
Like the Blizzard of ’67, my Dad’s brief dalliance with politics was something I heard about growing up. It was not the subject of a lot of discussion or reminiscing, by any means. Until recently, all I really knew is (1) that Dad ran against Seymour Simon, a machine-backed fixture of Democratic politics in Chicago who later became a justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, and (2) that Seymour cleaned Dad’s clock. A couple of months ago I noticed the campaign flyer, which hangs in a frame in my office at home. It got me to thinking about Dad’s run for alderman and his politics and my politics and what it all meant, if anything.
The Bliss of Political Apathy
For most of my adult life, my engagement with politics at all levels – local, state, and national – was minimal. At some point, I became very cynical about politics and, mostly, politicians. I came to a view that I hold today more than ever: most politicians (particularly the legislators in Washington) don’t give a rat’s ass about me, or about “doing what’s right,” or “upholding the Constitution,” or anything else. Their purpose is gaining and retaining power, and to do that they need to be re-elected. Every. Single. Thing. They. Do. It’s all about being re-elected. For that reason, they vote with their wallets in mind. It’s really that simple. It’s all about self-preservation. The office is the source of their power, and the power is the thing. And you vote however you need to vote to keep the money flowing into your campaign coffers. If a member of Congress is from a district that is solidly Blue or Red, the way to retain power is to be more Blue or more Red than his or her primary opponent, to please the donors. Upholding the Constitution? Doing what’s right for the country? Compromise? Quaint ideas all. Quaint.
I studied political science a little bit in college, attended law school, and entered the legal profession – so I did not entirely avoid the cohort of citizens who follow and, in many cases, have strong opinions about politics and policy and government and all that. As I got busy with life – becoming an adult, working, starting a family, honing my sports trivia knowledge, etc. – my cynicism may have drifted to apathy. I just did not have a lot of time to invest into following politics, given my other interests. Typically, I voted – and I believe I always voted in the Presidential election – but at no point did I really dig in and engage, and pick a side. I have always been someone who voted for people, not parties. I believe I’ve voted in 10 Presidential elections – and I’m 6-3-1, meaning I voted for the ticket of one political party six time, the other three times, and on one occasion I abstained because I could not in good conscience vote for either candidate. But aside from reading up on the presidential candidates and their policies and doing a rough assessment of what seemed, at the time, to fit my view of what is best for the country, I was mostly apathetic. It was blissful, frankly.
Five years ago, all that changed. This isn’t a post about the last five years in America or the events of January 6, 2021 or anything else. Frankly, I don’t have the energy. But about five years ago something – more like someone – happened that punched me in the face and said, “you have to pay more attention to what’s going on here!” And I did. I paid a lot of attention, because it was hard not to. And I emerged from those five years a more engaged, educated citizen. With higher blood pressure. And anxiety. For that, I am … thankful? Well – I am thankful for the “more engaged, educated” part, at least.
The Color Purple
Today, politics in America is all about being Blue or being Red. If you are Team Blue, you’re a far-left liberal socialist Antifa-loving police-hating open-borders China-loving radical Democrat. If you are Team Red, you are a far-right conservative Limbaugh-loving QAnon spouting Proud Boy Oath Keeper Capitol lynch mob racist.
Prince Liked Purple
It’s all so stupid. We are all human beings. We are all Americans. Many of us are blessed with comfortable lives and more “things” than we need. Most of us have good hearts and would help a friend (or even a stranger) in need without hesitation. Most of us take no pleasure in seeing others suffer. Most of us take no pleasure in unfairness and injustice in any form. Most of us are law-abiding and norm-respecting. Most of us admire people who work hard and make an honest living, but are also empathetic and understand that some people have been dealt an impossibly difficult hand of cards with which to play the game of life.
What’s wrong with Purple? Why Red or Blue? Why isn’t it okay to be Purple?
Why Do I Prefer Purple?
I’m officially declaring myself Purple – an Independent. Many of my friends identify Blue or Red. I have close, close friends on both sides. Happily, the political cauldron of the last four years has not caused me to lose any friends – at least as far as I know. I have had many calm, civil conversations with people on both sides of the political spectrum with whom I disagree. One observation: many, many people are single-issue voters. And that single issue is money. Like, which candidate is more likely than the other to (a) keep the stock market humming, and (b) minimize my tax bill? But that’s obviously not universally true; one well-taken lesson learned from recent political history is that your net worth does not necessarily predict whether you are Team Red or Team Blue. And both the rich and poor can chafe at the so-called “establishment” if it suits their world view, and they do.
But living in the cauldron did get me to think a lot about how people come to have such strong and seemingly unshakeable political opinions – or, more to the point, why some people who I know to be smart, generous, thoughtful, and rational are so willing to look the other way when it comes to objectively indefensible, awful behavior by someone on “their team.” Many, many people ask one question when determining whether to support a candidate: “Republican or Democrat?” I think that’s nuts. It was one thing for fans of the Chicago Cubs in 2016 to cheer for Aroldis Chapman, the closer with domestic abuse issues who came over in a mid-season trade and was instrumental in the Cubs winning the World Series. He could throw a ball 102 miles an hour, after all. But I wouldn’t have voted for him had he run for President, or the Senate, or for the local Water Reclamation District. I am convinced, however, that there are people who would happily vote Aroldis Chapman for President – as long he was on the right team. Character be damned.
Aroldis for President?
Part of the answer to why some are so staunchly Democrat or so staunchly Republican is that we all live in our own information bubbles. The opinions I reach about candidates or elected officials are based on the information I consume, which is a set of information unique to me. I get that. But in some cases it’s also at least a little bit about where we come from, where we live now, where we work and – most importantly – who we grew up around, who we live and work and play with on a regular basis.
“Vote for Our Dad”
I’m not sure I ever noticed it before I looked at the campaign flyer, but Herb Veith ran as a “Non-Partisan Candidate.” I knew he didn’t run as a Democrat, because I knew he ran against Seymour Simon and the Machine, and the Machine won. And I thought about something else. When I was a kid I would occasionally ask my Dad or Mom on election day, “who’d you vote for?” The answer was always in the form of a question and was always the same: “Can you keep a secret?” Me, with the excitement of someone about to be entrusted with a secret: “Yeah!!!” My parent (either one): “Well so can I.” Every. Single. Time. To this day, I do not know my parents’ politics. In researching this post, my oldest brother had a minority view – that my parents were staunch Republicans at one point. But none of the other siblings I spoke to shared that memory. They all remember what I remember vividly: “Can you keep a secret?”
If my brother is right and my Dad was a Republican in the 1960s, so be it. I had no clue. I’m thankful I had a clean slate, coming out of childhood. Or at least that I could approach politics without the burden of my parents’ political beliefs.
VEITH IS … VEITH WILL …
I love that campaign flyer. I love the front side because it shows may parents and our dog, Pirate, and all nine of the kids jammed into the living room in the best clothes we could dig up to stand still (or be held without fussing) for a couple minutes. And I love seeing those baseboard radiators that would hiss and moan on days like today, when the temperature flirted with zero. And I really love that the front of the flyer describes my Dad as a “Non-Partisan Candidate for Alderman.”
And I love the backside of the campaign flyer, too. I love the simplicity of “VEITH IS …” and “VEITH WILL …” And the reminder to anyone conditioned to think otherwise, “YOU NEED NOT DECLARE YOUR PARTY TO VOTE THE ALDERMANIC BALLOT.” I asked a few of my siblings and my Mom why my Dad threw his hat in the ring and decided to take on Seymour Simon, who was pretty much a sure thing. No one knew for certain. The consensus was that he’d gotten a taste of political activism when the Chicago Public Schools wanted to re-draw boundaries in a way that would have resulted in his kids having to cross bustling Irving Park Road to attend Cleveland School, which was about a half-mile away, rather than attend Bateman School, a short block-and-a-half walk north on Sacramento Avenue.
What seems certain to me – based on the flyer, and on my family’s recollection, and my own knowledge of my father’s life – was that he was not on a power trip, and that he had no desire to make a life in politics. By then, after a decade of working every type of job imaginable to feed a growing brood of children, he had settled into what would become a life-altering gig for him, a job as a State Farm Insurance agent. In short, my Dad most likely ran for alderman because some buddies at the local tavern said, “Herbie, you should run for alderman!” And my Dad – who was endlessly curious and adventurous in his own way – likely said, why not?! And thought … maybe, just maybe, I can do some good for the neighborhood.
My Dad was the ultimate neighborhood guy – he lived in and raised his family in a brick bungalow he bought from his in-laws. He served the neighborhood, and that service was returned with the patronage of generations of friends and acquaintances who insured their cars and their homes with State Farm, through him. He took a run at Seymour Simon not because he thought it was going to make him rich, or powerful, or notorious, or run up his number of Twitter followers. Maybe he’d get a few more people to stroll into his agency – which was located in a different ward. I suspect he just wanted to serve the neighborhood. To make living in the ward incrementally better.
I Have A Dream
About 10 days ago, I was talking to a guy who has served for close to a decade on the park district board and school board in his suburban Chicago community, and is presently running for an aldermanic seat. I mentioned my Dad, and the fact that he ran for alderman more than half a century ago in the 40th Ward. I asked him about serving on a school board during a pandemic, and serving in local government – generally – during such a polarizing time in America.
He confirmed my worst fears, frankly. He said parents and teachers and administrators advocating their positions are more strident than ever. Compromise is rare. Public meetings are heated. Respecting different points of view? Not so much. Members of the school board are routinely accused of “playing politics.” A school board!! Red vs. Blue is perceived to be a thing – even at the school board level.
Ever the optimist, I am hopeful that this day in American political life passes – just like the Blizzard of ’67. I am certain that by the time the voters of the 40th Ward – about 20% of whom took the opportunity to “Vote for Our Dad” – trudged to the polls about a month later, the streets were clear and the sidewalks were shoveled. The storm was etched in the city’s history and the memories of all who survived. But it passed, and life went on. Perhaps this period of intense polarization in America will pass, too.
I have a dream. Mine is less noble and aspirational than Dr. King’s, to be sure, but I dream of a day of selfless, intelligent, public service at all levels of government. I dream of bipartisan legislation of real significance. I dream of politicians who can reach across the aisle and cut deals, and not have to worry about being “primaried” to oblivion. Better, I dream of politicians who do the right thing because their terms are limited – politicians who serve the public for a reasonable number of years, and then go back to being teachers or lawyers or doctors or insurance agents.
It’s temporary, I promise, but my level of give-a-shit about following sports is at an all-time low. Don’t get me wrong, as I write this I have college football on the television a few feet to my left. And for the last few months I’ve dabbled in online, now-legal sports betting for the heck of it – putting small wagers on baseball, hockey, basketball, golf, a soccer game, and most recently, college football. (I won $43 when Ohio State covered yesterday, so there’s that.) Because some habits are hard to break, I will still carve out time to watch the beloved Bears every week, manage two fantasy football teams, read the sports section, and generally try to maintain my sports literacy.
So yeah … I still care a little bit, and I still watch to a point. But there is no doubt that the tumult and gravity of 2020 has occupied a lot more of my brain space than is the norm, and my attention to sports has ebbed. Maybe that’s a sign of personal growth and appropriate redistribution of attention from subjects that don’t matter a whole lot, at the end of the day, to subjects that are critically important – like dealing with a pandemic, widespread social unrest, elections, and the new Borat movie, to name a few.
But this past Friday night, I was ready for some sports immersion. All week, I looked forward to watching the Illinois-Wisconsin football game – the kick-off to a delayed, truncated Big Ten season. I am a die-hard Illinois fan across all sports. It’s my alma mater, and that’s reason enough for me to care about the Fighting Illini. Rationally, no person would invest the time and energy I have invested following the Illinois football team over the last 40 years or so. During that period, Illinois football has been … well, mostly awful. Two Rose Bowl appearances (both losses), irregular and mostly forgettable appearances in other bowl games, and memorable upset wins approximately once a decade – that’s about all I have to show for four decades of devotion to the Illini.
But that’s okay. From time to time I’ve asked, why do you do this to yourself? At times it does feel that I’m stuck in an abusive relationship of sorts. But the short answer is this, I went to school there – that’s my team. So I’ll pay attention and root for the Illini forever – it’s just part of what I do and who I am.
Leading up to Friday night, I was optimistic. At the start of every season for any team I care about, I tend to be an optimist. Illinois had a four-game Big Ten winning streak last year, upset a Wisconsin team then ranked in the Top 10, and made its first bowl game game in Lovie Smith’s four years as head coach. This year, it returns a fairly experienced team, a senior quarterback, and has added some reinforcements through the NCAA’s transfer portal. I noted early in the week that Illinois was a 23.5-point underdog. What? That’s outrageous! No respect! – such were the wailings of the fan base. For my part, I eagerly awaited confirmation that he Fighting Lovies had turned the corner, and could compete with the Big Boy Badgers.
Well, I made it for 43 minutes of action. With about two minutes left in the third quarter of what eventually would be a 45-7 Wisconsin win, I quietly turned off the television in one room of my house, walked a few steps, and joined my wife in watching an episode of Season 2 of The Handmaid’s Tale, an “American dystopian tragedy television series” premised on the chilling aftermath of a Second American Civil War.
No matter how bad it gets for Illini fans, Offred has it worse
One lesson learned (again): Never question the line. Vegas knows. And Illinois was awful. It is too upsetting to re-hash all of the details here, so I’ll hit some highlights. On the second play from scrimmage, Illinois’ tailback fumbled. Wisconsin’s quarterback, starting his first college game, completed 20 or 21 passes. (And the one incompletion was a drop.) Illinois’ defensive backs apparently took admonitions about social distancing very, very seriously, because they seemingly were never within six yards – let alone six feet – of a Badger receiver all night. Process this: Illinois successfully defended zero of the passes thrown by Wisconsin’s starting quarterback all night. Zero. The Badgers’ QB is good – probably Wisconsin’s most-heralded quarterback recruit ever. I knew that before the game. But never in a million years did he or I imagine that his first outing would be the equivalent of a seven-on-zero walkthrough.
Oh, and Illinois’ best linebacker made a great play to stop Wisconsin short of the line to gain on 4th-and-1 when the game was still a contest – only to be concussed and knocked out the game in the process. He wobbled to the sideline being held up by trainers as the head linesman added about a half-yard in Wisconsin’s favor to the spot of the ball, giving the Badgers a new set of downs. The Illinois coaches decided a potentially game-altering play was insufficiently important to throw the coach’s challenge flag to have the play reviewed. That’s what happens to the Illini. Always. But Wisconsin didn’t need officiating help Friday night; the Badgers won by 38.
The Illini dropped passes, missed tackles, and committed costly penalties. The players played poorly, the coaches coached poorly. It wouldn’t surprise me if the trainers taped ankles poorly. This game was a train wreck. And even Illinois’ one touchdown was almost accidental. A Badger receiver fumbled, and the ball laid on the ground surrounded by Illini, several of whom grabbed and pawed at the ball but could not corral it. Serendipitously, another Illini who was late to the party snatched the ball and sauntered into the end zone. A brief glimmer of hope, the lead narrowed to seven points. By halftime it was 28-7. Curtains.
Basically, the 43 minutes of Illinois football I could bear to watch Friday night was a microcosm of 2020. A complete and utter disaster. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. In a span of about two hours, my optimism about 2020 and my hope that the momentum of 2019 would carry into this season was basically erased. Illinois football did not provide a respite, as I’d hoped. It simply piled on the angst and despair. We’re back to wondering not whether the team takes another step forward, but who’d be available if the Lovie Experience ends.
It says something that I was driven to take refuge in The Handmaid’s Tale. If you haven’t watched it yet and are a little on edge about America in 2020, don’t watch. It’s dark. It’s depressing. It depicts as real what should be unimaginable. Why do I watch? Essentially, because I started, and now I’m invested, and I have some interest in seeing how the story evolves. And the series is brilliantly acted and produced. It’s just not a light, feel-good 45 minutes. Ever.
So, my night went from the light (Big Ten football’s back, baby!) to the dark (oh no, could we be awful again?) to the darker (the seemingly hopeless plight of the main character in The Handmaid’s Tale). Not the night I’d envisioned, to be sure.
But the sun rose on Saturday. I woke up, walked the dog and went to the Village Hall and voted. That felt good. A step back toward normalcy, I hope. As is sometimes the case when a team I follow loses horribly, I consciously avoid the next day post mortem. My team lost and is 0-1. We move on, life goes on.
And there’s always the next game. Purdue is traveling to Champaign next Saturday for an 11 a.m. kickoff. I’ll watch. For better or worse.
On Tuesday night, a boy named Kyle decided to make the 30-minute trip to Kenosha, Wisconsin, not far from his hometown of Antioch, Illinois. Antioch is just south of the Wisconsin border, about halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee. Kyle lived there with his mom in a small apartment near a park. He apparently dropped out of high school not too long ago.
I imagine Kyle had a bedroom, like most 17 year old boys do, decorated with posters of his heroes, or his favorite bands, or whatever. Maybe he had some pot or some booze stashed in a drawer, or maybe those things did not interest him at all. Maybe he owned a Bible and some comic books.
Sadly, Kyle likely will never see that bedroom again. He may never step foot in Antioch again. Right now, he’s in a juvenile detention center in Lake County, Illinois, awaiting extradition to Wisconsin.
Two people died and another was shot in Kenosha on Tuesday night. And Kyle Rittenhouse has been charged with multiple felonies, including two counts of first degree murder. Conviction could lead to life in prison. He allegedly killed a 26-year-old man and a 36-year-old man, and shot another. Two lives ended and one upended, it seems, by a baby-faced 17-year-old with a rifle. Reportedly, after Kyle shot his first victim, he was pursued by others trying to gain the police’s attention to have him apprehended. He tripped and fell, and he flailed around in the middle of a street pulling the trigger of a gun the others may have been trying to take away. At least that’s the picture painted, so far, by the many video accounts of Kyle’s night.
Kyle went to Kenosha Tuesday night, he’d tell you, to help bring law and order to that town. After a Black man was shot seven times in the back by a police officer over the weekend, Kenosha took center stage, adding another city’s name to 2020’s infamy. On cue, protests and chaos and violence followed the shooting, along with the predictable revelation a half-beat later of details about the victim of the shooting – a man named Jacob Blake. He had a knife, or was reaching for one. He had a rap sheet. He was resisting arrest.
It took seven shots, apparently, for multiple police officers to prevent whatever mayhem Blake was about to inflict on them as his three children sat in his car. In time, the shooting of Jacob Blake will be investigated and debated and will divide us some more. He was a thug who brought it on himself by resisting. Or he was another victim of regrettably inept policing, or worse. Those cases will be made. Americans won’t agree. These days, Americans never agree.
It’s almost a certainty Kyle did not know his victims. It’s almost a certainty that he did not hate his victims. To someone like Kyle, Kenosha was tantalizingly close – an attractive nuisance, you might say (if you completed a first-year law school curriculum). Kyle believed he had a job to do. I mean – he really believed he had a job do. A website, The Daily Caller, interviewed a young man identified as Kyle on the streets of Kenosha before the shooting, in front of a boarded-up business.
“So people are getting injured, and our job is to protect this business,” the young man said. “And part of my job is to also help people. If there is somebody hurt, I’m running into harm’s way. That’s why I have my rifle — because I can protect myself, obviously. But I also have my med kit.”
I suspect the idea of injecting himself into the chaos of Kenosha was irresistible. You see, Kyle had a deep respect for law enforcement and had even participated in programs for aspiring policemen. He wanted to be a Marine. He wanted to help. He wanted to protect property that was not his, in a town that was not his, in a state that was not his. And, of course, Kyle had guns and ammo, if not training or experience or any legal authority to participate in keeping the peace. And, as far as I can tell, Kyle was not promised a wage for his help, and his only reward that night was a thank you from the police, who offered water to Kyle and others toting guns, and told them they were appreciated.
If you are interested, you can watch Kyle’s night unfold on video here. Or read a little bit more about his background here.
So Many Questions
I typically sleep like a rock. When I was a kid myself – maybe 10 years old – a coach house on the alley of the narrow lot immediately next to my house caught on fire, so close that the flames charred our detached garage, which stood maybe six feet from the burning building. Multiple fire trucks were parked no more than 50 feet from my bedroom window and fire fighters shuffled up and down our driveway. I did not stir until someone came in and woke me from my slumber. Storms, barking dogs. I am pretty much impervious to all of it if I am sleeping.
