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.
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.
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.
“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.
-30-
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)
Even before I started to write this post, I got blowback. Tough crowd, but at least someone is paying attention.
The argument: “Duncan Keith and Marian Hossa are not role players – they are freaking Hall of Fame talents! You cannot re-define ‘role player’ to suit your own purposes.” Fair argument (but I kind of can re-define the term, it’s my blog).
Here’s my point in singling out the 2009-2010 Blackhawks: they were exceptional because Duncan Keith and Marian Hossa selflessly played their roles better than anyone else in the game at that time. Sure, hockey jargon is full of names for role players: sniper, creator, two-way center, stand-up defenseman, fourth-line grinder, and enforcer, to name a few. Duncan Keith was really none of those things. He was a puck-possessing, rush-stopping defenseman. Nor do any of those descriptions do justice to Hossa: let’s call him a dogged, puck-retrieving two-way forward. But before I defend my take on the players, let me talk about the team.
The Blackhawks
Again, Covid-19 provided me an opportunity to re-watch several 2010 playoff games and inspired my decision to feature this team here. Yay Covid-19, I guess. Then I did some research. (Author’s Note: if Hockey Reference or Baseball Reference or Basketball Reference had existed when I was a child, I may never have gone to school. I had playing cards and Sports Illustrated, that’s about it.) The 2009-2010 Blackhawks finished the regular season with 112 points, second in the Western Conference (to San Jose) and third overall (to the league-leading Capitals, who got bounced in Round 1 by the Canadiens).
The Hawks then dispatched the Predators in six (more on that later), the Sharks in four, the Sedin Sisters in six, and the Flyers, of course, in six, to win the franchise’s first Stanley Cup since 1961 – a 49-year wait.
A couple of things stand out when you dig in to Hockey Reference. First, the balance. Offensively, third out of 30 teams. Defensively, fifth out of 30. Six guys who scored at least 20 goals, none of whom scored more than 30. (Kane 30, Toews 25, Sharp 25, Hossa 24, Brouwer 22, Versteeg 20.) Second, the youth. My guys Hossa (31) and Keith (26) were basically old men on this team. Of the 31 guys who played for the Hawks during the regular season, John Madden was the oldest at 36 and Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews the youngest at 21. But here’s the kicker: 24 of the 31 players were 28 or younger, and 14 were 24 or younger. That’s bonkers, and it’s the answer to the meatheads’ favorite question: “why in da hell didn’t we keep Ladd, and Byfuglien, and Bolland, and Brouwer?” (And later, Panarin, Teravainen, and Leddy.) The answer is really painfully simple: You can’t keep together a group of players who achieve so much at a young age. In the hard-cap NHL, players who achieve success early in their careers become too expensive to keep. If you have four or five to re-sign, you’re good. But you cannot resign 12 guys. You pick your horses and ride – and the horses the Hawks rode to two more Cups were prrrrrretty, prrrrrretty good nags.
The first game I re-watched recently is one that is on my personal Top 5 All-Time Sporting Events Attended In Person list (no spoilers on the other four, I see a blog post in the future here). Game 5 of Round 1, at the United Center. The Hawks were tied in the series 2-2, and down by a goal to Nashville late in the third period. With the goalie pulled, Hossa draws a five-minute major for boarding behind the Predators net – very uncharacteristic of him to take a bad penalty. Depression sets in. Then Kane miraculously ties it (kind of) shorthanded in the last minute, Hossa does his time in the sin bin into the overtime period, skates out of the box directly to the side of the Preds’ net, collects a wayward/deflected shot and buries one into a near-empty net. Big Hoss slides on his knees at the near boards, the bench empties and piles on top of him, pandemonium ensues.
That win was the springboard to the Cup. People forget how close the Hawks were to a first-round exit. Nashville was good, and being forced to win Games 6 and 7 was not something the Hawks relished. Alas, Kane and Hossa saved the day. The Hawks went on to eliminate the Sharks in four and Sedins in six, and they closed the deal on the road in Game Six in Philadelphia.