Until 2020. Since March, I’ve awoken at night dozens of time – easily more this year than in all the nights of the balance of my adult life combined. Some might say my shrinking bladder has something to do with it, but that’s not fair to my bladder – it is holding up fairly well. Put simply, this year has been chock full of stuff that has had me rattled. I worry more than ever – about a whole lot of things, big and small – and worrying really isn’t my thing.
Early Thursday morning, I woke up again. This time, I was thinking about Kyle.
So many questions.
Did Kyle play Call of Duty, like my boys did when they were his age? Did Kyle imagine himself in a real-life video game Tuesday night as he roamed the streets of Kenosha with his rifle? Where did he get the rifle? Who suggested that he throw himself into the mess that was Kenosha on Tuesday night? Was he invited? Did he go as a member of a group of like-minded keepers-of-the-peace? Was he a militia member? How does one become a militia member?
How did Kyle get to Kenosha? Did he have a driver’s license? When he said, “I just killed somebody” on his mobile phone (a moment captured on video), who was on the other end? Was it his mom? A friend? Did Kyle have many friends? Any friends?
Lots of questions, no answers.
And then I thought of the pictures I had seen of Kyle, like the ones reproduced in this post. Just a kid. And I thought, did he play Little League baseball a few years ago? Did he ride bikes with his friends? Does he shave yet? Did he dream of having a family? And kids? Where did he learn to shoot guns? Who taught him to assemble and disassemble and clean his rifle? Where is his dad? Does he have siblings? Did any of the police he encountered on Tuesday night think it odd that a kid was walking around Kenosha toting an AR-15?
More questions, no answers.
And I also found myself asking questions that I’ve asked – in some form or another – over and over this year. What happened? What exactly is going on in this country? When did it become okay for ordinary citizens to arm themselves and take the job of law enforcement into their own hands? Is this a thing now? Has this always been a thing?
My curiosity not quite quenched, I read more about Kyle yesterday. Some answers, and more questions. I suspect there will always be more questions, and fewer answers.
And then I read about Brian Urlacher. Yes – that Brian Urlacher. Number 54. Hall-of-Fame linebacker. For a time, my favorite Chicago Bear and the anchor of its defense for a decade. The guy whose mug and scalp adorn billboard after billboard on Interstate 294, hawking a hair restoration procedure for which he is, literally, the poster child. Apparently, Urlacher “liked” a post on Instagram of an image of Kyle Rittenhouse “walking the Kenosha streets with his rifle in tow. … accompanied by emphatic text: “FREE KYLE RITTENHOUSE!!!! Patriot Lives Matter!!!” Oh, and for good measure Urlacher was critical of NBA players for refusing to play Wednesday night in the wake of the Blake shooting. Yes, Brian Urlacher is entitled to his opinions, freedom of speech is the bedrock of this country. But … really? Does he really agree with the sentiment that Kyle Rittenhouse is a patriot?
I could go on about social media and mainstream media reactions to Kyle’s night. Others have said some pretty remarkable things in the wake of Rittenhouse’s arrest. Between cable news and social media, one thing is certain: the commentary that follows tragic events in America only serves to illustrate our differences. Over and over, I think – surely no one can put a spin on this news. And spin, they do. And by they, I mean to exclude no one.
But that’s a point for another (long) post. I want to get back to Kyle, and to my questions.
Was he living out a fantasy Tuesday night? Was he heeding a call? Did he believe he was a soldier? Did he believe he was a patriot?
Does he have a grandmother or grandfather? Are they devastated? If he is indeed the killer, does he feel remorse? Did he accomplish his mission in Kenosha? Does he wish he had stayed at home?
Did he feel a rush of adrenaline Tuesday night when the police told him he was appreciated and threw him water? Did he feel a rush of adrenaline when he fired his gun at real, live people? Was it his first time?
Does he realize, now, he might never again feel the rush of adrenaline he felt Tuesday night? Does Kyle realize that he just might spend the rest of his life behind bars?
And how many Kyles are out there? How many kids in America see a future only by peering down the barrel of a gun?
Kyle’s family. The families of his victims. The future of America. No winners. No answers. Just questions.
In my personal sports fan bubble, this past weekend was hard to top.
Starting Friday night and through Sunday, nothing went wrong:
The Chicago Cubs swept the Pittsburgh Pirates, taking firm hold of first place in the NL Central.
The Chicago White Sox swept the Kansas City Royals, bouncing back from a shaky start to the season and showing much-anticipated signs of promise.
The Chicago Blackhawks returned to the ice and took a 1-0 lead in their series against the Edmonton Oilers, riding Actual Youth and the Fountain of Youth to a surprisingly impressive 6-4 win.
Finally, two Illinois basketball players who were flirting with the NBA – guard Ayo Dosunmo (the Illini’s best player) and center Kofi Cockburn (the reigning Big Ten Freshman of the Year) – announced they were returning for their junior and sophomore seasons, respectively. Instantly, Illinois was a preseason Top 10 team nationally, and Illini fans were given reason to dream big again.
The Buzz
Finally – for the first time in months – I paid rapt attention to sports. I wore out my remote control flipping among the Cubs, Sox, and Blackhawks on Saturday afternoon. I shared excited one-word texts with Illini fans: “Ayo!” “Kofi!” I watched post-game highlight shows to see replays of the six Hawk goals that I’d seen live. And then watched each goal again on my smartphone. I studied box scores – particularly those chronicling White Sox games. If you are not yet on that bandwagon, join. That lineup is must-watch TV, and Sox rookie centerfielder Luis Robert looks like the product of a science project to create a baseball playing machine. Imagine – if you can relate – Anthony Michael Hall’s character and his buddy in Weird Science setting out to build the ultimate baseball player, and not Kelly LeBrock.
Luis Robert and Kelly LeBrock
It was all so … normal. Live sports. Lounging away a weekend afternoon. A little guilty that I wasn’t being productive, but not really. Optimism. Hope. I thought the kinds of thoughts I haven’t thought in months. Boy, David Ross seems to have these guys playing loose. How would you ever pitch around this Sox lineup? Is this the most talented Illinois hoops team since 2005? The deepest Illinois hoops team in my memory? Has Kirby Dach grown from boy to man in the last four months? Has Jonathan Toews turned back the clock? Is Dominik Kubalik the Next Big Thing? What got into Tyler Chatwood? Did Adam Engel really leave 10 men on base as a hitter in a nine-inning game? (He did.) Is that some sort of record? (Looks it up.) Nope. But close – former Cub Glenn Beckert once left 12 on base.
This. This is what I missed. Wallowing in thoughts about the games and the players and the records. Dreaming of what Luis Robert and Yoan Moncada and Eloy Jimenez could become. Thoroughly enjoyable. For me, thoroughly normal.
The Kill
But as it turned out, the sports pages offered no respite from the invisible, dark cloud that has been hovering for months – COVID-19.
Outside my little bubble, it turns out, the virus carries on, upsetting daily life in America:
The Miami Marlins did not play baseball at all last weekend, and neither did the Washington Nationals or the St. Louis Cardinals or the Milwaukee Brewers or the Philadelphia Phillies or the Toronto Blue Jays. Positive tests. Lost games. COVID.
The Rutgers football team suspended all team activities following a wave of positive tests traced to attendance at a party. College kids – left to their own good judgment – decided to cut loose and attend a party. Who could have predicted that? COVID.
By my rough count, nearly 60 NFL players have opted out of playing the upcoming NFL season – including a key piece of the defense for the Beloved Bear, nose tackle Eddie Goldman. COVID.
Rafael Nadal withdrew from the U.S. Open. COVID.
So as much buzz as the weekend could generate, COVID-19 killed it. Sure, Chicago’s MLB teams appear to be legitimate contenders. But is the sport going to make it to the finish line in 2020? Sure, Ayo and Kofi are back. But back for what? Are we going to even have a college basketball season when it’s not possible to confine college kids to a bubble and expect that there won’t be positive tests?
Welcome back, Ayo and Kofi!
I cannot help thinking it was all a tease. The optimism, the hope, the anticipation. But “it’s all going to go away,” right? Right? A Tweet from ProFootballTalk’s account, of all things, summed up the situation pretty well, I think:
More than 150,000 American are dead. There are people who take the situation seriously, people who have grown numb to it, and people who continue to twist and torture the facts and logic to continue to downplay it. How many more have to die before they’ll admit they were wrong.
@Pro football talk, twitter post, august 4, 2020, 10:38 pm
What I have learned during the pandemic, I think, is that Americans – collectively – are pretty selfish. And fiercely individual. And prone to read and believe and repeat what they want to read and believe, and deny facts that inconveniently decimate their view of the world.
The optimism and hope and excitement I felt this past weekend did not have to be fleeting. But – as a nation – it looks like we blew it. We took a halfhearted approach to locking down and dealing with COVID-19 this Spring, and as a result we sit here in August, not really sure we’ve made much progress in overcoming this pandemic. Yes, we have gotten better at treating the sick. Yes, the progress toward a vaccine is encouraging. Yes, we are doing more testing now than we were doing in March and April. All good things.
But my sports fan’s buzz was killed when my thoughts drifted back to the dark cloud that is COVID-19. My buzz was killed when I scrolled through my social media accounts and continued to see debates about mask-wearing and the wisdom of doing all that testing. The thing that makes me most unsettled about the future of this country, and the present, is that a substantial number of Americans gobble up misinformation like fried food at a state fair. The ease with which people can propagate bad, unchecked, agenda-driven information has created a toxic environment in this country.
On the COVID front, the United States is, I am told, the best at testing. And yet many have to wait in hours-long lines and then wait days for results. But screw testing, others say – more testing means more positive cases. And we don’t need those! This is nonsense, of course. (If you are at all taken by the argument that the nation would be better off if we did less testing, please reach out to me privately and I’ll try to explain why doing more testing and detecting as many cases as possible is a good thing, not a bad thing, if we want to put COVID-19 in the rear view mirror.)
Put simply, we Americans have done a miserable job, collectively, at dealing with COVID. And that’s on the politicians and their constituents. We are lousy consumers of information, because we are lazy consumers of information. Just because you agree with a person or a party’s position on immigration or welfare or the corporate income tax does not mean you should lap up what that person or party feeds you about matters of public health. The rejection by some of science and scientists who have spent entire careers preparing to guide a nation through a crisis like this blows my mind.
Hindsight is 20/20. I get that. But a bunch of countries suffered like the U.S. suffered earlier this year. And they asked their citizens to sacrifice more than the U.S. asked its citizens to sacrifice – again, collectively speaking. As a result, many nations we would consider our peers (you know, if we weren’t uniquely “great”) are preparing to send their kids back to school without the fear that grips parents and educators on this side of the pond.
Interestingly, the two professional sports leagues that seem to be getting back to play without reports of cancelled games or outbreaks are the NBA and NHL. What are they doing that baseball isn’t doing, and that football won’t be able to do? The short answer: bubbles. Players are being confined, and limited from contact with the outside world. They are engaged in a collective effort, pursuant to a plan designed by league officials who consulted medical and public health experts in putting it together. No exceptions. Everyone pulling on the same rope, in the same direction – trying to keep the games going. Imagine that.
Go ahead – send me all the articles you’d like to send me, all the statistics that say I’m being too hard on the good old USA. We’ve done a terrific job, right? It will all, magically, go away? It is what it is, right? Yes, hindsight is 20/20, but foresight counts too. And it appears that many, many nations had more than we did. And they did not let a pandemic become a political football.
Statistics can be fickle. They can be spun and massaged and cherry-picked to make about any point you want to make. So I’ll just mention a few here that cannot really be spun and massaged. They are cherry-picked, I suppose, but only because they are the ones that matter most to me. If you want to cherry-pick your own, go for it – here’s my source. As of August 5, 2020:
161,601 Americans have died due to COVID-19
as a percentage of total population, 91 of every 1,000,000 citizens in the world have died due to COVID-19
as a percentage of its population, 488 of every 1,000,000 Americans have died due to COVID-19 – or more than 5x the world average
of the 215 nations tracked, the United States ranks as the 11th worst in deaths as a percentage of population (to be clear, being 11th is bad, not good)
stated another way, the United States has about 4% of the world’s population, and about 23% of the deaths due to COVID-19
For the richest, most technologically advanced nation on Earth, that’s not good. And it kills my buzz. And it does not kill my buzz any less because most of the dead were old. Or had diabetes. Or high blood pressure. They had months or years or even decades left. Many died early, and unnecessarily so.
***
As I wrote this piece, I was flipping between the Cubs and Sox games, and then added the Blackhawks Game 3 vs. Edmonton to the mix. The Cubs win – again. The Hawks improbably score two late in the third to take a 2-1 lead in the series. I wander to bed after midnight – and the buzz is back. Maybe there’s hope. Maybe the Hawks hoist another Cup and the Cubs and Sox face off in the World Series? Maybe we are really headed back to normal.
I’m told pitchers and catchers and most everyone else reported for “Spring” Training last week. Again.
So baseball is about to be back. Kind of. I think. Except for players who are opting out, and unless something goes horribly wrong.
I care. I miss baseball. Not to wax eloquent, but baseball is special in part because baseball lingers. In normal times, the game ushers in the optimism of Spring, spans the dog days of Summer, and fades away just as the leaves drop in the Fall. For those of us who live in the Midwest, baseball season marks the time we venture outside reasonably confident that we won’t have to shovel snow.
This Spring, baseball news was dominated not by reports of the feats of its stars, but by reports of wrangling between the owners and the players’ union as to how this pandemic-shortened season would be played out. I’m sorry, but 2020 has been too heavy and dark for me to conjure up an ounce of sympathy for anyone in that particular kerfuffle. As far as I can tell, the two sides traded proposals back and forth, got nowhere, and the commissioner exercised his right to basically dictate the terms under which the season would be played. Fine, I guess. However we got here, we are here. A sixty-game sprint of a season. Ready, go.
I need baseball back in my life because I need to hunt for the crooked numbers in the box scores. I need to be wowed by The Next Phenom. I need to lose myself in the tense grind a 2-1 gem of a pitchers’ duel. I need the spontaneity only sports can offer on a daily basis.
I enjoy baseball for many reasons, but one of them is my fascination with the names of those who have played the game. Apparently, heading into this season 15,213 men have appeared in Major League Baseball games – covering the National League, American League, and its predecessors. About six weeks ago – which seems like about six years ago – I spent some idle time scrolling through those names on the magical Baseball Reference web site, letter by letter. (Please don’t judge me for what I do with my free time – most of you watched Tiger King on Netflix.)
Obviously, there have been plenty of men who’ve played in the NFL, NHL, and NBA, too. Some of them had spectacular, quirky names too. But for me, there’s just something about baseball player names.
It could be that baseball names are just more sticky, given the nearly-every-day-for-six-months cadence of the 162-game regular season and the publication of hundreds of names in box scores every day (with vowels, if space allowed). Or perhaps the nature and pace of the game itself accounts for the shelf life of baseball player names. After all, the pitcher versus hitter match-up repeats itself, inning after inning, game after game. Each regular position player is the center of the action at least four or five times a game when he strides to the plate. Equal time, more or less, afforded the weak-hitting #8 hitter and the All-Star batting cleanup. The PA announcer, TV announcer, radio announcer – they all repeat the names of the game, because they have time to do it. For those prone to wallow in sport, the pace of baseball – too slow for some – is perfect.
The Birthday Boy
I started down this particular rabbit hole after a college friend reminded me of a trivia question that I’d heard many years ago. Here goes:
Which major league baseball player wore his birthday on his back?
trivia question credit to mike “bucky” Kadubek
The answer: a former White Sox outfielder/first baseman of my youth, Carlos May. He was born on May 17, 1948, and while with the Sox, at least, wore uniform #17. His jersey’s back said it all: “May 17.” Perfect.
So it got me to thinking, is there anyone else? First, I checked for other players with the last name May (there are 16, including Buckshot, Jakie, Pinky, and Carlos’ late brother, Lee May). But no dice – not one was born in May. Then I went through the other months. Again, no dice. The closest I came to finding another birthday-on-the-back was a pair of former American League hurlers: Darrell May, born in June, and Don August, born in July. So as far as I can tell, Carlos remains the answer – by himself – to a fun little trivia question.
Carlos May, the Birthday Boy
As I got into my journey, I discovered that not only are the months of the year well represented as you scroll through Baseball Reference, but so too are the days of the week – like Monday (Rick) and Friday (Skipper). And even the Hollidays (Matt), like (Luke) Easter and (Steve) Christmas.
The Common and The Phenomenal
The letter M (2,040) edged the letter S (1,919) as the most common beginning letter for a MLB surname, dealing a blow to the 163 Smiths who have played in the big leagues, including Klondike, Skyrocket, and Phenomenal (the latter of whom was a 5-foot-6 lefty with a career pitching record of 54-74 – more Mediocre than Phenomenal, if you ask me).
The least common beginning letter was no surprise. The letter X has been shut out, so far. Apparently, a lad named Joe Xavier was drafted by the A’s out of Fresno State, played six years in the Minors, but topped out in AAA – in Denver, the Mile High City, coincidentally. Denied immortality as The Only Xavier.
Curiously, however, there was a young man from Trenton, Canada who played five seasons between 1878 and 1883 and whose name is listed in the record books as The Only Nolan. Of course, the same record books prove his boastful name wrong, as there were, in fact, two other Nolans (Gary and Joe) who made the bigs, and a couple of close calls (Aaron and Austin Nola). The Only was, however, the only Nolan to reach the Majors for nearly a century – until Gary showed up in 1967.
Just ahead of the Xs (the null set), the Is (59) and Qs (51) bring up the rear. But though they lacked in quantity of names, the Is and Qs brought forth quality. Who could forget the Iorg boys (Dane and Garth, not to be confused with Wayne and Garth of Wayne’s World fame), or the unforgettable submariner, DanQuisenberry?
Wayne and Garth, meet Dane and Garth
Of the 361 big-leaguers whose last name started with the letter O, 107 of them sported an apostrophe, too. Proof, I guess, that the Irish have fared well at the American pastime.
Not surprisingly, common names dominate. More than 40% of the 510 Js belong to the Johnsons (113) and Joneses (100). There have also been loads of guys named Miller (89), Davis (75), Hernandez (48), Martinez (45), and Gonzalez (40)in the Show.
When I reached the Vs, my curiosity was piqued, “could it be … a Veith? Maybe?” Alas, the closest I got was Peek-a-Boo Veach – no cigar. As I neared the end of my journey, I ran across Moses J. “Chief” Yellow Horse, who hailed from Pawnee, Oklahoma and was the first full-blooded Native American to make it to the Show, where he played not for the Indians or Braves, but for the Pirates in 1921 and 1922.
Chief Yellow Horse
The Four Pfeffers
Among the hidden gems of my name-mining exercise: the Four Pfeffers. Don’t ask me why, but my eye stopped at the Pfeffers – maybe I have a weakness for the silent P, I don’t know. I do know the Pfeffers popped up shortly after I paused on the simple greatness of another name: Wily Mo Pena.
Wily Mo Pena
As it turns out, Fred Pfeffer was a middle infielder from Louisville who played from 1882-1897, mostly with the Cubs. He’s buried in Des Plaines, Illinois, not far from where I live. Then there was Monte Pfeffer, a diminutive 5-foot-4 shortstop who played for the Philadelphia Athletics in one game in 1913, ending his career with four plate appearances, a career batting average of .000, and an on-based percentage of .250, thanks to getting hit by a pitch in that game.
But the coolest story among the Pfeffers involves the second and fourth names on the list: Big Jeff Pfeffer and Jeff Pfeffer. When I saw those names, I thought: how cool, a father and his namesake son, both made the Majors – and long before Ken and Junior Griffey did it. But when I dug deeper, it got better. It turns out Big Jeff Pfeffer played from 1905-1911, and Jeff Pfeffer played from 1911-1924. What? Either Big Jeff was really old when he broke into the Majors or “Little” Jeff was a baseball version of Mozart.
As it turned out, neither was true, but there was an explanation. As it happens, Big Jeff Pfeffer was born in 1882 in Champaign, Illinois, and Jeff Pfeffer was born in 1888 in Seymour, Illinois. Its turns out Big Jeff was not Jeff’s father, but his brother. Seriously? Their parents could not think of different names for two sons born six years apart?
Jeff Pfeffer, not Big Jeff Pfeffer
In fact, the Pfeffers had not taken the easy way out and named both sons Jeff. In fact, neither of their sons was named Jeff at all. Big Jeff Pfeffer’s given name was Francis Xavier Pfeffer, and he is listed as standing 6-foot-1 and weighing 185 pounds. Plain old Jeff Pfeffer was named Edward Joseph Pfeffer, and he was – of course, bigger than Big Jeff – at 6-foot-3 and 210 pounds. So two brothers from Central Illinois named Francis Xavier and Edward Joseph play in the Major Leagues, for some reason known as Big Jeff and (the bigger) Jeff. Go figure.
But there is more. It turns out “Little” (but bigger) Jeff Pfeffer was really, really good – just check out his Baseball Reference page. Playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1916, Jeff Pfeffer, a right-hander, pitched in 41 games, started 36, completed 30, was 25-11, and had a 1.92 Earned Run Average. To this day, Jeff Pfeffer’s 2.31 ERA is second all-time in Dodgers’ franchise history – nearly 100 years after he hung up his spikes. (In first, Zack Greinke at 2.30.)
Baseball Feeds The Soul
Take a spin through Baseball Reference like I did and I’ll guarantee you one thing – you’re heading to the kitchen for a meal or a snack long before you get to the Zs. I love baseball player food names almost as much as I love ballpark food. Fruits, meats, vegetables, spices – baseball has all of them covered.
Do you favor seafood? Then let me offer up some Trout (Mike, Dizzy, or Steve), Catfish (Hunter) or (Tim) Salmon. More of a meat-and-potatoes person? Maybe a (Mark) Hamburger, some (Eddie) Bacon, or a plate of (Herman) Franks and Beans (Belve, Bill, Colter, or Joe). (If you just thought about a scene from Something About Mary, we should be friends.)
Of course, if this is all too pedestrian and you have a more adventurous palate, perhaps indulge in some venison (Rob Deer), (Bob) Moose, or Goose (Gossage). Have you tried Moose (Tony) Curry? Me neither. More mainstream spices suit you, perhaps? Then stick with (Jarrod) Saltalamacchia and Pepper (Bob, Don, Laurin or Ray).
Whatever you do for the main course, don’t forget the starch – maybe a Spud (Davis) or some Noodles (Hahn). And if you do opt for the burger, don’t forget a crisp, juicy (Brandon) Claussen pickle (not to be confused with (Fritz) Clausen, who is missing an s).
Ready for dessert? Baseball names present many choices. Maybe a slice of (Darryl) Strawberry shortcake, a (Chet) Lemon square, (Ken) Berry crisp, or Peaches (O’Neill) cobbler.
Straw
It’s no wonder, really, that baseball rosters teem with food – there are, after all, 13 Cooks (from Aaron to Ryan) and 10 Bakers (from Dusty to Home Run) who have suited up in the big leagues.
It Gets Better
For the churchgoers, baseball has given us a Monk (Cline), a Preacher (Roe), a couple of Priests (Eddie and Johnny), seven Deacons (from Jones to Donahue to Van Buren), eight Crosses (from Amos to Clarence), and a Luther (Hackman).
For those who study anatomy, baseball offers up several Hands (Bill, Donovan, and Rich), (Rollie) Fingers, a (Roy) Face, and – if you don’t sweat the spelling or pronunciation or clinical terminology too much – a Foote (Barry), some (Ricky) Bones, a (Wally) Backman, and a (Josh) Booty.
And then there are names that are just plain cool, or quirky, or fun to say. In that category, there are hundreds – far too many to mention here. As a tease, in that category I give you the likes of Al Albuquerque, Grant Balfour (a curse of a name for a pitcher), Mookie Betts (yeah, he does), and Milton Bradley (as proficient at board games as baseball games).
Last, but not least, there was one more thing I noticed during my little sojourn. I might blame the pandemic, because I’m not really sure what this says about me, but I could not help noticing that baseball’s roster of names reads like a list of male inductees in the Adult Film Star Hall of Fame (there must be such a thing, right?). While there have been no MLB players with names that start with X, there have been many who could have starred in X-rated movies without bothering to adopt screen names.
It’s hardly surprising, I suppose, that a game whose principal items of equipment are bats and balls would feature a roster of names that could make up the cast of characters in Boogie Nights.
Do they look the part, or what?
Indeed, baseball has given us the likes of Dick Pole, Scotty Alcock, Pete LaCock and Jay Baller. Not to be outdone, of course, by Richard Lovelady, Slim Love, and Footer Johnson. And then, in that special section of the Hall of Fame reserved for the true luminaries of the seedy silver screen, the sport brings you Fred Woodcock, Hunter Wood, Ted Sizemore, and Mel Harder.
Of course, falling shy of induction, for obvious reasons: Walt Smallwood, Pop Swift, Jimmy Wacker, and any of the five players named Small or the four named Short.
Not able to top that, I’ll land this plane now.
So let’s enjoy the games and the names, new and old, from A to Z – or, should I say, from (David) Aardsma to (Tony) Zych. Let’s play ball and – next May 17 – don’t forget to raise your glass and toast the only birthday-on-his-back Major Leaguer ever, Carlos May.
Every father should remember one day his son will follow his example, not his advice.
charles kettering
On a hot summer day in 1980, my Dad and I sat on one side of a small table in a cramped interview room in the Albany Park police station on Pulaski Road on the Northwest Side of Chicago. I was within a week or so of my 15th birthday – I’m not sure on which side. On the other side of the table sat three of my best childhood friends. As we sat there, a detective questioned me and my friends, trying to piece together a strange series of events that had transpired over the prior 24 hours, which culminated with me chasing two semi-professional burglars out of my house in my boxer shorts, wielding a baseball bat.
My Dad mostly listened. And then – as if someone had turned the spigot of a faucet – the tears came. He sobbed. His whole body shook and heaved. Disappointment came crashing down on him, driving him well beyond simple tears. I sat stunned. I’m not sure I had ever seen my Dad cry, and I definitely had never seen him sob.
I’ve thought about that day many, many times, and especially in the nearly 11 years since my Dad passed away. That afternoon is etched in my mind, and I think I’ve finally figured out the lesson I took away that day.
The Neighborhood
I grew up in a bungalow in a typical Chicago neighborhood, a neighborhood dotted by row after row of bungalows, two flats, and – typically on the corners – apartment buildings. Our day-to-day world was bordered by Irving Park Road on the south, Kedzie on the west, Montrose on the north, and California (and Horner Park) on the east. Thinking back to the summer days of my early teen years, my friends and I would wander outside on our bikes early in the morning after our parents went off to work, organize games of lob or fast pitch in the school yard, maybe hit up the corner grocery for a freeze pop, and just sort of pass the time.
None of us had much spending money. The neighborhood was firmly middle class, I guess. I am sure some of us had a few more bucks in our pockets than others. I vaguely recall getting a small allowance from my parents, but my greater source of income was the $10 or $20 my Grandpa would give me – along with a lunch of bratwurst and German fried potatoes – when I would cut his postage-stamp sized lawn as he pretended to tend to his rose bushes or tomato plants while supervising me.
As we hit our early teens, having a few bucks in our pockets became a bigger deal. We had started hanging out at a small Chinese restaurant/grocery store on Irving Park that was owned by a classmate’s family and happened to have a couple pinball machines. So part of our day, every day, was mining the neighborhood for bottles we could return for deposits that we could drop into the pinball machines. We’d find stray bottles or, maybe, figure out a way to liberate bottles stored on the back porches of some of those apartment buildings. And some of us had started umpiring baseball games for the Horner Park Little League, for maybe $5 or $10 per game. Pretty good money. We were hitting the age where we were getting a little restless, wandering out of the neighborhood a bit, wanting more than our daily lives had been serving up.
The Pirates
I’ll call my friends “Jimmy,” “Mike,” and “Patrick” here. We were part of a group of maybe 8-10 kids within a two-year age span that attended the same grammar school and lived within the half-mile square I mentioned above. And most of us had been Pirates.
The Pirates were the team we were all assigned to at the Neighborhood Boys Club. During the school year, especially, we spent most every day doing something at NBC, which was about six blocks away, halfway between my house and my Dad’s insurance agency on Irving Park Road. NBC organized team sports starting in September and continuing through the following July: football, basketball, floor hockey, 16-inch softball, and baseball. The teams were organized by neighborhood, and our neighborhood was divided up between the Pirates and the Buccs. The Buccs were our arch-rivals, and also happened to be some of our schoolmates and friends.
NBC was really all about letting kids play. High-school or college-aged “Leaders” ran the programs and refereed the games. With the exception of football, there were no coaches allowed, and in all sports there were strict rules about how much each kid played. Every kid got a fair shot to play. If the supervisors caught a team trying to cheat the rules, justice was swift and simple: a loss in the standings.
NBC allowed adult coaches in one sport: football. My Dad had volunteered to coach my brothers years before, and before I came along more than a decade later, he coached a team called the Hornets – from the neighborhood near his office. They called him Papa Hornet.
NBC football was tackle football for second- through eighth-graders – with a few modifications. Players who ran the ball had to be below a certain weight – white elastic arm bands distinguishing the “lights” from the “heavies.” The heavies could handle kickoffs and punts and receive passes – but those plays would end if they were tagged with two hands below the waist. Also, players were substituted in and out at the beginning of each quarter, and played both ways. A typical team would have maybe 15 players, and every player had to play at least a full quarter. Unless someone got hurt, there were no mid-quarter substitutions. And the kids called their own plays.
You might gather this was not the right place for a control-freak kind of coach. And that was perfect for my Dad. He was the biggest cheerleader on the fields, his voice booming encouragement and congratulations at every opportunity – especially to the two or three kids on the team who were the least athletically gifted. We would hold an occasional practice where we walked through plays. If it was too cold or rainy to practice, he’d gather us around the ping pong table in our basement and show us how to vanquish our rivals using checkers to diagram plays and defensive strategy. He taught us three or four running plays, three or four passing plays, how to line up in a stance and not jump offside, and how to position ourselves on defense. And he taught his quarterback – me – a little about strategy to help in calling the plays. And then Dad got out of the way and let us play.
Jimmy was our star and one of my best friends from kindergarten on. He was maybe the best athlete in the entire club. Mike was a lineman, better at floor hockey than football. Patrick was the center – the kid who snapped me the ball on every play. I’ll never forget one awkward practice when we were 11 or 12, after Patrick and I had gotten into a scrape on the playground. Prior to the shotgun era of quarterbacking, quarterbacks and centers were, let’s say, intimate on most every play. Patrick and I were initially in no mood to be intimate after our playground tussle. But we figured it out and got over it – for the team.
My Dad loved to coach, and he truly had zero ego about doing it. We typically had good teams – in part because we had a good coach and mostly because we had Jimmy. But Dad could not have cared less about winning or losing, he was all about doing what he could to see kids have fun. And my Dad loved Saturday morning games at 10 a.m. or later. After those games, he’d wedge me and an obscene number of my always sweaty and sometimes muddy teammates (still wearing shoulder pads) into his comically spacious Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight and take us all out to lunch – probably for pizza or hamburgers or hot dogs. His treat. And then he’d pack us back into the Olds and drop my teammates off at their homes.
A Bad Choice
There are bad people, but many more people who simply make bad choices, for which they should be forgiven. Jimmy, Mike, and Patrick made a bad choice on a summer day in 1980 that set off the chain of events that led my Dad to sob.
That summer, I was lucky enough to score my first real job. I applied and was hired at No-Frills Discount Foods, a grocery store about a mile from my house. I was 14 when I started, having fibbed and said I was two years older on my application. I was a stock boy, and pretty terrible at the job because it required a level of strength lugging boxes, moving pallets, and baling cardboard that my immature body could not always muster. But I worked hard, showed up on time, and earned my keep. If my memory serves me, I made $4.10 an hour – significantly better than the $3.35 minimum hourly wage in 1980. And it made me the richest kid in the neighborhood. And my friends knew it.
At this point in the story, I am going to start using Jimmy, Mike and Patrick interchangeably. Collectively, I’ll call them The Three.
On the day before we found ourselves together in the police station, I worked an afternoon shift. I remember it being a particularly hot summer week, and a particularly hot day. I cashed my paycheck at the store after work, and rode my bike home. In my bedroom, a small cardboard box on my desk was my piggybank. When I went to add the $100 or so I had netted from my paycheck, it seemed to me my stash of money was light.
A little puzzled, I ate dinner and then wandered outside, where I met one of The Three. Something was off, he was noticeably fidgety. Within a few minutes, he said, “Paul – I have to tell you something.” He then proceeded to tell me that he had been a party to a crime. The Three (and one more boy, who may have instigated the whole thing) had been idling away a hot afternoon – as broke as usual – when one of them got an idea: let’s go get Paul’s money, and split it up. I’m not sure if they were envious or resentful that I had found a job, or bored, or all of the above.
My house was never locked, my parents both worked, and all but maybe one of my siblings had moved out. My friends knew that if I was working, no one would be home. And they knew where I kept my modest stash of money. So in a manner of about three minutes, a couple of them dashed up the stairs and into my second-floor bedroom while a couple of them kept lookout. They grabbed maybe $80 or $100, got out, and rode their bikes to some nearby alley or the schoolyard to split up the money.
But one of The Three could not stand the guilt, and he spilled the beans. I immediately went home that evening and told my Dad what had happened, and who was involved. He had coached The Three for years. He did not fly into a rage. He did not call the cops. He did not get their parents on the phone. He thought a minute, and then told me calmly: “I think you need to go find your friends and get your money back.”
My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person, he believed in me.
jim valvano
I was a little terrified about confronting my friends, but I got on my bike and rode to the house of the first of The Three. Nervously, I rang the doorbell. He answered and I asked him to step onto the porch and to close the door behind him. Protecting the identity of the friend who had told me what happened, I said: “I’m missing some money from my bedroom, and one of my neighbors saw you guys go into the house today while I was gone. We are not going to call the cops, but I want my money back.” Surprisingly, as I think about it, there was no denial. The first of The Three said, “I’m sorry. But I don’t have the money – I spent it. But give me time and I’ll pay you back.”
I moved on to the next of The Three. He was not around – I later found out he was at NBC’s annual carnival, a weeklong highlight of the summer. I have no doubt he was spending his take from my stash on rides, or games, or popcorn. But somehow word got to him that I knew what had gone down, and word got back to me that he would come to my house the next morning to pay back his share of what had been taken from me.
The “Semi-Professionals”
The friend who pledged to bring back my money the next morning followed through. But, unfortunately for him, he arrived just as the police were responding to a call after my house was robbed for the second time in less than 24 hours. So Friend Three was coming to pay me back and had not been a party to the second robbery, but he was the first to be taken into custody.
Here’s what happened.
As Friend Three was spending his take from my stash at the carnival the prior night he ran into a couple of kids who were maybe 16 or 17 years old, and for a long time had started to drift to the rougher side of my neighborhood. By that, I mean they were among the kids who had started flirting with drugs, petty theft, and possibly street gangs (street gangs on the Northwest Side were not as prevalent or menacing as they were in some parts of the city, but they were a thing, for sure). I knew who these older kids were, by name and reputation. They were well known to me as kids to avoid. My friend was better acquainted with them and was starting to drift a bit himself to the darker side, so when he saw them at the carnival he bragged about his heist – and told them what an easy mark our house was for a burglary.
So the next morning a little after nine o’clock, not long after my parents had gone to work, I was home alone sleeping in my boxers up on the second floor at the front of the bungalow’s converted attic. I woke up and heard some rustling downstairs – doors and drawers opening and closing in a more hurried fashion than made much sense. Through my fog, I thought, “is that Dad getting ready for work?”
Soon, I had my answer, when I heard people talking while bounding up the internal staircase at the back of the house that led up to the second floor. Sensing something was not right, I grabbed a baseball bat and opened the door to my bedroom, which opened up into a “middle” room that separated the staircase and me by about 20 feet. As I stood there in my boxers, Semi-Professional Thief 1 reached the top of the stairs and looked me directly in the eye. I didn’t get a great look at him. He immediately bounded down the stairs, nearly running over Semi-Professional Thief 2 in the process. I gave chase in my boxers and the bat – somewhat half-heartedly, because I had no idea if they were armed or would decide to confront me.
They likely ran out the back door and to the alley, and were gone. I ran to the front of my house, noticing a bit of disarray where the thieves had been seeking valuables. Frightened, I ran out the front door and to the neighbor’s house across the street, where I breathlessly tried to explain what had happened. We called the police, and my Dad.
By quick inspection, it looked like the Semi-Professionals had taken off with some jewelry, some prescription drugs, and some spare cash that had been in my parents’ room. They were probably disappointed with their take, but at least some of the jewelry was reasonably valuable and meaningful to my Mom.
Within minutes, the police and my Dad arrived, I put on shorts and a t-shirt, and I tried to explain what had happened – starting with the theft of the prior day and ending with my unexpected wake-up call from two neighborhood punks/budding criminals.
The Interrogation
The explanation of the two incidents led the police to round up The Three (and maybe a fourth) and bring them to the Albany Park station, where they sheepishly had to look into the eyes of their football coach, their friend, and a detective who was trying to piece it all together.
As they talked, my Dad sat silently, taking it all in. He said little or nothing. He just listened to the kids he had piled into his car and bought hamburgers – kids who played and ate and slept at his house many times over the years. I wish I knew what was going through his mind as he sat and listened. I wish I knew what made him break down and sob.
It had been a weird, jarring 24 hours, for sure. These were some of my best friends – but as I think back on it now we had reached a time when we knew we were all on the cusp of drifting apart. I had just finished my freshman year in high school, and I was the only kid from my grammar school who had gone on to attend Luther North, a small school that was three-and-a-half miles west of my grammar school as the crow flies, or about a million miles away in other ways.
At the end of the hour or two we spent at the police station, the detective ushered The Three to another room and asked my Dad f he wanted to press charges. No, he said – just let them go home. Within about a week, they paid me back every dollar they took from my stash. I cannot recall if the Semi-Professionals were ever arrested. I know we never got back anything they took on the second day. My Dad, I suspect, wanted to move on. And we started locking the door when we weren’t home.
By the time all this went down, in some senses I had already left the neighborhood. My group of friends changed, as often is the case when a kid hits high school. And maybe that made it easier for me to be the mark – that, and the fact that my friends knew I had earned a few dollars at the grocery store that summer and knew where I kept my money. We moved out of the neighborhood when I was 19 and in college, to a new house several miles away on the far Northwest Side. I have stayed in touch with one of The Three over the years, and know relatively little about the other two.
But the rest of that summer was pretty normal. I remember asking my Dad – would it be okay if I hung out with (one of The Three)? He told me, that’s up to you. I did hang out with at least two The Three a little bit more that summer, and my Dad never disapproved. In fact, he never said much of anything about that incident. I don’t know why. He moved on. I moved on.
My father didn’t tell me how to live. He lived and let me watch him do it.
clarence budington kelland
Lessons Learned
My Dad taught me a lot, and mostly by example. Nearly 11 years ago, I eulogized him, and it was maybe the greatest honor of my life to do that. This is not a eulogy about a man who raised nine children, was married for 60+ years to the same woman, and built a successful business on a high school education. This is an article about a single day, and what I’ve come to think he taught me that day.
What I said when I eulogized my Dad, among other things, was that he was honest and generous to his core. When he heard that the kids he coached strolled into his home in the middle of the day and took his son’s money, he was brought to tears. Not by anger, but by disappointment. He had coached them and fed them and unfailingly supported them – to what end? He was crushed, and his emotions overflowed. He did not yell or scream. He did not threaten my friends. He did not run off to try to tell the other parents that they had raised terrible kids. He did not – in short – act as you might imagine a man could be expected act in that situation. He cried in front of all of us. I cannot speak for my friends, but that made more of an impact on me than any fit of anger.
I wonder sometimes if he cried that day because he felt bad for me – crushed because my friends had betrayed our friendship. Maybe. But the thing I appreciate most about how my Dad handled the entire incident is that he left me to deal with the fallout. He did not confront my friends that first night; I did. He did not issue an edict as to whether I could maintain those friendships going forward; he left that to me. He did not demand I forgive them; he left it to me.
That first night – the night before I was awoken by the semi-professional thieves – I cried as I went to bed. Softly. I cried because my friends had betrayed me. As I toed the line between boy and man, I cried not because I’d suffered a broken bone, a cut, or a scrape, but because I had been hurt inside. My Dad did not know I had gone to bed and cried, but the very next afternoon he let me know – through his own tears – that it was perfectly okay that I’d done so, whether I was a boy or a man.
Thanks, Dad. And Happy Father’s Day. Hit ‘em straight up there.
My friend Dave posted on Facebook for the first time last Tuesday. And it was a doozy. Another friend, in a private text, asked Dave: “couldn’t you make your [Facebook] debut with some cute dog pics?” Dave chose to go in another direction – to launch a scathing attack on himself. To blame himself for the vexing problem of institutional racism in our society.