OK, so you’re up to speed. But what was so great about this Hawks team – they did win a couple more, right? Well, I suppose part of me is a sucker for the fact that the 2010 team was the first to raise a Stanley Cup banner in nearly 50 years. But I was also struck by the comparisons to the 1996 Bulls in this way: the response to “remember that 72-win Bulls team?” absolutely has the names “Michael” and “Jordan” in the answer. And, especially after their dominant playoff performances, “Toews and Kane” will roll off the tongues of most casual fans when asked about the 2010 Blackhawks. But just as Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman played an enormous part in that Bulls team’s success, it’s hard to imagine the Blackhawks raising the Cup without Big Hoss and Duncs. The ultimate role players. (Ducking.)
Picture by HockeyBroad/Cheryl Adams
#2 and #81
My singling out Keith and Hossa as ultimate role players should not be taken as some sign of disrespect. They are two of my three favorite Blackhawks of all time, and both should enter the hockey Hall of Fame someday. If your definition of “role player” is the “journeyman, limited minutes, limited skill set,” then there are a gaggle of 2010 Blackhawks you would call role players without catching flak. Names like Madden and Sopel and Eager and Fraser come to mind. But that’s not Keith and Hossa.
The Blackhawks in 2009-2010 – and really throughout the Stanley Cup run – thrived on puck possession. They routinely got out-hit and didn’t much care. (Which made it especially fun when the meathead sitting a few rows down would yell at the top of his lungs for Patrick Kane to “hit someone!!” and would implore Brent Seabrook loudly to “Shooooot!” from the point on the power play notwithstanding the fact that four sets of shin guards separated him from the goal.)
For a team valuing puck possession, it was critical to have guys who were incredibly skilled at (a) moving the puck from the Hawks zone to the offensive zone, and (b) retrieving the puck if the other team had the audacity to possess it. I give you Exhibits A and B, Keith and Hossa. I like to think of hockey players having a radius of impact when they are on the ice – a measure of their ability to impact plays when the puck is within a certain distance. To my eye – and I have no advanced metrics to back this up – Keith and Hossa impacted the game seemingly whenever the puck was anyhere in the same zip code. Harvey Keitel’s character in Pulp Fiction was The Wolf – the guy who cleaned up the messes. I don’t know why it popped into my head, but I think The Wolf is a pretty good comp for Keith and Hossa – they cleaned up messes, and made things right. And got the puck back where it belonged – in the other team’s zone.
Trivia. In 2009-2010, the Blackhawks had two US-born players who played all 104 games (82 regular season, 22 playoffs). One led the team in regular season goals and the other tied Patrick Sharp for the team lead in playoff goals. Who were the two Americans, and where were they born?
TRIVIA QUESTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE ONE TRUE TEAM
Duncan Keith won the Norris Trophy as the league’s top defenseman in 2010 – another nice point for those wanting to ridicule a guy who labels him a “role player.” He was second on the team in scoring with 69 points (14G, 55A). So, yeah, he could play. What Keith did better than anyone else that year, and maybe anyone I have ever seen – is possess the puck. On the defensive end, his insanely active stick was his weapon. He is not a hulking presence like Chara or Pronger. But come within a stick’s distance of Keith on the rush, and the puck was probably being knocked off your stick. And 26-year-old Keith’s speed and skating ability seemingly allowed him to always take away your “time and space” (as Eddie Olczyk would say). Once the puck was on his blade, it was leaving the Hawks zone. He’d skate it, or pass it – whatever it took. And let’s not forget this morsel: in the regular season Keith played 26:36 a night, and in the playoffs a ridiculous 28:11. Imagine how demoralizing it must have been for opposing coaches to look up and see him on the ice so damn much – kind of like when you are coaching youth basketball and the jackass coach of the other team has his star 10-year-old play every second and take 47 shots. Duncan Keith played several roles, but the role he played better than anyone else was Chief of Puck Possession.