Dave’s despair-fueled suggestion that he is at fault for institutional racism is preposterous. And it caught my attention because …
Dave is a middle-aged white man, like me. He is a lawyer, like me. Before he retired, he spent his entire career at a large law firm in Chicago, like me. He commuted to a comfortable office from a cozy house in the suburbs via Metra (when we still did that kind of thing), like me. He got married to his high school sweetheart, like me. They had kids and dogs and vacations and all the good stuff, like us.
Given the parallels, Dave’s first Facebook post hit a little too close to home. Here’s the post:
WHAT IF IT’S MY FAULT?
I have never posted to Facebook. And I really don’t much care for political posts. But maybe now is the time.
I have led a nice, comfortable life. I am politically knowledgeable and have a 100% Democratic voting record. I share with many utter disgust of a President who is a narcissistic troll, offering nothing in the way of national unity. And now it is time for the all important “but.” Because while his defeat in November is necessary for any hope of a better America, it is not sufficient. And it is not sufficient at least in part because I have never done anything meaningful to make this country a land of equality, certainly not for African-Americans. Nor Hispanics, nor Native Americans, nor any other marginalized group.
It is easy to think you are on the side of right by opposing the horror currently occupying the West Wing. But the carnage inflicted on minority communities is not his fault alone. It is the fault of a man who spent thirty years working at a large law firm that, like all large law firms, was disproportionately white and who never spoke in protest. It is the fault of a man who daily took a train from his safe suburban house to his safe downtown office without giving a thought to the lives of the people in between those points—people with no money, shoddy schools, a police force dressed like an occupying army, and so little hope. It is the fault of a man who would say he is not in any way racist, who would say all the right, woke things, but whose friends all share his pasty skin tone. It is the fault of a man who was one of many beneficiaries of a system of institutional racism, who knew that the contest was rigged in his favor, but who silently accepted the benefits.
I don’t pretend to know how to fix any of this. But it is a massive problem and it is my fault. So bring on the massive solutions. Reparations, wealth transfers, tax the hell out of me and others who can afford it. I am at fault, so if I whine about fairness, do not listen to me. I have been on the plus side of “fairness” for over six decades. Time for a change.
Dave, Facebook, june 2, 2020
To my knowledge, no one has ever accused Dave of being a racist, and if you know him or know his work, you couldn’t possibly reach that conclusion. He is a sarcastic smart ass, and one of the brightest people I know. He is a good enough friend that I will say most anything in his presence. Yet I’m always a little guarded if our conversation turns away from something I know well – like sports or Italian beef sandwiches. If I’m wrong about something, he won’t simply nod in faux agreement like so many people. He’ll let me know if he doesn’t agree with me, and he’ll tell me why, if I care to listen. And Dave does something that is too rare – if he is engaged on a subject on which he doesn’t really know enough to form an intelligent opinion, he’s not afraid to utter the three words that are a telltale sign of an honest, secure person: “I don’t know.”
Some of you may have read Dave’s post for the first time here and written it off as the plaintive wailing of a self-loathing liberal. If so, I think you missed his point entirely. Sure, Dave boasts of a perfect Democratic voting record. But the political references in Dave’s post are somewhat beside the point. He makes the point that it’s way past time for those of us who have fully enjoyed the privileges of growing up as white Americans to wake up and take real action to advance the goal of racial equality. It’s certainly not enough to self-evaluate, conclude “I’m not a racist so I’m not the problem” – and go on with our lives. Personally, I suppose I’ve done all the normal, easy things to check the “not a racist” box. But I could have done, and could do, so much more.
Obviously, institutional racism is not individually Dave’s fault – or your fault, or mine. But Dave started with that preposterous punch line in all caps because he wanted you to read the rest of what he wrote (kind of like starting a sports blog post with the proposition that Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, Duncan Keith, and Marian Hossa were “role players,” right Dave?).
I have not talked to him about it, but I suspect the motivation for Dave’s first Facebook post was pure, helpless frustration. He is, essentially, throwing up his hands and saying, “I give up. Tax me. Treat me unfairly if you want. I’ve done nothing meaningful to make life better for people of color during my lifetime, so take your pound of flesh from me now.” For Dave, writing and posting was probably as much therapy as anything else. He’s not running for office. He’s not campaigning to add Facebook friends. I’d guess he probably cares very little if many even took the time to read his post. He had a bunch of thoughts and needed to get them out and onto a screen. I get it.
Goal: A Better World for Him
For my part, I have taken a break from blogging since I viewed the video of George Floyd’s murder. That incident and subsequent civil unrest sapped me of any urge to write about sports, for sure. Lots and lots of thoughts have been bouncing around my brain at warp speed over the last two weeks, but I was silenced by the paralysis caused by too many thoughts. Having consumed a torrent of articles and video depicting the events of the last two weeks, one of the thoughts that silenced me was “what do I – a middle-aged white man, possibly have to add to this conversation?” I’m not sure I have anything to add, frankly. I am less qualified than most to speak on the subject of racial equality, and obviously less qualified than any person of color.
But eventually I got the nerve to write this post because, at bottom, I am an optimist. I think a huge part of the path forward from 2020 is to listen and to understand, and then to speak up and act, when the opportunity presents itself. I can read. I can listen. And I can speak up when it’s appropriate. And, I am here to respond to Dave and talk him off the edge. I want to stop Dave before he sells his possessions and donates the proceeds to the Sanders 2024 campaign (slogan, “The Third Time’s The Charm, Dammit!”). So hear me out, Dave; there are several reasons for optimism.
This just feels different. I’m not the first to say this, but the breadth and intensity of the recent protests are unlike anything I can remember in my lifetime (excluding 1968, perhaps, because I was only three years old and have no lasting memory from that time aside from a dog named Pirate). Sure, we expected to hear from all of the usual pols and public figures protesting Floyd’s murder, calling for reform, and urging unity and healing and all that. But Patrick Kane? And NASCAR’s Jimmie Johnson? The list of people from the world of sports who have used their social media platforms to speak up – largely, I think, from the heart – has gone much deeper than I can ever remember. When you step up and speak up and talk, you sign up to “walk the talk,” as they say. So let’s do that, ladies and gentlemen of the world of sports.
Another reason I think this feels different? The ubiquitous smartphone. I suppose we owe a debt to Steve Jobs, right? Where would we be without having a high-quality video recording device at our fingertips constantly? There is no question that the shocking smartphone video of George Floyd being murdered at the knee of a police officer changed the world, particularly coming so soon after the release of the shocking smartphone video of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder. These two events were, together, a deafening thunder clap in the middle of a quiet night of sleep. Without the smartphone, Arbery’s killers likely never get prosecuted, and the police officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than FIVE … HUNDRED … SECONDS … likely would be weaseling his way through yet another sticky internal police investigation of his conduct, and not facing a murder rap.
Yes, the Floyd murder was the spark. The protests and looting and tear gas and helicopters were the fire. But not all sparks cause fires. You need the right conditions for the spark to cause a fire, and the right conditions to sustain a fire once sparked. For a whole lot of reasons, America in 2020 is a tinder box. The fire will die down, for sure. But my hope is that the embers endure, and that the spotlight on racial inequality does not dim when the news cycle ends, as it inevitably will. The media loves to cover sparks and fires. But the coverage of Floyd’s murder and the protests will only take us so far. The media should shine light not just on the tragic effects of racial injustice, but also on the conditions that cause the injustice — every day.
Safe spaces are becoming less safe – in a good way. Last week, I observed a friend step out of character and rebuke other friends for banter that struck him as inappropriate. This caused a very brief period of tension that was quickly ironed out privately. Normalcy returned and the banter continued. What happened, in a nutshell, was that someone in a safe space (sophomoric chatter among good friends) had called someone else out for a comment made within the confines of that safe space. By doing that, he was basically saying this: maybe that’s a borderline comment we would have chuckled about in the past, but let’s not go near that border any more.
This was a baby step. It won’t be covered on CNN. But I suspect this is a scenario that will play out over and over and over among friends in the coming weeks and months and, hopefully, forever. Friends should call out friends on occasion. That said, I am not naive enough to suggest that calling people out will be the rule. Most of us tend toward the avoidance of conflict. More likely, I think, jokes or insensitive comments that have a racial component will be met with awkward silence. Or a subtle, disapproving glance. Silence can be a powerful tool for change. Silence is death for a wannabe comedian. Removing the crumbs of racism – the “harmless” banter in safe spaces that leads to racially insensitive comments – is a step in the right direction. A tiny, tiny step. But a step.
Goal: A Better World for Her
Our kids are better than us. I attended a local community Black Lives Matter protest this afternoon. It was organized by a recent high school graduate. As I recall, all but one of the several speakers was under 25. And people listened intently to their stories. The crowd was full of little kids toting homemade signs. My favorite adorned the side of a Radio Flyer wagon carrying two pre-school age kids, I think it said: “Too Woke, No Nap.” Young people seem to be fiercely aligned in opposition to racism. God bless them, but the generation of Americans who didn’t think twice about using racial slurs or perpetuating stereotypes is dwindling in number. In my own immediate family, the three people who have the keenest sense of detecting words and actions that might be hurtful or demonstrate subtle racism are the three youngest people. I wish I was educated enough to be able to cite empirical evidence that attitudes about race have shifted – in a positive way – among young adults over, say, the last 50 years. I cannot cite any research on the point, so I will stand on my anecdotal observations: young adults seem better attuned to the subtleties of racism than I was at a similar age, or am today.
There is a lot we can do, short of throwing up our hands. Like Dave, I occasionally feel the guilt of someone who recognizes a problem, arguably has the means to help solve it, but does less than he or she could because … well … the problem is so big that nothing any person could do could have a meaningful impact. But like a colony of ants devouring an apple, there is power in numbers and power in constant, relentless, collective effort by individuals.
I ran across an article titled 75 Things White People Can Do For Racial Justice. As its author says, “achieving racial justice is a marathon, not a sprint.” I may never tackle all 75 items on that list. But I can absolutely tackle some. I can read. I can write. I can listen. I can vote. Those four tools cover a lot of ground. I encourage you to check out the list – I’ve bookmarked it for myself and hope to make it a regular stop for inspiration.
Dave wrote, “bring on the massive solutions.” That makes sense. Racism is a massive problem, and massive problems sometimes call for radical, massive solutions. But I guess my pragmatism and optimism keep me from straying too close to the edge of the cliff Dave stood on when he wrote his first Facebook post. I want to believe the privileged among us can meaningfully chip away at injustice. I can hear Dave already, “Of course you’re pragmatic and optimistic! Things have always worked out for you pretty well. And it’s easy for you to be optimistic because you like the status quo – you like your life just fine, why would you truly want radical change?“
Be An Optimist, Like Lloyd
As usual, Dave’s right. But I guess I’m going to summon Lloyd Christmas, Jim Carrey’s character in Dumb and Dumber. When Lloyd asks the way-out-of-his-league Mary Swanson the question: “What do you think the chances are of a guy like you and a girl like me ending up together?” Mary answers, “Not good.” Lloyd presses: “You mean, not good like one out of a hundred?” Mary responds: “I’d say more like one in a million.” After a long pause as he processes her answer, a gleeful smile comes across Lloyd’s face: “So you’re telling me there’s a chance! YEAH!”
Maybe I’m dumb – or dumber than Dave, at least. Maybe I am being a little bit Lloyd Christmas here, but I see signs of coalescence around the cause of racial equality that I have never seen before in my lifetime, and it gives me hope.
So yeah, Dave – I guess I’m telling you there’s a chance. Don’t quit yet.
The actor Ben Stiller’s father Jerry died on May 11, a month shy of his 93rd birthday. Jerry Stiller was a comedian and actor whose career spanned more than half a century. Like the spring-loaded plunger that sends a pinball into the field of play, Stiller’s death (which was not attributed to Covid-19) sent my thoughts bouncing around the bumpers and flippers in my brain, unexpectedly leading me to the answer to a most vexing question: How should I live my life as the Covid-19 pandemic plays out?
“SERENITY NOW!!”
Fans of Seinfeld know Stiller as George Costanza’s father, Frank. George is famously “neurotic, self-loathing” and “prone to occasional periods of overconfidence that invariably arise at the worst possible time.” Frank was perhaps best known as the prickly champion of an alternative to the Christmas holiday known as Festivus – a product of his “disgust with the commercialism of Christmas and his dislike of tinsel decorations.” Frank did not conceive of Festivus himself, or declare that feats of strength and the airing of grievances would be among its core traditions, but to me Frank is Festivus, and Festivus is Frank.
Festivus aside, I remember Frank Costanza best for “SERENITY NOW!!” – the phrase he bellowed when his frequent fits of anger reached a zenith.
Frank’s outbursts were often prompted by exchanges with his shrill, nagging wife, Estelle. As Frank explains: “The doctor gave me a relaxation cassette. When my blood pressure gets too high, the man on the tape tells me to say ‘serenity now.’” When pushed to his breaking point, Frank looks skyward, holds up both hands with fists clenched, and shouts that phrase at the top of his lungs – there is nothing relaxing about it.
Estelle, George, and Frank
Frank first used the phrase on the show when Estelle refused to move her front seat forward to give him more leg room in the back seat of George’s car. Frustrated by Estelle’s resistance and ignoring George’s reminder that they were only five blocks from home, Frank loses it: “Like an animal! Because of her, I have to sit here like an animal! SERENITY NOW! SERENITY NOW!”
George asks about, and Frank explains, the inspiration for the phrase. Then George asks: “Are you supposed to yell it?” To which Frank responds, “the man on the tape wasn’t specific.”
What does this have to do with a pandemic? Well, at times over the last couple of months, I’ve absolutely felt the urge to channel Frank, to look skyward and shout, “SERENITY NOW!”
In my first blog post, I described my feelings about the Covid-19 pandemic as follows: “Unsettled. Anxious. Uncertain. A little bit scared. Disoriented.” Two-plus months in, I might choose a slightly different set of words. For sure, I would add frustrated and restless to that list.
Frustrated
My consumption of news regarding Covid-19 has trailed off. I became frustrated that this pandemic – a public health crisis prompted by a virus that literally does not care where you come from, what you look like, or which political party you support – has achieved the impossible: it has further divided a country that was fast becoming a nation of Hatfields and McCoys. If a public health emergency cannot bring us together, exactly what can? Would it take war between nations? A meteor strike? An invasion by extraterrestrials?
The debate du jour, of course, is about the pace of “opening up.” Judging from a non-scientific survey of my social media accounts, there are three camps: (1) Full Throttle; (2) Proceed With Caution; and (3) Slow Down.
Then why wear the mask?
Those in the Full Throttle camp want to open up the economy NOW!, and some consider being asked to wear a mask to be a threat to personal liberty on the level of being forced to donate a kidney. Some – not all – in this camp are willing to tote guns and storm state capitols to prove … something. These are many of the same folks, of course, who originally thought (because they were told to think so) that the whole coronavirus thing was a hoax. As the bodies have piled up (we could nearly fill the Rose Bowl with the dead, at this point), they have now pivoted to alternately blaming bats, the Chinese, Bill Gates, the World Health Organization, and Obama. Some have taken to acts of defiance of rules and guidelines promulgated in the name of public health. They ridicule the snowflakes who wear masks and practice social distancing. The Full Throttle folks are convinced this crisis is being manipulated by “the media” to control the masses and help tank the economy for political ends.
Those in the Proceed With Caution camp (spoiler, my camp) are typically sane and rational and conflicted. People in this camp understand that this pandemic poses a once-in-a-century quandary, and that difficult decisions are being made based on a delicate balance of legitimate, competing interests. They tend to want public and private decisions guided by data, science, and compassion, but are also resigned to the fact that cold, hard economic analysis needs to be considered as well. They know that being 100% confident in the wisdom of any decision is a pipedream. These folks want to save as many lives as possible while minimizing the economic and other collateral damage inflicted by any set of policies that shackles commercial activity.
I think the vast majority of Americans are in this centrist camp, and that they hold many different opinions and points of view because there are really difficult, vexing problems to be solved, and reasonable minds can differ on how to solve them. Doctors, public health experts, economists, experts in the transmission of respiratory illnesses, economists, actuaries, supply chain experts. I say bring all of them to the table to help forge a path forward. You’ll note I omitted politicians; in a perfect world, all of the politicians would be quarantined – together – on Madagascar (with apologies to Madagascar).
Doubling up on the protection, for good measure
Then, there are those in the Slow Down camp. A few on the fringe in this camp are convinced politicians urging open economies want to kill the most vulnerable in some twisted Darwinian experiment. They are by nature nervous and cautious, and wonderfully stubborn about saving lives. They will advocate taking any and all steps to ensure that the inevitable second wave can be controlled. Whatever the economic impact, they want all of us to wait patiently for the virus to be brought to its knees – by a vaccine or otherwise – before getting all the way back to “normal.” As much heat as they take, they are the most compassionate among us, and their voices need to be heard even if the ultimate course we take strays from their ideal course.
I’m not frustrated that there are differences of opinion – that’s to be expected in a society where information (and disinformation, sadly) flows like beer at a frat party. What’s frustrating is the moving targets, the demoralization of institutions that should be leading our national response, the inconsistent approaches taken by states that share borders simply because different political parties control their governments. It’s all so silly and on-brand for America, circa 2020, that the imperative that we vanquish a common, non-discriminating foe has driven us to hate, berate, and distrust one another even more.
Restless
While my frustration is largely borne of what I know and see today, my restlessness relates to the future and its unknowns. I am restless because I realize that I need to figure out – for myself – how to forge a path forward. I don’t fully trust elected officials to call the plays, and therefore I need to figure out exactly where I stand on the “open up” versus “go slow” spectrum and be prepared to improvise. None of us is an innocent bystander; we are all participants. Going forward, the outcome here – that is, how much worse things get before we can say this pandemic is over – will depend on the choices we make, individually. Day by day. Hour by hour.
Delicious … but risky
We all take risks, every single day. We drive, sometimes too fast. We eat delicious Italian beef sandwiches dipped in gravy, and ice cream, and sushi. We ski and skateboard. We jaywalk. By and large, we respect formal and informal rules – that’s part of the social contract under which we live. But to different degrees, we are willing to push the edges of those rules.
And now, mundane things we never associated with risk are – even if to some tiny degree – risky. Riding a commuter train. Using a public restroom. Going to a grocery store. Singing in a choir. Pumping our own gas. Judged against staying home, every single one of these actions increases the risk of contracting the coronavirus and suffering from Covid-19.
How each of us navigates this pandemic will be a study in risk tolerance. Every day.
Beware the choir
I desperately want to get back to normal. I want a haircut. I want to eat in a restaurant. But I also want my 89-year-old diabetic mother to see her 90th birthday in October, and to join our family in my home on Christmas Eve.
The restlessness. The frustration. At times it leads to those “SERENITY NOW!!” moments. I don’t get there daily, or even weekly. But every once in a while – usually when I read a story about some defiant, selfish jackass – I get to that peak and feel like letting go, like Frank.
So how did Jerry Stiller’s death help me develop a framework to use going forward? My musings about Frank Costanza and SERENITY NOW!! and individual responsibility and negotiating risk led me to think about The Serenity Prayer. You may not know it by that name, but I suspect you’ve seen it:
God, grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
Reinhold Niebuhr, American theologian
This prayer was composed in the early 1930s, during the Depression, and gained widespread secular use. It was later adopted and popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous, and the famous atheist author and philosopher Ayn Rand said of the prayer:
… that statement is profoundly true, as a summary and a guideline: it names the mental attitude which a rational man must seek to achieve. The statement is beautiful in its eloquent simplicity.
I fancy myself a rational man, and if The Serenity Prayer offers up “the mental attitude which a rational man must seek to achieve,” I’m all in – so much so that I have decided to use it as a North Star for finding the way back to “normal.”
Accepting Things I Cannot Change
Going forward, I know I will encounter things I cannot control or change, and must accept. Among them:
+ I cannot change that some people will insist on viewing the “open up” versus “hunker down” debate as a political debate. It’s nonsensical and counterproductive and I wish people would stop. But they won’t – I’ll have to accept that and move on.
+ I cannot change that some people will view minor inconveniences (wearing masks, staying physically distant from others, not getting to play blackjack at casinos) as major assaults on their liberty. There have been oceans of ink spilled onto pages by people who have actually suffered a deprivation of liberty – none of those pages describe the horror of being asked to wear a cloth mask at Costco.