Marian Hossa only played 57 games in the regular season, and still managed 51 points (24G, 27A). Not shabby. At times, he was a highlight reel. (If you follow that link, I recommend the “catch and release” clip.) But what I loved most about Marian Hossa – and what the Blackhawks sorely missed most about him when he stepped away – was his work as a back-checking, puck retrieving forward. To call him dogged defensively doesn’t do him justice. I wish I had a reel of highlights like this: (a) Hossa carries the puck at center ice or in the offensive zone in traffic, (b) the puck comes loose and an opponent seizes the puck and starts the other way, and (c) Hossa stops on a dime (no lazy circling around) or makes a tight turn and chases the puck-carrier as if the guy had taken his passport two minutes before Hossa’s honeymoon flight was boarding. I saw this play out literally hundreds of times, but they don’t turn plays like that into highlight reels. There was no one in the game who did this better, and I know because my eyes were glued on Big Hoss on every shift. Sure, Hossa won three Cups, made five All-Star teams, and has a ridiculously long Wikipedia page, but the fact that he never won a Selke Trophy as the league’s best defensive forward is a criminal omission. Again, for the Three Cup Blackhawks puck possession was everything. Marian Hossa did it all – but the role he played best was Chief of Puck Retrieval. If you want to possess something, and you don’t have it, you go get it. That was Marian Hossa.
Argue it. Debate it. Disagree. Whatever. That’s part of being a sports fan. But give me this: the “old men” on the 2009-2010 Blackhawks wearing sweaters #2 and #81 made them champions, because they made sure the Blackhawks had the puck more than the guys on the other side.
Trivia Answer: Buffalo’s Patrick Kane led the Hawks with 30 goals in the regular season; Roseau, Minnesota’s Dustin Byfuglien tied Sharp with 11 goals in the playoffs.
They were two Chicago teams in different sports, separated by 14 years and a turn of a century. They shared a city and an arena. They both won championships – one in the middle of Chicago’s greatest basketball decade, and one at the start of the city’s greatest hockey decade. One did it with the greatest basketball player of all time (apologies to no one) and a precision-fit supporting cast; the other with a roster so young that playoff beards – for many – were just rumors.
Sporadic joy. That is all I ask in return for my investment as a fan. The 1995-1996 Chicago Bulls and 2009-2010 Chicago Blackhawks are unrivaled in delivering me joy. What set those teams apart was something that sets iconic teams apart in all sports: a great player or two complemented by the complete buy-in and acceptance of roles by his or her teammates. Basketball and hockey are all about flow and momentum. Games are fluid and decisions are made on the fly, without much real-time guidance from coaches. In each sport, five players (setting aside the hockey goalie) need to act singularly. While set plays and individual battles exist in all sports, basketball and hockey lack football’s role-defining play-calling and the hyper-importance of baseball’s pitcher/batter duel.
These two teams were athletic orchestras – one on hardwood and one on ice. They brought me joy and achieved greatness in large part because of brilliant performances by role players. Not just any role players – arguably the greatest role players I have ever seen, role players who also happen to have had Hall of Fame-caliber careers: Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman of the Bulls, and Marian Hossa and Duncan Keith of the Blackhawks.
I know, I know. I hear you already. “Wait a second! How can you say Pippen and Rodman and Hossa and Keith were role players? That’s crazy.” And, “What about the 1985 Bears and 2016 Cubs and 2005 White Sox? Didn’t they bring you joy?”
Let me answer the second question first. Of course, those teams brought me joy. The 1985 Bears were a supernova; they fielded the best defense I have ever seen and an unrivaled collection of characters. That was a special group, and they did what they had been assembled to do – pummel everyone standing in the way. I don’t begrudge anyone who places the 1985 Bears on a pedestal. But I would feel a lot better about that team had it climbed the mountain at least once more. And I have grown a tad tired of the canonization of all things ’85 Bearsssss, including the head coach. You can try, but I am not sure you can convince me that Mayor Harold Washington would not have led the 1985 Bears to their Super Bowl win — as long as Buddy Ryan was left alone. The defense was that good. I mean, did you watch the playoffs?