+ I cannot change the hearts, minds, and souls of the truly asinine – the kind of people who respond to polite requests by becoming violent and menacing and confrontational.
+ I cannot change that some will spend an inordinate amount of time looking to assign blame, rather than looking for solutions.
+ I cannot change that not everyone will assess the risks that are presented ahead through the same lens as I do. I have no choice but to accept that I will encounter some who do things I find unacceptably risky, and some who will believe I am the one being reckless.
+ I cannot change that my state, village, or employer will impose rules on the road back to normal that I think go too far. I’ll accept the rules, and do my level best to comply with those rules. But I might – unwittingly or intentionally – violate a rule here or there. I won’t do so intentionally, though, if I think I am putting anyone else in harm’s way.
+ I cannot change that things won’t snap back to normal overnight, that we have miles and miles yet to go before we get to normal.
+ I cannot change that when I watch baseball or football or hockey again, I’m likely going to be watching athletes in empty stadiums and arenas. Sad, but true.
Having The Courage To Change Things I Can
But there are many things I can control and change, going forward:
+ First and foremost, I can change my mindset to a pandemic mindset when I am out and about. Early on, I read or heard great, simple advice: whether you believe you are infected or not, behave as if you are a contagious carrier of the virus determined not to infect anyone else. This is the Covid-19 Golden Rule, as far as I am concerned. If everyone followed this rule consistently, we would all be OK. I am going to do my best to do so. (And, by the way, having tiptoed back into society over the last few weeks, I will be frank – lots of people are not living by this rule.)
+ I can control my level of education about the virus, how it spreads, and which precautions are most effective. Statistics about how many have died, how many have been tested, how many ventilators are in use, and how many ICU beds are open are important – but they don’t really do me any good, individually, as I forge ahead. I will read seemingly credible sources that provide practical advice, like the one I’ve linked here. Facts about the disease, and how it spreads, are critical to understanding how I can follow the Golden Rule. When I’m outside, 150 yards from a playing partner hitting a golf shot (using a club no one else has touched), I’m not a danger to anyone. When I am in line at the deli at Sunset Foods with 20 of my closest friends on a Saturday morning, I am a threat. So I will wear a mask, keep my distance, avoid coughing or sneezing, and keep to myself. And in the unlikely event someone invites me to join a choir, I will politely decline.
+ I can hunker down when sick – this is the most important application of the Golden Rule. In the past, I’m sure I’ve gone to work or to a restaurant or party when I’ve felt just a wee bit under the weather. No more. If I am even the least bit feverish or “off” in any way, I’m staying home. Period. Sure, I might have to overcome FOMO (the Fear of Missing Out) from time to time. But until we are truly back to normal – and maybe even after we are back to normal, I’m not going to apologize for sidelining myself if I am feeling ill. Those among us for whom never missing a day of work is a badge of honor? Please get over it; it’s not so honorable to get others sick.
+ I can control and change my tolerance of other points of view and degrees of sensitivity to social interaction. Look, some people are going to be very anxious in public for the foreseeable future. They will wear masks even in situations where they are not obviously needed (alone in their cars, for example). They will feel more comfortable around me if I wear a mask, or keep my distance. I’m sure there will come a time – likely a long, long time from now – where I think to myself, “wow – didn’t he hear the news that we are past this thing?” Shame on me when (if) I have that thought. Why should I care if you choose to wear a mask in public in 2025? Why should I care if you choose to cross the street to avoid me when I am walking toward you? Let’s try something new, as a society, and be universally respectful and tolerant.
Was the bearded guy’s gun really necessary?
+ I can control how I react to the defiant, rude, selfish oaf who refuses to live by the Golden Rule. My hope is that my reaction to that person will be the same as my typical reaction to any troublemaker I encounter in life. First, respectful re-routing. Second, cautious and measured engagement (if necessary). Third, extraction and flight. Growing up in the city helped train me for this moment. As someone who walked city streets every day and encountered the normal collection of drunks, menacing kids, creepy adults, etc., I learned that the best way to avoid trouble was to simply avoid it. Cross the street. Choose another seat on the bus. Move to another table. Get off a stop early. Simple survival tools. If I encounter someone who decides to make a spectacle of himself by defying rules or ridiculing those who impose or follow them, I will likely adopt that same strategy – avoidance. If forced to engage, I’ll try to do so calmly and with reason, aiming to avoid a SERENITY NOW! moment for everyone. And if all else fails, I’ll get the hell out of Dodge and, if I’ve witnessed something really, really bad, I’ll do what I can to ensure that a person charged with keeping the peace is aware that a troublemaker is on the loose.
+ And finally, I can control and change the choices I make as a consumer. When businesses re-open, those who understand and respect differing levels of comfort among their clientele will thrive. Those who celebrate being allowed to open by raising a figurative middle finger to best practices will suffer. If you are a business owner, compassion and common sense will breed comfort and loyalty. Simple gestures will matter. Case in point: the local Waterway car wash/gas station has earned my business by taking the simple step of placing boxes of disposable plastic gloves next to its pumps. Small measure, small cost. But it tells me its management knows that some people will appreciate not having to contact a touch screen or gas pump that many others have touched that day. If I owned a business that interfaced with the public, I would not want to alienate a significant percentage of my potential customer base by seeming not to care all that much about Covid-19.
Kudos, Starbucks
The Wisdom To Know The Difference
The final ask of The Serenity Prayer is for the wisdom to know the difference between what we can change and cannot change. As the Honorable Richard M. Daley once said (I think), “it ain’t a rocket scientist thing.” We generally know what we can and cannot change. And I’m not sure the changes I have listed above necessarily require a great deal of courage to be executed. It seems that simply being considerate, tolerant, and exercising common sense will go a long way here. But that’s usually the case, right?
So that’s my plan going forward – accept the things about living through a pandemic that I cannot change, and change my mindset in small ways to be a better pandemic citizen.
Of course, I reserve the right to become frustrated. If it becomes too much, I will close my eyes, raise my clenched fists, and in memory of Frank Costanza I will wail “SERENITY NOW!!!” (But I won’t do so in an elevator or other confined space.)
“My Rushmore” posts feature my musings about the four greatest [fill in the blank]. Of course, the actual Mount Rushmore in South Dakota is a monument to four historically significant American presidents – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. This isn’t about them. Today, I write in memory of the four greatest games I played (inside my house) as a kid.
THE AUTHOR
I was a city kid. I grew up on the North Side of Chicago in a brick bungalow – a crowded brick bungalow. I was the youngest of nine, and by the time I came along my parents had pretty much had enough of the whole parenting thing. If I made it home for dinner and was in my bedroom about the time my parents were settling in with their late-night snack to watch Johnny Carson, all was good. I pretty much did what I wanted to do. Because I wasn’t all that interested in getting into serious trouble, that arrangement worked out well for everyone.
My days outside the house were filled with the normal city kid stuff – school, playing sports, throwing snowballs at cars, riding bikes, playing sports, climbing roofs, collecting beer cans, playing sports, raiding back porches of apartment buildings for bottles to turn in for nickels, and … playing more sports.
But like most kids, when weather or darkness forced me and my friends inside, we played games – either together, with siblings, or alone. Sure, I played Monopoly, Clue, the Game of Life, and Risk – but all four games on My Rushmore are, not surprisingly, games involving sports, and games that could be played alone, if need be.
Let’s get to it.
No. 4: Strat-o-Matic Baseball
Strat-O-Matic Baseball – or just Strat-O – is a table-top board game. A math student at Bucknell University named Hal Richman started Strat-O in 1961. He went on to release football, basketball, and hockey games, too. But Strat-O Baseball was my thing when I had time to kill from maybe sixth through ninth grades. My interest waned in playing Strat-O, I suppose, at about the time I got a driver’s license. I was the only Strat-O devotee among my circle of friends, but I take comfort in knowing there were enough of us that Strat-O has survived to this day, has its own Wikipedia page, and that its founder was inducted into the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.
Strat-O is a dice and card based simulation game. I’ve never played the game Dungeons and Dragons, but I feel like Strat-O might have been something like D&D for baseball nerds. Basically, every major league baseball player’s statistical performance is represented on a game card. Rolling two dice and referencing a pitcher and hitter’s card yields a result for every at-bat. The makers of the game were “intent [on] replicating athletes’ abilities as accurately as possible, giving the gamer the feel of making managerial decisions.”
I spent hundreds of hours playing Strat-O at my desk, hand-scoring every game, and compiling neatly organized composite statistical summaries. Weird, I know. My mother must have wondered why I was constantly clamoring for more college-lined loose leaf paper and pencils. When I played Strat-O, I managed both teams, and the dice and cards yielded the results of each at-bat and, ultimately, the games. I would set up All-Star teams from each league, made up of my favorite players. But there was no way of rigging the game so that your favorite player always hit the clutch homer – it was all about statistical probabilities and rolls of the dice. I suppose by managing one team less aggressively or less wisely than the other, I could tilt the probabilities of one team winning – but I was most interested in letting things play out, and then compiling the statistics.
Today’s video-game addled youth would find Strat-O to be boring, I’m sure. But video game systems that allowed you to simulate major league baseball games just weren’t a thing in the late 1970s, for better or worse. Playing Strat-O honed my math skills, sharpened my knowledge of baseball strategy, and kept me off the streets. It is well-deserving of its place on My Rushmore.
No. 3: Coleco Electronic Quarterback
Coleco Electronic Quarterback was a handheld electronic football game, released about a year after the first generation of the groundbreaking Mattel Classic Football. The games were very similar, using “simple mechanisms to interact with players, often limited to illuminated buttons and sound effects.” The “players” were represented by glowing, reddish LED blips on a dark screen, brought to life by the magic of a 9-volt battery. The object of the game was to press buttons to move a ball carrier (a brighter blip) down a field, avoiding “tacklers” (represented by less bright blip). The screen had three lanes running the length of the field, and each press of the button advanced the ball carrier a yard. This was high-tech stuff, let me tell you.
Unless you are 50-something or older, if you got your hands on one of these games and played for a few minutes you’d probably say, “you spent hours playing this?” Without a hint of shame, the answer is, “Yes. Yes we did.”In defense of my generation, remember this: we did not grow up in an age of seemingly endless in-home entertainment options. There was no YouTube or Facebook or Twitter or TikTok. Heck, ESPN – the first 24-hour sports network – did not debut until 1979. Even in a metropolis like Chicago, our televisions received about eight English-language channels – if you had the best antenna available. There was no cable TV, no Netflix, no HBO – nothing. We were starved for diversion, and mostly we got outside and figured out ways to entertain ourselves. But for those long car rides, rainy days, and late nights as we drifted off to sleep, Electronic Quarterback and handheld games of its generation filled the void and cracked the door open for what was to come.
Mattel Football 2 – proud owner, Sandy Veith
I have no idea why I scored the Coleco version of this game rather than the Mattel version, above, but it was a source of some pride because the Coleco version was the first to have a feature that allowed the offense to pass. In retrospect, this game (and its Mattel cousin) was pretty mindless and boring. But it deserves its place on this list because it occupied lots of my time, and it was a sort of gateway device – a precursor to the mind-blowing, realistic video games of today. For those of you who love Madden, MLB The Show, EA Sports’ NHL and NBA games, and even Call of Duty and Fortnite, remember to honor your elders and go easy on us when we clumsily try to master the modern video game and the seemingly endless array of buttons, triggers, and joysticks on its controller. We grew up when dodging little LED blips on a dark screen was cool – and all we needed to operate the game was a 9-volt battery and our thumbs.
No. 2: Tecmo Bowl
Those of you who are super observant may have noticed that the title of this article ended with an asterisk – intended to be a qualifier on the word “kid.” The reason for that qualifier: Tecmo Bowl.
Here comes a confession. Around 1989, during my last year in law school, I visited a mall outside of Boston with my then-girlfriend, soon-to-be fiancée, and future wife. I have a very vague recollection that we casually looked at engagement rings, but I have an absolutely clear recollection that we came home with a Nintendo Entertainment System like the one pictured below. (Recollection confirmed with said wife, by the way.)
I must have had a few bucks saved up from nice summer gigs, and decided to splurge. We set up the NES at her apartment because she had a 19- or 21-inch color Panasonic TV (far superior to my 10-year-old, 12-inch, black-and-white Sanyo). We were both in grad school and did not have a ton of spare time for mindless endeavors, but we had enough to spend some of it playing Super Mario Brothers in her roach-infested, rent-controlled apartment.
The Nintendo Entertainment System
Super Mario Bros. was the cartridge that came with the system, and probably the only one I owned for quite some time. After graduating in 1990, I moved back to Chicago and the NES came with me. At some point, I had purchased Tecmo Bowl, a football game for the NES. As described on its Wikipedia page:
[Tecmo Bowl] is an American football video game developed and released by Tecmo. Originally released as an arcade game in 1987, … a [cartridge] for the Nintendo Entertainment System was released in 1989 and was the first console game to include real NFL players, via a license from the NFLPA … The NES version of the game was extremely popular, spawning various sequels, starting with 1991’s Tecmo Super Bowl. The NES game has also been cited by various media outlets as one of the best sports video games ever made.
Wikipedia
One of my friends from college who was a couple years older than me had worked and saved enough that he bought a townhouse in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. It became something of a home for wayward members of my college crew, and a hangout for many of us – wayward or not. Among other things, we played Tecmo Bowl. Lots and lots of Tecmo Bowl. The original Tecmo Bowl featured 12 NFL teams, and whether you beat your opponent had something to do with your skill, and something to do with the team you drew.
Hence, the asterisk. I’m not sure I was a “kid” anymore at 25 years old; but during those sessions in that dark, cramped townhouse in Lincoln Park we acted a lot more like kids than grown-ups. I suppose I could have been spending time doing things that were more enriching, socially productive, or both. But as it turned out, there would be plenty of time for that later in life. We hung out, drank beer, played cards, and played Tecmo Bowl. Don’t judge.
Eye-popping graphics, circa 1990
In researching this piece, I was blown away by the treasure trove of information available on the internet about Tecmo Bowl. In addition to the Wikipedia page, I found not one, but many detailed rankings of the NFL teams included in Tecmo Bowl, and of the NFL players who were the highest-rated, best players within that game.
Bring me any ranking of Tecmo Bowl players from now until the end of time, and I’ll tell you which player had better be at the top of the list – Bo Jackson of the Oakland Raiders. In 1989, when the NES version of Tecmo Bowl was first released, Vincent Edward “Bo” Jackson was at the height of his powers. The 1985 Heisman Trophy winner from Auburn, Jackson was clearly the greatest two-sport professional athlete of my lifetime. His career in football ended and his career in baseball was derailed by a serious hip injury he suffered during a football game in 1991.
Bo: The Greatest Video Game Athlete Ever
Jackson’s greatness had three primary components. He was big. He was powerful. And he was fast. Very, very fast. Jackson had been selected in the second round of the MLB draft out of high school by the Yankees, but made good on a promise to his mother to attend college and accepted a football scholarship at Auburn. He played running back for the Tigers in the Fall, and baseball in the Spring. After winning the Heisman Trophy and (reportedly) running the 40-yard dash in 4.13 for NFL scouts (at 227 pounds!), he was the first overall pick in the 1986 NFL draft by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
But Jackson would never play for the Buccaneers, and he told them as much before they drafted him. As the presumptive first pick, the Bucs had flown Jackson on a private jet to Tampa to tour their facilities. That turned out to be against some idiotic NCAA rule, and in all its draconian glory the organization stripped Jackson of his eligibility to play baseball at Auburn during his senior year. Jackson thought the Bucs had intentionally compromised his baseball eligibility to force him to play football, and told the Bucs that selecting him would be a wasted draft pick. On April 29, the Bucs ignored Bo’s warning and drafted Jackson with the first overall pick.
About six weeks later – on June 2 – the defending World Series champion Kansas City Royals took a gamble and drafted Jackson in the 4th Round of the MLB amateur draft (the Yankees’ right to sign Jackson had expired). Again, Jackson kept his word and did not sign with the Bucs. He signed with the Royals, played 53 games at AA Memphis, and was called up to the Show in September. He played five seasons with the Royals, three with the White Sox, and one with the Angels – resuming his baseball career with a new hip after his football career ended.
Even though his baseball career was by then in full flight, the Raiders selected Jackson in the 7th Round of the 1987 NFL draft – the Bucs’ right to sign him having expired. Bo signed with the Raiders, who agreed to allow him to play both baseball and football. They figured having part-time Bo was better than no Bo. Given baseball commitments and injury, Jackson never played more than 11 games in an NFL season.
In 1989 – the season Tecmo Bowl was released for the NES – Jackson rushed for 950 yards and a 5.5 yards per carry average in 11 games. And he hit 32 homers, drove in 105 runs, and stole 26 bases for the Royals. For good measure, he was the MVP of the 1989 MLB All-Star game.
Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of dominant NFL players coded into Tecmo Bowl – Lawrence Taylor, Jerry Rice, Ronnie Lott, and Barry Sanders, to name a few. But anyone who cares to argue the case against Bo Jackson is simply going to lose that case. If you dare to try, first consider this YouTube video (yes – someone made a YouTube video!!) titled “Why Bo Jackson is So Unstoppable in Tecmo Super Bowl” or this article, “Remembering Bo Jackson’s ‘Tecmo Bowl’ Dominance.”
Bo Jackson was the greatest two-sport talent of my lifetime, and his injury was tragic. Folks can argue my “greatest two-sport talent” declaration – there have been other athletes who have played professionally with some success in two sports. But what cannot be argued is this declaration: as represented in Tecmo Bowl, Bo Jackson was the greatest video game athlete of all time.
1. Super Toe
The top spot on My Rushmore of Games I Played As A Kid* goes to the glorious, plastic oaf pictured above: Super Toe, or – as I affectionately called him – “Toe.”
Super Toe was an elegantly simple toy sold by Schaper Toys in the mid-1970s. The game came with just a few components: Super Toe himself, two plastic footballs that were squared off on either end so that they could stand without a kicking tee, and a set of plastic goal posts that were constructed in sections. The idea behind Super Toe was simple – you used him to kick plastic football field goals through the plastic goal posts.
“The score is tied and time is running out …” was the pitch on the commercials. Once you set up the goal posts, you picked a spot for your field goal try, lined up Super Toe, placed the ball in front of his plastic leg, and – this was the fantastic part – whacked Super Toe on the top of his helmet, sending his kicking leg forward to strike the ball, which sent it hurtling through the air toward the goal posts. The harder you banged on Toe’s helmet, the further the ball would go.
Super Toe’s range was maybe 12 feet (give or take), and obviously kicking the ball through a set of plastic goal posts became more difficult as you got further away. At first, successfully kicking relatively short field goals was a challenge – you had to get the hang of just how hard you could slam down on Super Toe’s head. But as you got better, finding space to try longer and longer field goals was the challenge.
Toe and I spent a lot of time together, and I got reasonably proficient sending those odd plastic footballs through the uprights. But my time with Toe nearly ended disastrously.
To understand why, you have to understand the layout of my childhood home on Sacramento Avenue in Chicago, pictured below.
Where it all happened
Chicago bungalows are relatively narrow, maybe 20 feet wide on a standard 25-foot city lot. Our house was situated in the middle of a double lot, so it was a little wider than most – say 25 feet. Our house, like all bungalows, was much longer than it was wide. In the front of the house, you had the aptly named front room. As you proceeded toward the backyard and alley, along the left side of the house you had a dining room, bathroom, and kitchen. On the right side, you had my parents’ bedroom, a second bedroom, and a third bedroom. In our house, a narrow hallway connected the dining room and kitchen, with the second bedroom (mine, at the time) and the one bathroom on either side of that hallway.
At our dining room table, my father sat at the end nearest the front room, facing the back of the house. We ate at 5:30 p.m. every day, like clockwork. One night, I was called to dinner at exactly the same time I was about to attempt Toe’s longest field goal ever. I had figured out that I could squeeze a few extra feet of “field” out of my bedroom by placing the goal posts near the closet door, which was furthest from the door to the room. But my room wasn’t going to be enough to contain Toe’s booming leg, so I lined him up in the hallway to attempt an epic kick that would have to travel into and across the bedroom to reach the uprights.
There was one problem. Unless you whacked Toe on top of the helmet just right, he tended to kick the ball wildly. As luck would have it, on this occasion I whacked Toe on the head a few moments after my Dad had sat down at the dinner table. Toe kicked the ball a long way – but sideways. The ball rocketed out of the hallway, flew the length of our dining room table, and landed in my Dad’s mashed potatoes.
To my surprise, he did not yell. He got up calmly carrying a plastic football covered in mashed potatoes, walked down the hallway, picked up Super Toe, and then walked both to the back of the house, down the back stairs, and to the alley. There, he dropped Super Toe and the ball in one of our two steel garbage cans. He never said a word to me as he returned to his seat at the table and finished dinner. I just sat and ate silently, not knowing if I’d ever see Toe again.
Later that night, I snuck out to the alley and retrieved Toe and the ball. I hid both in my closet for a time, and made sure never to attempt a field goal from the hallway during dinner (or any time my Dad was home) again. At some point, I moved my bedroom to the attic upstairs. A long, window-less carpeted room served as my new quarters, and Toe and I had a gloriously long, safe space in which to split the uprights.
I rescued him, just as he had rescued me from hours of boredom.
Predictably, I’m hooked. Four episodes into its 10-episode run, The Last Dance on ESPN is proving to be must-watch television. Great memories. Unforgettable characters. Horace Grant’s succinct, profane summary of the Detroit Pistons’ petulant walk-off after being swept by the Bulls in the 1991 conference finals. Dennis Rodman getting the green light from Phil Jackson, mid-season, to go on a 48-hour bender in Vegas. Countless electrifying highlights of Michael Jordan in his prime. For any basketball fan – and especially a Bulls fan – this is watching sports pornography. What’s not to like?
Actually, I do have one small beef with The Last Dance, and I think those of you who are from Chicago, grew up in Chicago, or lived in Chicago at any point before or during the Jordan years will understand. So far, at least, The Last Dance has failed to capture Michael Jordan’s enormous impact on the City of Chicago’s image and its citizenry’s collective self-esteem. MJ turned out to be a six-time NBA champion, zillion-time All-Star, Olympic champion, and the greatest-of-all-time at his sport. But before he was any of those things – and while he was building his legacy – he was our superstar.
I’ve seen some quibbling, critical reviews of the series – typically from those who acknowledge Michael Jordan’s status as Basketball Jesus, cultural icon, marketing phenomenon and all that, but clearly aren’t enamored of Michael Jordan the Person. One described Jordan as a 57-year-old with a paunch who – sadly – cannot let go of decades-long grudges. (On that charge, I find him guilty, though I’m not sure it’s so sad – the paunch or the grudges.) Another remarked that the series is too wed to telling the story from Jordan’s point of view. To that, I say “What? You want to hear more from Scott Burrell and Jud Buechler?” Call me crazy, but I am far more interested in Jordan’s perspective than Luc Longley’s.
Yet another scribe suggested Jordan only agreed to allow extensive access because he saw LeBron James as a threat to his status as the GOAT. Frankly, I don’t much care why Jordan agreed to sit down for hours and hours of interviews – I’m glad he did it. If you’ve seen the excellent 30-for-30 feature on the 1985 Bears, you saw an incredibly poignant story angle focused on Buddy Ryan, the team’s defensive coordinator. By the time the cameras rolled, Ryan was a dying man who had lost the ability to communicate much at all, let alone tell stories. The love his former players had for Ryan, and the love he had for them, came screaming out of the television. But man, what I would give to hear Buddy Ryan tell stories about Hampton and Singletary and McMichael and Dent and the Fridge. So yeah – I’m fine with lots of MJ in this series, and relegating his supporting cast to supporting roles.
My Guys – Norm Van Lier, Jerry Sloan, and Bob Love
Chicago Basketball B.M. (Before Michael)
Pre-Jordan, professional basketball in Chicago was more or less a wasteland. The Chicago Bulls were actually the third NBA franchise to call Chicago home. The Stags (1946-50), Packers and Zephyrs (1961-63) had failed to stick, but the NBA awarded the city an expansion franchise in 1966. The Bulls, coached by Chicago prep and University of Illinois great Johnny “Red” Kerr, actually made the playoffs – the first time an expansion franchise had done so in its first season. The Bulls first draft pick was the legendary Dave Schellhase of Purdue, a 6-3 guard who played in 73 games for the team and scored fewer points per game (2.8) than he had functioning limbs (presumably, 4). The initial success did not last. By 1968, the city was sufficiently disinterested in the Bulls that one of their home games was contested before 891 fans, and some “home” games were played in a far western suburb – Kansas City, Missouri.
In the mid-1970s, the Bulls put together a pretty decent team, and they were the first team to break my heart and make my nine-year-old self cry. Featuring Jerry Sloan, Norm Van Lier, Chet “The Jet” Walker, and Bob “Butterbean” Love, the 1974-75 Bulls took the eventual NBA champion Golden State Warriors to seven games in the conference finals, but lost. To this day, I hate Rick Barry and his silly underhanded free throw style – the one he used to make better than 90 percent that year. I recall the sting of that loss if it happened yesterday. After the game, I retired to my room, pulled the covers over my head, and cried myself to sleep. I had been initiated into the fraternity of disappointed Chicago sports fans.
The A-Train, Artis Gilmore
That Bulls squad, coached by Dick Motta, dribbled off a cliff the next season. They went 24-58. Motta was out, and the forgettable Ed Badger replaced him. This began a dark, dark time in Bulls history. Playing mostly to empty seats at the Chicago Stadium, the Bulls teams in the eight years leading up to Jordan’s arrival in 1984 were most remembered for bad basketball and consuming copious amounts of cocaine (if The Last Dance has it right). This was my team, though. As I staggered through adolescence, I rode with the A-Train, Artis Gilmore – he of the creaky knees and gigantic Afro. The A-Train was 7-2, a bruising lefty with a blacksmith’s touch, and the best center in team history. Incredibly – given the weight of having been a Bull – he ended up in the Hall of Fame. The only reason he was a Bull at all was that the team drafted him #1 overall when the American Basketball Association folded and the NBA held a dispersal draft to claim players from the teams that were not being merged into the league. The Kentucky Colonels’ loss turned out to be the Bulls’ gain. Probably my favorite Bull of the Dark Ages was Reggie Theus, a flashy gunner from UNLV who was basically a thoroughbred running around with donkeys.
Trivia Question 1: In the 1977 NBA draft, the Bulls selected two players from the Atlantic Coast Conference who had played for the US Olympic basketball team in 1976. Who were they and what schools did they attend?
Trivia question brought to you by the one true team
The NBA draft in 1979 proved to be something of a bottom. The Bulls’ ineptitude had earned them the right to flip a coin with the Los Angeles Lakers for the first overall pick. The Bulls lost the flip, and the consolation prize was David Greenwood of UCLA. The Lakers took a guy named Earvin Johnson out of Michigan State. Went by the name Magic. That worked out okay for the Lakers. As the Greenwood Tree took root, in 1982 the Bulls drafted Quintin Dailey out of the University of San Francisco in Round 1. Dailey, a reasonably good player, was most memorable for his nickname, “San Quintin.” Apparently, a few months before the Bulls drafted him, Dailey had been accused of sexually assaulting a resident assistant at USF. He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and received probation, dodging any time in the penitentiary that inspired the nickname he could not shake. Decent folk – and even some local sportswriters – pilloried the Bulls’ selection of Dailey.
Eventually, the A-Train was shipped to San Antonio and the Bulls hit “re-set” for what seemed like the 15th time in my 17 years on Earth. In the six seasons pre-Jordan, the Bulls won an average of 30 games a year – or precisely 36.7 percent of the time. On the good news front, tickets to their games could be fetched for a song. That would change.
The Little School By The El Tracks
While Chicago professional basketball was in a dismal state pre-Jordan, Chicago was home to a powerhouse college program. Coach Ray Meyer’s DePaul squad, playing initially in 5,000-seat Alumni Hall at Belden and Sheffield, proved that the public would pay attention to winning basketball. DePaul built its program largely by recruiting the suburbs. In 1974, the Demons added Proviso East’s Joe “The Godfather” Ponsetto, Thornton’s Randy Ramsey, and Hersey’s Dave Corzine to an already decent squad. The next year, the Demons added Thornton’s Curtis Watkins and a rangy guard from East Orange, N.J. named Gary Garland. The table had been set. (Later in life, Garland, whose nickname was “The Music Man,” toured as a backup singer for his half-sister, a modestly talented gal named Whitney Houston.)
Mark Aguirre and Coach Ray Meyer
In 1979, Chicago’s own version of Michael Jordan arrived in Lincoln Park in the person of Westinghouse High’s Mark Aguirre. A 6-6 forward with hands Coach Ray once described as being as large as toilet seats, Aguirre was the best pure scorer I ever saw play college basketball. As a teenager whose dad wisely bought DePaul season tickets when Aguirre was a freshman, I worshiped Mark Aguirre. (So much so that I forgave him for being a Piston later in life.) As a freshman, Aguirre joined a veteran Demons squad and led it to the Final Four, losing to Larry Bird’s Indiana State team by two points. Between that year and 1983-84 – the six-year run-up to Jordan’s arrival – the Demons were 153-27 (an .850 winning percentage). It’s no wonder that DePaul regularly drew crowds of more than 15,000 after moving to the Rosemont Horizon – the House that Mark Built. Meanwhile, the Bulls struggled to fill half of the lower level at the old Chicago Stadium.
After building the program largely with suburban kids, Meyer turned to the Chicago Public League to take his program to the next level. In addition to Aguirre, he recruited Carver’s Terry Cummings, King’s Teddy Grubbs, and Skip Dillard and Bernard Randolph from Westinghouse. I still can hear PA announcer Jim Riebandt’s spirited introduction of DePaul’s Chicago Public League-dominated starting five … “from Chicago King …,” “from Chicago Carver …,” and of course, “from Chicago Westinghouse. Number 24. Mark. Aguirre.” Still gets me pumped.
Naturally, because it was a Chicago team of my youth/adolescence, the Demons underachieved. I absorbed another memorable gut punch in March 1981. My Dad let me skip school, and he and I climbed into his baby blue Lincoln Continental and road-tripped to watch top-ranked DePaul in (we assumed) the first two rounds of the NCAA tourney in Dayton, Ohio. Alas, in one of the biggest upsets in tournament history, DePaul lost to St. Joseph’s at the buzzer, 47-46. A completely forgettable guy named John Smith made an uncontested layup at the buzzer. Aguirre put on headphones and left the arena in tears, walking all the way back to the hotel in his uniform. His supernova college career was over just like that – he was the first overall pick in NBA draft a couple months later. My Dad and I stayed for the second game (eventual national champion Indiana dismantled Maryland), and made the 1,000-mile drive back to Chicago the next morning. Crushed.
Dave Corzine
Air Jordan Arrives
There was a bridge of sorts between that DePaul program and Michael Jordan’s Bulls in the person of Dave Corzine. Corzine turns out to have been at DePaul just prior to Aguirre’s arrival, and also on the scene when Jordan arrived. After a stellar career at DePaul, Corzine was drafted in the first round by the Washington Bullets, made his way to San Antonio, and in the summer of 1982 was traded to the Bulls along with the great Mark Olberding for the A-Train. Corzine was listed at 6-11, but in college he’d played at about 7-3 thanks to a glorious ‘fro of his own. Like a lot of the big men of his era, he was simply an outsized version of a normal human being – he wasn’t the chiseled, super-hero that we see today. Consummate pro, played his 25 minutes and scored his 10 points. Set solid screens, leaned on opposing centers. Nice little mid-range jump shot. In the two years before Jordan arrived in 1984, Corzine scored 14 and 12.2 points per game – his best marks as a pro. He was part of the core of the train wreck of a squad Jordan joined.
That Jordan arrived in Chicago at all is a story often told, and already told in The Last Dance. Corzine and Co. were bad enough that the Bulls earned the third overall pick. The Rockets and Trail Blazers, in need of big men, selected Houston’s Hakeem Olajuwon and Kentucky’s Sam Bowie. Jordan fell into the Bulls’ lap, and the rest is history.
There’s no point to me walking through Jordan’s career, but there were two seminal moments for me. As The Last Dance detailed, Jordan scored 63 points in a playoff loss to the Boston Celtics in 1986 after missing most of the season with a broken foot. I remember the game vividly, because it marked my return to being a sports fan, after a long period during which it seemed like every game I watched was a game I covered as a college journalist. I remember sitting on a couch and enjoying a ridiculous display by Jordan. He relentlessly loped around the court like a colt, contorted himself to score over, under, and around the great Celtics front line. That was the day I thought to myself, this guy is really something special. And I pinched myself – he actually plays for my team.
Trivia Question 2 – Which Bulls’ player threw the inbounds pass to Michael Jordan that led to The Shot, and where did he play in college?
trivia question brought to you by the one true team
The second MJ moment, for me, was The Shot – the dagger of a buzzer-beating jumper in the deciding Game 5 of the first round in 1989 playoffs. Of course, Jordan hit that shot over Craig Ehlo to give the Bulls a 101-100 win, leaped about 14 feet into the air, and pumped his fist wildly as his teammates mobbed him and the Cleveland fans stood in silence. That was the first inkling that Jordan could not only shine spectacularly as an individual, but that he could will a team to win.
Move Over, Al Capone
By the time the 1990s rolled around, and certainly by the time of the 1997-98 season on which The Last Dance is focused, any Chicagoan traveling just about anywhere on Earth was almost certain to get something like this, in one accent or another: “You’re from Chicago? Ahhhh – Michael Jordan!!” By anywhere on Earth, I mean Europe, Asia, even Alabama or New Mexico. Jordan had become an international icon. If you were from Chicago, Jordanphiles from everywhere – and obviously, there were lots – envied you merely because you happened to live where Jordan played. “Chicago” no longer conjured up images of Prohibition era gangsters and the rat-tat-tat of their machine guns, but of the most dynamic, graceful, dominant athlete in the world.
Arriving on the heels of the Dark Ages of Bulls’ basketball, Jordan elevated the franchise to heights no one could have imagined. Wildest dreams? Nope – way, way beyond our wildest dreams. Remember, this was the franchise of Coby Dietrick and Ricky Sobers and Tom Boerwinkle. Of Granville Waiters and Leon Benbow and Sedale Threatt. Fine fellows and excellent ballers, for sure – but players who played on teams for whom the playoffs were an inconvenient and unwelcome delay from the start of the summer.
Not only did he lift the franchise, but Jordan lifted an entire population’s self-esteem. That he came, in a short time, to symbolize and represent all that was good about Chicago is a little bit ironic. After all, Jordan was from Wilmington, North Carolina. Though Jordan played in Chicago, became famous in Chicago, opened restaurants in Chicago, and raised his first family in Chicago, Jordan was not from Chicago. Jordan was not Aguirre, or Cummings, or Isiah Thomas, or Doc Rivers. They were from Chicago (or, in Rivers’ case, Maywood). MJ just played here because Portland had to have Sam Bowie and his brittle legs. As it turned out, MJ was better at basketball than all of them. And he put their town on his back and took all of us for an unforgettable ride.
Six times
Chicago’s reaction when Jordan left was interesting – a collective shrug. We didn’t really care that he found it necessary to come out of retirement and putter around with the Wizards for a couple of years. I could not have cared less. Jordan was mine when he was at his greatest. His career ended, as far as I am concerned, with the pose in Utah after nudging Bryon Russell – ever so slightly – to free himself for a jumper that sealed a sixth title. (I have a feeling we’ll see that shot at some point in The Last Dance.) I was not the least bit bitter when Jordan decided to play for a team other than the Bulls. He’d earned the right to do whatever he wanted. I hardly watched, not because it bothered me, but because our time together had ended. I don’t even recall being very upset that the dynasty was (maybe) ushered to an early end by Bulls’ management, personified in the series as GM/Punching Bag Jerry Krause. Let’s face it, Pippen needed to get paid. Phil’s Zen act was wearing a little thin. MJ was not getting younger. And the two ends of Dennis Rodman’s candle were converging. Did the team have the right to lose its title on the court? That can be argued. But I, for one, felt satisfied with the double three-peat.
I have never met Michael Jordan in person, or been anywhere closer to him than in the same arena on the few occasions I was able to see him perform. I share very little in common with him – apart from a love of basketball, golf, and (to a lesser extent I think) casinos. But somehow, for some odd reason, I felt entitled to take more than a small measure of pride in the simple fact that he and I – and millions of others – shared a city.
A Missed Step, Or A Lost Cause?
Thankfully, The Last Dance – and not the Tiger King – will be the Covid-19 series I’ll remember best. Like any documentary that covers a lot of ground, viewers will quibble with things left out. My point is this: the producers have missed (so far, at least) capturing Jordan’s impact on my hometown, Chicago. And they’ve missed deeply exploring the impact he had on civic pride and a city’s self-esteem. When Jordan arrived in 1984, the last championship any Chicago team had won was in 1963, when the Bears won the NFL title. The Bears would win a Super Bowl before MJ would get the Bulls to the promised land, but Jordan was the best thing that ever happened to Chicago sports, with apologies to many who were great – but not as great.
There are bits and pieces of The Last Dance that convey the Dark Ages of Bulls’ basketball, and even the footage of Jordan’s rookie season shows an ocean of empty seats at the Stadium. We heard Michael dish about the cocaine, booze, and women his teammates soaked up on road trips when he was a rookie. We’ve seen plenty of footage of parades and celebrations and adoring crowds – and we’ll see more as the series unfolds.
But what the producers missed is something that is not easily captured and communicated: the story of how a singular athlete lifted up not just a teammate, or a team, or an entire franchise – but changed the perception and self-image of an entire city.
He is the greatest player of all time. He is maybe the most ruthless competitor to ever wear sneakers. He is a marketing force. He is a cultural icon. He’s all of the things that The Last Dance highlights. But during the years that really mattered – during that glorious span of 14 years – he was all ours.
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Answers to Trivia Questions:
Q1: In 1977, the Bulls selected Duke’s Tate Armstrong in the first round, and Maryland’s Steve Sheppard in the second. Both played on the gold-medal winning 1976 U.S. Olympic team. Seven of the 12 players on that team were from the ACC.
Q2: Brad Sellers of Ohio State inbounded the ball. The highlight of his career.
answers provided by the one true team
FILE PHOTO AUGUST 19, 1951 -- Eddie Gaedel, a 3-foot-7 inch person, takes his famous at-bat on Aug. 19, 1951 for Bill Veeck's St. Louis Browns. The catcher is Detroit's Bob Swift, and the umpire is Ed Hurley.
Ricky Bobby, Tallegega nights: the legend of ricky bobby
It was cold and late, and I was dejected. We had lost – again. It was past 11 on a Saturday night in early March 2019, in River Forest, a Chicago suburb I visit once a year for the sole purpose of participating in this event. This year’s contest had ended about 10 minutes earlier. I’d said my goodbyes to my five teammates, muttered the obligatory “we’ll get ‘em next year,” and made a beeline out to my car in the parking lot at Trinity High School.
As I drove home, I thought, “maybe that’s it.” The team I captained had competed hard – we beat 100 teams and lost to one. By any measure, that’s pretty good, and we were pretty good. I’d captained various editions of this team in this event in eight of the last nine years and we finished first twice, second five times, and third once. Objectively, not bad – always on the medal stand. But on that night in 2019 it hit me that the prospect of ever again walking out of that gym in first place – as champions, carrying the traveling trophy reserved for winners – was waning.
The juggernaut that had me pondering retirement was known as Popeye Jones’ Ugly Brothers. Popeye first entered the tournament in 2013 and promptly dethroned my team – The One True Team – by the narrowest of margins. The One True Team reclaimed the title in 2014, with Popeye finishing third. Then, Popeye went on a run. It finished first out of 72 teams in 2015 (we were third); first of 84 teams in 2016 (we did not enter); first of 92 teams in 2017 (we were second); first of 102 teams in 2018 (we were second); and first of 102 teams in 2019 (again, we were second). A five-peat for Popeye. The One True Team had settled in as a bridesmaid – or groomsman, I suppose.
It wasn’t just that Popeye was winning every year; the margin of victory was growing. From 2017-2019, Popeye won by 4, 7, and 14 points, respectively. We were losing ground. Popeye was Secretariat in the last furlong in the 1973 Belmont Stakes – and we were the horse in second, destined to be forgotten. We’d tweaked the roster and tried different approaches. But nothing seemed to work. As I headed home, I wasn’t sure I’d be back 12 months later.
A Trivial Pursuit
If you see photos of The One True Team and of Popeye Jones’ Ugly Bros. – and you will, if you keep reading – you’ll figure out that the contest I am writing about does not involve physical prowess of any kind. No one will look at those pictures and say, “I want those guys on my side in a street fight.” More likely: “Those guys need to get out in the sun a little more.” There may not be a single elite athlete among them, but sports is very much at the center of their competition – more specifically, they compete in the not-so-rough-and-tumble world of sports trivia. If you’ve ever attended a trivia night fundraiser, you know the drill. Get some friends together, have a few drinks, play a little trivia. This contest is like that – but on steroids. And all about sports.
The aptly named St. Giles Men’s Society is made up of a group of men who are parishioners at St. Giles Catholic Parish in Oak Park, which borders River Forest. Before the explosion of Sports Trivia, the SGMS was best known (to me, at least) for its “Retreads” men’s basketball league. Team captains actually draft teams and they compete over the winter in the church gym. The elbows fly, lungs burn, and hamstrings pop. Local orthopedic offices greet the start of every season with the same refrain: cha-ching!
Sometime prior to February 2009, some SGMS genius came up with the idea of staging a sports trivia contest on a weekend night to break the monotony of a long, cold Chicago winter. The idea was elegantly simple: form six-man teams, serve beer and pizza, run a sports trivia contest, and maybe raise a little money for charity – or at least to cover the pizza and beer. The inaugural event in 2009 – Sports Trivia 1 – drew 14 teams and was held in a church fellowship hall most memorable for its linoleum floor. Twelve years later, SGMS Sports Trivia has earned the tagline on its web site: Chicagoland’s Premier Sports Trivia Charity Event. The last three events each drew around 100 six-man teams. If there were any women on those teams, please forgive me for not noticing. At this event, ladies are as rare as a Seth Jones – the unicorn NHL All-Star whose father, Popeye, played in the NBA.
Sports Trivia Teaser 1
Which Chicago Bear scored the team’s last points in the 46-10 win over the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XX? What uniform number did he wear? Where did he play in college?
Trivia brought to you by the one true team
After first graduating to the church’s gym, Sports Trivia ultimately got so big that it was moved down the street to Trinity. The organizers ramped up the silent auctions and raffles, brought in late-night snacks, wooed corporate sponsors, and goosed the entry fee – these guys are Catholics, after all, hard-wired to raise money. At some point, the proceeds from the night were earmarked for a school – Christ the King College Prep – on the West Side of Chicago. In recent years, the drum corps from the school gets the jam-packed assembly of 600+ trivia nuts hyped at the start of the night.
For sports trivia geeks, this is the night that vindicates years of poring over box scores, reading Pete Maravich biographies, playing in fantasy leagues, and watching meaningless games on cable. And, for the less socially inhibited (most of the crowd), it’s simply an awesome night out with some buddies. Good old fashioned guy time. As American writer Chuck Palahniuk said, “We don’t see a lot of models for male social interaction. There’s sports and barn raisings.”
Among other things, Sports Trivia participants are treated to the stylings of hands-down the best organist in the history of Chicago sports (with apologies to current Blackhawks organist Frank Pellico).
The incomparable Nancy Faust
Nancy Faust was the long-time organist for the Chicago White Sox, keeping fans entertained at the variously named Comiskey Parks between 1970 and 2010. During those 41 seasons, she missed five games – apparently dialing up some lame excuse about giving birth to a son. She also played the organ at the old Chicago Stadium for the Bulls and then the Blackhawks between 1975 and 1989 – among many other gigs. Now retired, Nancy moved to Arizona with her husband and tends to a couple of donkeys. One more fun fact about Nancy: she attended the same high school in Chicago – Roosevelt High – as my mother, father, and oldest sister. (Wikipedia rules.)
Some genius – again, the SGMS is full of them – thought to track down Nancy and ask her to provide the running sound track for SGMS Sports Trivia. For the last five years, she and her husband have made the trip back to Chicago every winter, lugged her organ out of storage, showed up at the gym, and entertained the masses before, during, and even after the event. Her ability to play snippets of songs in real time that track the questions is uncanny. A question relating to the Yankees or Mets might prompt her to belt out a few bars of “New York, New York.” One year, a question about a penalty assessed in a golf tournament brought “I Fought the Law (And the Law Won).” Whatever SGMS is paying Nancy, she’s worth every penny.
For all the pomp and circumstance, the key to the success of the event is the questions. Each year, SGMS curates a set of questions so balanced it would make Olga Korbut proud. From reasonably easy to really hard, from current events to decades ago. Baseball, basketball, football, hockey, soccer, tennis, golf, racing, Olympic sports, boxing, cycling. College sports, actual amateur sports, professional sports. For sure, the questions tilt to the four major American sports, but you name a category, and at some point it has been covered, and many are covered every single year.
The gym buzzes at the start of the night, as teams of six wander into the gym with bags of snacks and settle themselves into wobbly folding chairs in a sea of round tables. The questions are broken into between six and 10 themed rounds. By themed, I mean a round might be titled: “Color My World” and the answers or questions might include some reference to a color – perhaps A.C. Green, Vida Blue, Eric “the Red” Davis, Downtown Freddie Brown, or the Alabama Crimson Tide. The questions sometimes call for multi-part answers, and partial credit is given. It’s not multiple choice – you need to come up with the answers cold. After questions are read, teams confer in whispers and answers are written down. At the end of each round, answer sheets are turned in, scores tabulated by an army of scorers in referee shirts, and the standings are projected – thanks to yet another unsung SGMS genius who keeps the tech humming behind the scenes. In terms of overall difficulty, most teams in the competition nail at least half the questions; the winners usually answer about 80% correctly. After 12 years, the night runs like the 10:05 from Munich to Augsburg.
Mike Andolina, the face of SGMS Sports Trivia
The face of Sports Trivia is a guy named Mike Andolina. Mike’s a friend, and will forever be known in New Jersey high school hoops circles as the Jelly Donut Guy. Mike was a sturdy, skilled point guard who was a dead ringer for the guy in the Dunkin’ Donuts commercial pictured above. Legend has it that rival high school student sections showered him with the “Jell-Lee Dough-Nut” chant whenever he had the ball. Year after year, Mike shoehorns himself into a tux and dishes out the questions from the podium. The fact that he also tries to down a beer between each round makes all participants grateful – especially deep into the evening – that the sometimes nuanced questions are also projected on huge video screens. (Our mutual friend and fellow SGMS committee member Kyle Rettberg deserves some credit for contributing to the questions and, more importantly, regulating Mike’s booze intake.)
Andolina drew me to this event – as a St. Giles parishioner he was among its early Pied Pipers and helps develop the questions. After occasionally bouncing questions off me for a couple years when Sports Trivia was cutting its teeth, he said, “you know what, you should get a team together this year – it’s going to be great.” I figured, why not? So I formed a team and entered Sports Trivia 3 in 2011.
I’m half-embarrassed and half-proud to say it was not my first rodeo in competitive sports trivia.
My Road
What happened? How did I come to retain a lot of useless information about sports? I think the correct answer is “osmosis” – not the scientific kind, but the other one: “the process of gradual or unconscious assimilation of ideas, knowledge, etc.” Though my wife might disagree, my interests have diversified considerably as I have aged. But to be perfectly honest, I’ve been unconsciously preparing to captain a sports trivia team forever – or at least since I learned to read and to turn on a television set. As I told a reporter once (really) who asked what I did to prepare for SGMS Sports Trivia, you cannot really prepare for a sports trivia contest, you just kind of have to pay attention to sports – like, for your entire life.
Putting aside time spent in school, sleeping, eating, building snow forts, riding bikes, and playing pinball at the Chinese grocery on Irving Park Road, I estimate that I spent around 80% of my childhood playing, watching, or reading about sports. Sports was my best friend. As the youngest of nine trailing the rest of the pack by five years, I wasn’t quite an only child but I was definitely on my own when it came to entertaining myself and filling my free time.
As a kid, I played everything. Counting high school, I competed (meaning playing in organized games or tournaments) in about 10 team or individual sports. And by a wide margin, I spent far more time playing sports in schoolyards, alleys, front yards, back yards, and parks in my Chicago neighborhood. Basketball was my favorite and best sport as a kid, and I played in my yard as long as there wasn’t snow or too much ice on the ground. In a great stroke of luck, an especially heavy, wet snowfall took down our detached garage on the alley, making room for a near-regulation quarter court. My Dad – a big sports fan himself and rare city kid who became an avid golfer – even let me tag along to the dimly lit driving ranges on River Road or at Diversey and Lake Shore Drive to hit golf balls on summer nights, at least until the mosquitoes or an empty wire basket chased us home.
But my passion for sports – and the reason I have accumulated loads of information that is useless for 364 nights a year – had more to do with what I was doing when I wasn’t playing sports. If there was a game on TV, or radio, I watched or listened to it. I was blessed to grow up in a big city, where we got as many as seven or eight channels. I watched everything. The pros: Cubs, Sox, Bears, Blitz, Bulls, Blackhawks, Sting, Cougars, and probably a few defunct teams I have forgotten. I watched college football, Monday Night Football, college basketball, Wide World of Sports, PGA golf, the pro bowling tour on Saturday afternoons (huge fan of Earl Anthony and Carmen Salvino). I rotary dialed SportsPhone over and over to get round by round updates of the NBA draft. You get the picture – and now you are warned to never turn to me for advice on hunting, fishing, tying knots, or myriad other more useful endeavors.
By far the biggest contributor to my accrual of sports knowledge was the thousands of hours I invested reading about sports. Beginning probably in 5th or 6th grade and for many of my adult years, I’ve read the sports pages of my local newspaper front to back, and in my formative years that included the box scores. I was a Sports Illustrated subscriber for almost 40 years, only pulling the plug recently in protest to new owners gutting the editorial staff. I bought and devoured publications like Street & Smith’s, which did annual basketball and football previews. I was an early devotee of Bill James and his revolutionary handbooks on baseball. Sports books? Check. Baseball, football, hockey and basketball cards? Check (I didn’t really collect them, I bought them and read them). Played hand-scored seasons of Strat-O-Matic baseball (a dice-and-card based board game) endlessly? Check.
As a consumer of sports, I peaked in high school and college. I read an article once about how and when we develop our musical tastes and why we so easily remember lyrics to the songs we listened to in high school and college. The basic point of the article was that most people develop a long-lasting affinity for the music they listen to through their teenage years, give or take a year. I am not an expert in cognitive development, but I suspect part of the reason I have sports trivia stashed in my brain is that I acquired a lot of it at a sticky time, cognitively speaking. How else would one explain the fact that I instantly recall the jersey numbers of probably 75% of the roster of the 1985 Bears, but would be hard-pressed to tell you what I ate for lunch yesterday?
Sports Trivia Teaser 2
Four American universities claim both at least one Super Bowl-winning quarterback and a President of the United States. Name the four schools, the quarterbacks, and the presidents.
trivia brought to you by the one true team
I kept playing and watching and reading through high school and college. As a freshman at the University of Illinois, I mustered the courage to approach Illini Hall on John Street, walked down a flight of stairs to a basement, and opened the door that said “The Daily Illini.” Sent to see a cranky upperclassman in an untidy corner of the newsroom who was the Sports Editor, I introduced myself. He said, “So you wanna write?” I said “yes,” and he assigned me to cover an intramural basketball tilt between Sigma Chi and Alpha Tau Omega that night. It was a test. I knocked out a short game story and passed the test. I spent much of the next three-and-a-half years covering games, writing features, writing columns, and working the night desk designing the pages or copy editing. It was exhilarating. I covered the lacrosse club, women’s cross country, men’s golf, women’s basketball and many other sports. Finally – as a junior – I reached the Holy Grail of college sports journalism, covering Big Ten football and basketball shoulder-to-shoulder with people who were doing it for a living. And I actually even made pretty good money doing it – the DI was an independent, self-supporting newspaper that paid students who wrote and edited and sold ads and did everything else it takes to run a paper.
As luck would have it, once in law school I gravitated to a bunch of guy who loved sports too – go figure. We played intramurals (shout out to the Rugworms) and found time to watch a lot of sports on TV, start up a Rotisserie baseball league, and even took road trips to watch early-round NCAA tournament games if our rigorous studies permitted. Some of my housemates may have also dabbled in sports wagering to make the games we watched more interesting – it’s a vague memory, I cannot be sure.
However it came to be acquired, my reservoir of sports trivia ended up coming in handy. As a college freshman, it led me to be recruited by a true sports trivia savant, who told me about a midget.
The Savant and the Midget
I entered Illinois in 1983. On the first day of classes, my bike was stolen from outside my dorm, and I almost choked to death on a piece of leathery beef in the cafeteria at Hendrick House. Otherwise, it was a fine day. My very first semester in college presented the answer to a trivia question: Illinois’ football team went undefeated in the Big Ten, most notable not because it led to the Illini’s first Rose Bowl appearance in two decades, but because that team was the last Big Ten football team to beat every other Big Ten team in the same season.
The Hendrick House cafeteria, where it all began
When Hendrick House residents entered the cafeteria, one of the resident advisors was stationed at a table and checked IDs – the most noticeable was Jimm Crosby. Jimm was in his mid-20s and pursuing a Master’s in accounting. But he looked nothing at all like someone headed for a Big Eight accounting gig. He was wiry, had a bushy beard, and a shock of only occasionally combed brown hair. And he had eyes that never stopped moving; he was seemingly always on the lookout for … something. He struck up conversations with everyone. And he had an attractive undergraduate girlfriend who lived in the dorm – my friends and I all thought, “what’s up with that?” I also remember that he played underwater hockey – a sport played with a weighted puck maneuvered toward goals at the bottom of a swimming pool. When Jimm was the meal ticket taker, he’d ask me and anyone else passing through the line a sports trivia question. I cannot remember if the questions were particularly hard, but I probably did okay. I didn’t think much of it.
Unbeknownst to me, I was being tested. Jimm was recruiting. One day early in the second semester, he popped the question. “Do you want to be on my sports trivia team?” I’m sure I said something like, “Sure. What’s that?” That was the Eddie Gaedel Memorial Sports Trivia Bowl, an annual trivia contest that was the brainchild of someone at the university’s campus recreation department andwas held at the sprawling Intramural Physical Education building – affectionately known as IMPE. The tournament featured dozens of teams facing off in a bracketed, single-elimination format. Each team had four players who would sit on opposite sides of an aisle, armed with Jeopardy-like buzzers to try to answer toss-up questions. If answered correctly, the toss-ups led to bonus questions.
The competition was named for a midget – Eddie Gaedel. In 1951, Browns owner Bill Veeck – later the White Sox owner – signed Gaedel to a contract. In the second game of a doubleheader, Gaedel, wearing the jersey number 1/8, strolled to the plate and pinch-hit for the Browns’ leadoff man. He walked on four pitches – all too high. He jogged to first, a pinch-runner was sent to replace him, and Gaedel’s major league career was over. He retired with the best on-base percentage in MLB history.
“He was, by golly, the best darn midget who ever played big-league ball. He was also the only one.”
bill veeck, veeck – as in wreck
During each night of the tournament, the organizers would ask at least one question somehow related to Gaedel – maybe asking for his height or weight, the name of the pitcher who walked him, or some other factoid. In addition to me, Jimm had recruited two other Hendrick House residents to be on his team, which was named The Frank Saucier Fan Club. Saucier – Jimm told me – was the Browns’ outfielder for whom Gaedel pinch-hit in the bottom of the first.
So we played. And we won. And Jimm was ridiculously good. His recall of dates and lists and winners of MVP awards and first-round draft picks was otherworldly. I mean, I thought I knew a lot about sports, and I knew a fraction of what Jimm knew. It became clear he was … different. In early rounds, we would destroy teams. Four kids from some dorm would sign up, walk in, and we’d beat them like 410-50. If you buzzed in for toss-ups, you were on your own – no help from teammates. We had Jimm. He typically owned the toss-ups, but I’ve never forgotten one he missed – it tells you a lot about Jimm.
The question was: what time of the day did Bobby Thomson hit the famous ‘shot heard ‘round the world?’” (In 1951, Thomson of the New York Giants hit a homerun off Ralph Branca to win the National League pennant in the first-ever nationally televised baseball game.) Jimm buzzed in and blurted out: “3:04!” The emcee said: “Incorrect,” and gave the other team a chance to steal. Before the time expired (the other team had no idea), Jimm leaned toward me and whispered in a pained voice, “he’s right – it was 3:58 – I gave him the time Flight 191 crashed.” I looked it up, and it so happened he was right – American Airlines Flight 191 went down at 3:04 p.m. after taking off from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport bound for Los Angeles on May 25, 1979 – it was one of the deadliest air crashes in U.S. history.
So, yeah – Jimm was pretty good – maybe even a sports trivia savant. He had, like me, been a voracious consumer of sports growing up on the South Side of Chicago. In the later rounds of the Gaedel tournament, when the competition got tougher, he (maybe) needed the help his three teammates could provide, particularly on a few sports that were not in his wheelhouse. We won the competition in 1984 and 1985, shortly before Jimm alighted for The Ohio State University to pursue some other degree. Three years later, I tucked the Eddie Gaedel experience into the “Other Interests” section of the resume I used when I was seeking work as a summer associate at law firms. Occasionally, someone would bite and ask me about that item. Especially if the interviewer was a sports fan, the rest of the interview tended to fly by.
The One True Team is Born
I didn’t have the time or inclination to take Jimm’s approach to assembling my squad for Sports Trivia 3 in 2011. I was 26 years removed from my last sports trivia competition – the second of our two Eddie Gaedel wins – and I had no idea what level of competition to expect. I knew there would be beer and pizza, and that was enough. I quickly signed up three colleagues — Kevin Fee, Chad Schafer, and Dave Johnson. We were still two players short of the allowed six, and Johnson offered up his son, Erik. At the time, Erik was in his mid-20s and spent a lot of time playing on-line poker and watching sports on TV – so he was perfect. (If you ever assemble a sports trivia team, recruit some youth and, ideally, underemployed youth.) We never got a sixth man, and it cost us. We lost the competition by one stinking point, and it will forever haunt the five of us. We missed a question that fell in the “fairly easy” category: who was the first foreign-born basketball player not to have played in college to be drafted #1 overall in the NBA? The answer – so painfully obvious – was Yao Ming. We overthought it and guessed Andrea Bargnani – who was drafted #1 overall, but four years later.
Johnson the Elder was responsible for naming our team. Dave is a devout atheist, and the only one I’ve known to read the Bible cover-to-cover, for fun. The name pokes fun at our Roman Catholic hosts – devotees of the “one true church.” As a Lutheran, I was on board with the name choice.
Sports Trivia Teaser 3
Christian Laettner famously hit a turnaround jumper at the buzzer to beat Kentucky and send eventual champion Duke to the Final Four in 1992. Four-part question: (1) How many shots — including free throws — did Laettner take that game? (2) How many did he make? (3) Who threw him the pass before “the Shot”? (4) Which Kentucky freshman’s chest did Laettner stomp on in the first half – earning a technical foul but not a deserved ejection?
trivia brought to you by the one true team
“Who can I get?”
The one-point loss in Sports Trivia 3 irked me. Shorting the team one player likely cost us – anyone I would have added surely would have known one answer the rest of us could not pull. For the next several months, I thought long and hard – “who can I get to round out The One True Team?” To be honest, it was more like “who can I get to put us over the top?” At some point, I had the Eureka! moment: I needed Jimm Crosby.
I’m fairly certain I never spoke to Jimm between the Spring of 1985 and late 2011. Our friendship turned out to be transactional – it was all about sports trivia. He left for Ohio State, I finished college and went on to law school. Our paths never crossed and we didn’t have any common friends. But I decided to take a flier. I went to an online U of I Alumni Association directory and searched. There was one hit for a James Crosby. A South Side street address. No phone number. No email address. So I wrote a letter and sent it to him in the U.S. Mail, not even sure it was the right James Crosby. I didn’t keep a copy of the letter, but I’m sure it started: “You probably don’t remember me, but …” About three days later, an email from Jimm hit my inbox, “Of course I remember you!” I had told Jimm about the SGMS contest in my letter, and he badly wanted to play.
Before I officially invited Jimm to join The One True Team, I took him to lunch and we caught up. As it turned out, the fact the letter reached Jimm at all was somewhat miraculous. The address was his father’s, and Jimm happened to be in town at the time staying with him. He told me that after finally running out of degrees to pursue he had spent his career in various teaching positions – many focused on preparing foreign-born students for the placement tests they need to take to enter American universities. Jimm, a bachelor, has worked all over the world and has visited 153 countries. If you need a guy to head off to Rwanda for a year and prepare Rwandans to enter American universities, Jimm’s your guy. Since our reunion in 2011, he has traveled back to Chicago from Rwanda, Mongolia, and Saudi Arabia to participate in Sports Trivia.
Adding Jimm made a difference; we were first of 43 teams in Sports Trivia 4, the last of the pre-Popeye contests. Jimm was still very, very good at Sports Trivia – but maybe not quite as dominant as I had recalled him being in 1984-85. He admitted that he read less and watched less sports than he had earlier in life – owing in part to his globe-trotting in the name of diversifying American universities. One thing 2012 taught me was that it takes a village – or at least five guys – to win SGMS Sports Trivia. I’d added Jason Coyle, a friend and digital sports media impresario, to the mix. So Jimm, Jason, Dave, Erik and I manned the table (still short-handed due to Kevin’s late scratch), and we won by a half point (don’t ask how that happened, I don’t remember).
The next several years are something of a blur, but SGMS’s awesome web site helped me piece it together. In 2013, Popeye showed up and promptly won. We took second of 51 teams by a single point. By 2014, I finally managed to put together a full team. Jimm and I were the only holdovers from the 2012 champs. Dave Johnson will falsely accuse me of “banishing” him, but it’s more like he was recruited over. That’s actually not true – Dave moved out of state and started spending winters in Las Vegas, so he fell out of the rotation. Erik started a real job that kept him away for several years. Jason had a conflict, so Jimm recommended Matt Scalise, a “kid” in his mid-30s from Jimm’s South Side circle. Youth! I added Eric Mennel, a college friend whose arrested social development has led to him spending many weekends well into his 50s in Lincoln Park bars watching sports. I recruited Jeff Carroll, a second-career lawyer and former sportswriter. I also added Peter Brown that year, a kids’ baseball acquaintance recommended by a mutual friend as an ace. We were good. That version of The One True Team won its second crown and Popeye somehow stumbled to 3rd of 58 teams.
The One True Team – 2014 Standing from left: Matt Scalise, Eric Mennel, Jeff Carrol, Paul Veith, Peter Brown Kneeling: Jimm Crosby
Now firmly entrenched as a Sports Trivia force, teams were coming for us. Besides Popeye, teams made up in part with employees of the Big Ten Network and ESPN Radio entered. The level of the competition was ramping up. (Public service message: there are very few teams full of freaks like The One True Team and Popeye Jones – maybe a half-dozen or so. Don’t be scared off if you want to enter this event in the future – you’ll do fine and have fun.)
In 2015, we lost Peter to a work conflict and Popeye’s five-year run of dominance began.
Popeye Jones’ Ugly Bros. donning their championship swag following Sports Trivia 9
From that point, The One True Team’s roster morphed a bit. Erik came back, freed of a restaurant managing gig. A client, John Calkins, came on board somewhere along the line. Jimm, Matt, Jeff, and Eric were firmly in the rotation. One year we found ourselves short and Jeff dragged along a guy who was touted as a Cubs expert. Narrow, deep knowledge of one professional team doesn’t cut it. I don’t remember his name; he did not return.
Heading into 2019 the The One True Team comprised seven “regulars” – and that year marked the first year someone had to voluntarily sit out because all seven of us were available. It didn’t matter though; Popeye just kept winning and winning. The other teams – many of whom come back year after year – were starting to get annoyed. Now, when the Popeye Six strolled up to the stage to accept the prizes doled out to the winners, some in the crowd showered them with (mostly) good-natured boos and catcalls. No one really noticed that, in most years, The One True Team was lurking nearby.
Late in 2019, when I got wind of the date for 2020, I recalled my flirtation with the thought of dropping out. But for whatever reason, I decided to give it one more shot.
Sports Trivia 12
As always, I forwarded the “save the date” email from SGMS to what had become the regular crew – Jimm, Erik, Matt, Jeff, Eric and John, meaning we had seven guys for six spots. If all say, “I’m in,” I have to figure out who is going to sit out – not something I relish. Eric had graciously offered to sit out in 2018, so in fairness he needed to be back in.
As the emails flowed back, my lineup problem was solved, with a punch to the sternum. Jeff was out, something about tickets to a Lumineers concert, a wife, and yada yada yada. Jeff’s good – that’s a big loss. More surprising, Jimm was out. This year, he was in Somalia or Somaliland (if those are two different things) and had not been able to finagle a trip back to the States from his employer.
So while one problem was solved – no one had to sit out – I was back to recruiting a sixth man. Somehow, I remembered a few random conversations I’d had in recent years with a neighbor and golf buddy, Kevin Hartbarger. I sensed Kevin had stored up some trivia along the way – I knew that to be true of music trivia, and had some inkling it might be true for sports as well. I asked, he accepted. So we were back to six.
I read a quote a couple years ago to this effect: whether you are happy in life is a function of the comparison of your expectations and your reality. In other words, if you have low expectations, you are less likely to be disappointed by your reality, and generally more happy. Heading into Sports Trivia 12, I had low expectations. Not – oh my God, Jimm and Jeff are out and we’re going to finish 50th expectations, but I did not think there was any way we could catch Popeye. Sure, we had been second several years running, but we were missing two “starters,” and Popeye had just grown stronger in recent years.
My low expectations set up perfectly for a really enjoyable, low-pressure night. Drink some beer, eat some food, play a little trivia. Maybe try to stay a step ahead of the team named Five Lawyers and Someone You’d Really Like – which featured several friends of mine.
The first two rounds came and went, and to my surprise we were neck-and-neck with Popeye. The vibe at the table was great. Everyone was contributing. The sometimes chaotic chatter which led to educated guesses on the toughest questions was less chaotic than usual. On one occasion, Kevin very calmly corrected me on an answer I’d written down that he (correctly) was firmly convinced I’d gotten wrong. I came up with a buzzer-beating answer as the scorecard was being whisked away when I recalled that the 2001 NL saves leader with the palindromic last name was – of course! – Robb Nen of the Giants. And each of us pulled answers that impressed our teammates. The One True Team was, truly, a team that night. We were ham-and-eggs, peanut-butter-and-jelly, chips-and-salsa, Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance.
To make a too-long story short. We took Popeye down, ending an amazing run that earned that squad my undying respect. How’d we do it? Well, it turns out The One True Team pays attention to obscure sports logos. Most years, the organizers designate a “speed round.” They pass out a packet with pages containing visual clues and you write down answers to written questions about the images. The clues might be old trading cards, or magazine covers, or some other such thing. This year, we were simply asked to identify the teams associated with several sheets of team logos – some still used and relatively recognizable, and some very obscure. College teams, defunct teams, and random sports-related logos of all sorts. And we nailed it. I was able to identify the logos of the Fort Wayne Mad Ants (an NBA G League team) and Wabash College. Kevin knew the Montgomery Biscuits’ logo (minor league baseball). I think Eric pulled the University of San Diego Toreros. I bet every person at the table knew at least one or two logos that others would not have known. Of 52 logos, we got 45 correct. That gave us a little bit of daylight ahead of Popeye, and we held on to win.
To the victors …
At the end of the night, Andolina stepped up to the podium to announce the winners. He starts with fifth place and works backwards – Miss America style. When Popeye Jones’ name flashed on the enormous screens next to the words “Second Place,” a cheer went up through the gym – the streak had ended! No one else likely knew or much cared that it was The One True Team that had dethroned the champions – those who cheered were just happy to have a different name on top. Nobody roots for a dynasty.
Our table, of course, erupted. Low Expectations + First Place = Much Happiness. We each received a nifty official NFL football bearing the Sports Trivia 12 logo, a three-buck medal (that are decidedly not made of metal), and a hat. And that elusive traveling trophy. And – totally unexpectedly – the trophy’s generous cup was chock full of miniature Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. My favorite candy and, since I am the custodian of the trophy, all mine.
The One True Team – 2020 From Left: Kevin Hartbarger, Matt Scalise, Eric Mennel, John Calkins, Paul Veith, Erik Johnson Drunk Guy in a Tux Creepily Lurking Behind Us: Mike Andolina
A Postscript
The One True Team has now won three times – 2012, 2014, 2020. We have had 14 players over the years, and 11 of them have won championships. Every single player has brought a passion for sports to those cramped tables and wobbly folding chairs. Each of us brought a bank of knowledge to draw from that is a function of many things – age, where we grew up, which teams we followed, the schools we attended, the books we read. We’re not all savants, but we’re all pretty good. And in 2020, shorthanded, we proved something to ourselves – that no streak lasts forever, and that paying attention to obscure logos can pay off.
As I write this, most everyone has spent the last month at home thanks to your run-of-the-mill global pandemic. I can only imagine how much sports trivia the members of Popeye Jones Ugly Bros. are consuming, itching to get back on top. I presently captain a team of eight former champions – for six seats. Depth is good, I guess. I hope a gathering of 600 in a high school gym will be possible next February or March, and that we’ll have a chance to start our own streak. It will be nice to be the hunted, for a change.
I’m not insane. I do have a life. I realize that at most every level, winning a sports trivia contest doesn’t matter. The SGMS event is truly about fellowship and fun and – in recent years – helping out Christ the King. But I won’t make any excuses either; The One True Team will always play to win. After all, as Vince Lombardi said, “If it doesn’t matter who wins or loses, then why do they keep score?”
(And by the way – the horse that finished second to Secretariat in his Triple Crown-capping win at the Belmont in 1973 was Twice A Prince. 31 lengths back. I knew the margin, but I didn’t know the horse.)
-30-
Answers to Trivia Teasers
Q1. #70, Henry Waechter, a defensive lineman, tackled Steve Grogan for a safety in the fourth quarter. He played at Nebraska.
Q2. Stanford (QBs Jim Plunkett, John Elway; POTUS Woodrow Wilson); Miami (Ohio) (QB Ben Roethlisberger; POTUS Benjamin Harrison); Navy (QB Roger Staubach; POTUS Jimmy Carter); Michigan (QB Tom Brady; POTUS Gerald Ford)
Q3. (1) 20; (2) 20; (3) Grant Hill; (4) Aminu Timberlake (from Chicago’s DeLaSalle High School, and no relation to Justin)
Nobody knows. That’s the answer. But don’t stop reading.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, rock star public health expert, was interviewed on The Wall Street Journal’s frequently enlightening podcast, The Journal, earlier this week. It’s 24 minutes of Fauci answering questions posed by a Journal reporter, uninterrupted by politicians or captains of industry or anyone else. I think the podcast is well worth your time. Dr. Fauci was asked, among other things, what we can expect over the coming weeks and months as the nation aims to return to “normal.” Dr. Fauci did not pretend to have all the answers – that’s one thing that makes him endearing, I think. He did say that things won’t return to normal suddenly. He said transitioning from our present state to normal is not like a “light switch, on and off.” In his view, it would not be advisable to “jump in with both feet.” None of this is particular alarming, surprising, or ground-breaking. As far as specifics go, Dr. Fauci talked about the possibility that we might see restaurants re-open but with tables spaced out, as one of several examples of how we might get from here to “normal,” gradually.
What Dr. Fauci said that few would dispute is that American life will eventually – albeit gradually – get its mojo back. He pointed to the availability of a vaccine, which he is hopeful (even optimistic) we’ll see in 12-18 months. He thinks a vaccine is the “game-changer” for truly getting back to pre-COVID normal. But Dr. Fauci also said, “I don’t think we’ll ever get back to completely normal.” For example, he suggested that the practice of shaking hands as a common form of greeting may never come all the way back, and that obsessive hand-washing may remain in vogue long after this particular strain of coronavirus stops infecting people. In that respect, I suspect Dr. Fauci was projecting what he hopes will be a lasting impact of COVID-19. Given his chosen profession and what he has seen over the years, he has probably been anti-hand shake and pro-hand wash for a long time.
Even before I listened to that podcast, I have been semi-obsessed thinking about the question of how COVID-19 will change the American way of life in the long term – starting, say, two years down the road, when we’re all back to work, back to attending sporting events, concerts, festivals, and weddings without worrying that we are putting ourselves or others at risk.
In the short term, the impact is plain for all of us to see. In the mid-term (say the next two to eight months), I suppose we’ll see a “gradual” return to normal. I think we’ll see sports come back, but maybe initially in venues that exclude or severely limit the number of fans allowed to congregate. I’m not sure buffet lines come roaring back in the mid-term. I don’t think cruise ships will swell with passengers any time soon. When those of us who play golf are allowed to golf again, I suspect at first the length of conceded putts will expand to avoid forcing golfers to touch the flagstick or retrieve a golf ball from the cup. (I am personally 100% behind generosity on the greens in the name of public health and safety, by the way.)
Pre- or Post-COVID-19, that is a gimme
In the medium-term, people will experiment with all kinds of accommodations to make people feel better about returning to work, and restaurants, and public places generally. And those among us who are skittish may wear masks. I, for one, won’t judge anyone who wears a mask in any setting for a long, long time – maybe forever.
It’s “forever” – the long-term – that interests me most. When it comes to permanently-life-altering events, essentially no one alive today has lived through something quite like this pandemic. In my memory, the last event that had a lasting, noticeable impact on daily life in this country was the coordinated terrorist attack of September 11, 2011. But I’m not sure 9/11’s impacts were even that life-altering. To be sure, traveling through airports is different. The security process is more time-consuming. 3/1/1. Limits on liquids. No lighters. No pocket knives. Take off your shoes (prior to the godsend of TSA Precheck, at least). You can no longer access the gate areas without a ticket. I think all these changes can be traced to 9/11, but are these really life-altering? Essentially, we have all had to learn how to modify how we pack a suitcase unless we want to check a bag, and maybe leave for the airport a little earlier – to be safe. For enhanced safety, not a bad tradeoff.
Beyond that – what else? Office buildings in large cities are certainly more secure – security desks are now common. Enhanced security at high-rise buildings is a good thing, don’t get me wrong. But no security desk or array of armed guards could have prevented what happened at the World Trade Center. Incidentally, the only time I visited that complex was in July 2011, and I found it to have the tightest security of any building I had ever visited. I am sure others – obviously those who lost family or friends, and particularly New Yorkers – could point to other ways in which 9/11 altered everyday life in America and had noticeable cultural impact. But in the end, I’m not sure 9/11 had a tremendous impact on the way Americans go about their daily lives. To be sure, we are all probably a little more anxious when we fly, more aware of our surroundings, and most of us are more tolerant of the government snooping around to prevent the next attack. But mostly, we got back to normal.
The long-term impact of COVID-19 remains to be seen. I am, however, 100% confident in each of the following predictions for the coming months:
Politicians at all levels from all parties will take credit for having taken actions that saved lives.
Politicians at all levels from all parties will blame politicians from other parties for failing to take actions that would have saved lives.
Some people will say that “we” – Americans, as directed by our leaders – overreacted to the COVID-19 pandemic and that social distancing directives and shut-down orders went too far.
Some people will say that by practicing social distancing as directed by our leaders, we collectively saved lives. (Incidentally, this article has an interesting discussion of the certain debate between the “we saved lives” and “we overreacted” camps. As the article points out, some people will say that the epidemiological models over-estimated the number of sick and dead as proof that we overreacted. Others will argue that our good, conscientious behavior caused us to achieve better results than the models predicted. It will be kind of aggravating to watch that debate, which will mostly take place between cocksure panelists on night-time cable news channels. My bet: few of them will be experts in medicine, public health, statistical modeling, or any other relevant discipline.
We will be smarter and better, next time. Driven by better data than has ever been available concerning a pandemic and tremendous ability to process that data, an explosion of important, intelligent, science-based, peer-reviewed work studying our experience dealing with COVID-19 will be published – making us better prepared to deal with a threat like this in future, as long as the right people pay attention at the right time.
The balance of this post is dedicated to answering a twist on the question that sits at the top of this post: “How will COVID-19 make our lives different two years from now – on the weekend of the 2022 Masters?” I pick two years because I am optimistic that vaccination and/or herd immunity will have mostly gotten us “back to normal” by then. Let me start all this by saying this: most Americans are resilient and adventurous sorts. We like our personal liberties and hate being told how to live our lives. Many hate being told to do something demonstrably proven to be beneficial to your personal health and safety. There are many people who still refuse to wear seat belts or motorcycle helmets – actions that clearly, measured broadly, save lives and reduce injuries. So I have little doubt that we’ll get back to normal – because normal was pretty great.
Here’s my take on how COVID-19 might change our lives down the road – admitting these are nothing more than guesses. I encourage you to share your thoughts in the Comments.
People who wear masks in public won’t be dismissed as weirdos. In the past, public mask-wearing has not been a super-common thing in the USA. On the five or so times I have traveled to Asia, I’ve seen many masked travelers in airports and subways – likely in part because Asian countries have more experience with virus-borne and transmitted illnesses. Going forward, anyone wearing a mask gets a pass from me – perhaps unless you are approaching a bank teller. Those with compromised immune systems and those themselves suffering from a malady causing them to cough or sneeze who must nonetheless be out and about should probably wear masks. I could even see an industry of fashionable masks developing. We’ll see.
Hugs ‘n Kisses? Maybe not so fast. Dr. Fauci doesn’t want anyone shaking hands, so I suspect his head would explode if some random member of the public sees him in an airport in a couple of years and approaches to give him a bear hug in appreciation for his public service. My guess is that handshakes in a business setting come back all the way – except that it will be more common for people to beg off and say, “I’ve had a bit of a cold, so if it’s okay I’m not going to shake your hand.” And I think all of us will be absolutely okay with that. Not a slight. Among bro-friends, the fist bump had been on the rise – I think it continues to gain popularity. But what about the huggers and cheek kissers among us? Will they be shunned? Eventually, I suspect the practice of hugging a close friend or family member comes back – I mean, it feels good if someone thinks enough of you to offer a hug, right? But begging off or pulling back a bit will, I think, become more common and won’t be judged as an affront.
“Self-quarantine” will become a thing if you’re sick. There are people who take pride in never missing a day of work. Through thick and thin, coughing, hacking, sneezing, and wheezing – they show up and answer the bell. The Cal Ripken of the Accounting Department. I think this will change. If you’re sick, stay home, ride it out. I think people riding public transportation who cough or sneeze repeatedly will be viewed as having committed a felony. I can imagine angry words being exchanged – heck, can you imagine if someone breaks the church-like silence of a quiet car on a Metra train with a big, hacky, coughing fit? That could lead to fists being thrown. I think most people get that now, and will be quicker to stay home if they are symptomatic. Especially because …
The practice of working remotely will increase. Over the last month or so, many of us have been forced to work from home. For those of us in office/desk jobs, this isn’t a big deal. With high-speed internet at home and the proper hardware and software, not a big deal at all. With connectivity tools, face-to-face meetings are possible. Conference calls? No problem, obviously. Access to materials? Most come and go electronically, anyway. I will admit that before this experience, I was a little old school about this. I think there is value – at least in a large law firm – to being physically present and interacting with colleagues. Plus, I have always thought I am more productive in the office than at home. But I have surprised myself – and I save two hours per day otherwise spent commuting or making myself look presentable. I look forward to getting back and seeing my colleagues – but I think I will be a little more open-minded about working remotely in the future. For businesses in which mentoring, interacting with colleagues, etc. is not a really big deal – I suspect what was already a trend toward remote work will pick up steam. Commercial real estate experts, is this a worry? Will we drive a little less? Could this actually be a positive development in reducing pollution?
The practice of socializing remotely will increase. My 89-year-old tech-challenged mother who is quarantined in an assisted-living facility learned how to use FaceTime the other day in about five minutes. I have attended several Zoom “happy hours” with friends near and far. I have hosted on-line poker games with the participants engaged in banter during via companion Zoom meetings. Technology has made this all really, really easy. Particularly for folks separated by distance, the group meet-up options are now super-easy. The increased use of these tools will stick. That’s not to say the Zoom meet-up with people who all live within a mile of one another is going to take the place of an actual party – but where great friends and family are spread far and wide, there is no longer a good excuse to not “get together” every so often.
We will all have cleaner hands, forever. In the future, I cannot imagine any public establishment not having hand sanitizer available to its guests. And I think more of us will stop and take a squirt of sanitizer. Likewise, we will linger a little longer at the sink – and use soap. In the interest of having cleaner hands, I think we’ll all use cash less – even less than now. And the practice of swiping or inserting a credit card into a machine will likely give way to holding it close to devices that allow contact-less transactions.
I’ll end with one final comment. That regal looking mutt at the top of this post is our family dog, Ellie. COVID-19 changed her life for the better in the short-term. More companionship, more attention, more walks. Long-term impact? I think not. Ellie will eat her two scoops of Purina Pro Plan twice a day, get walked around the block two or three times, and sleep a lot. Her owners’ lives might change modestly. But post-COVID, a dog’s life is will continue to be pretty great – of that I am confident.