As for the baseball teams? Special, obviously. The 2016 Game 7 Cubs’ win will likely never be displaced as the most cathartic, soul-cleansing win by any team I’ll ever follow. And while I am in the minority of Chicago fans who defend being a fan of both baseball teams (“why not?” is my argument), I am not a White Sox diehard and won’t pretend it was important to me as it was to others.
The Bulls
By 1996, the Bulls had already won three titles – during the Michael Jordan-Scottie Pippen-Horace Grant half of the dynasty. You know the story: Jordan retired in 1993 after the tragic murder of his father, dabbled in baseball, and then came back late in the 1994-1995 season wearing a strange new number (45) and a lot of rust. The Bulls bowed to the Magic in the playoffs.
Trivia Question: Four Bulls on the 1995-96 playoff roster were born outside the USA. Name them. Answer later.
trivia Question courtesy of the one true team, three-time champion of the st. giles men’s society sports trivia night
MJ was, well, MJ. He essentially picked up where he’d left off in 1993. But what elevated the 1995-96 Bulls to be the best of the six Bulls’ champions of the Nineties was Jordan’s supporting cast. Pippen was, of course, arguably the best wing man ever. He finished the season second on the team in per game scoring (19.4), third in rebounds (6.4), first in assists (5.9), and second in steals (1.7). Thanks to a little pandemic downtime, I recently watched some of the 1996 Bulls’ playoff games. MJ was, well, MJ. A cold-blooded killer. Unstoppable offensively. Relentless defensively. A force, just as I had remembered. You don’t forget Michael Jordan.
What I had forgotten – a little bit – was Scottie Pippen’s grace and greatness. Imagine yourself pouring a few tablespoons of cooking oil into a frying pan. The oil glides across the surface in all directions, eventually covering every square inch of the pan. That was Scottie Pippen on the basketball court. Gliding effortlessly, everywhere. Covering every inch of the court with his impossibly long, loping strides. Defensively, he was always in the other team’s way – either on the ball, or in a passing lane. Offensively, he deferred to Jordan quite a lot – but somehow still made his presence known. Bouncy, spectacular, versatile. On both ends, he seemed to have the length of someone 6-11, and the mobility of someone a foot shorter.
That Jerry Krause-built team had only three guys average in double figures — Jordan, Pippen, and The Waiter, Toni Kukoc. Steve Kerr came off the bench and was the fifth-leading scorer (8.4). Krause assembled the perfect set of complementary players for Jordan – in addition to Pippen, the team featured a collection of relatively young/relatively unproven guys (Kukoc, Luc Longley, Jason Caffey, Dickey Simpkins), mid-career journeymen keenly aware of their limitations (Kerr, Bill Wennington, Jud Buechler, Randy Brown), guys on the back nine of their careers who gladly fell in line with however the coaching staff and Jordan wanted them deployed (Ron Harper, John “Spider” Salley, James “Buddha” Edwards), and one towel-waving cheerleader (Jack Haley).
Did you notice the guy I did not mention? Dennis Rodman. He really does not fit into any of those categories. Imagine, Dennis Rodman, Non-Conformist. By then, he was not a kid, but also not yet done. He was Dennis Rodman, rebounding savant. And he had an exceptional basketball IQ. “You’re saying Rodman was smart?” Uh – yeah. Watch one of those playoff games in 1996. When he joined the Bulls, Rodman essentially stopped shooting – he took on average less than five shots per game in the regular season. That’s an insanely low number, considering he averaged nearly 15 rebounds a game, with 5.6 per game coming on the offensive end. Rodman would often pass up on put-back attempts after gathering a rebound – hurrying the ball back to Jordan or Pippen on the perimeter as if he was allergic to leather. What he did was played the exact role the post-Horace Grant Bulls needed – rebounding machine. His positioning on both ends of the court, awareness of spacing, anticipation of where the ball was going, knack for setting screens – all off-the-charts good. Sure, he could be a goofball and draw a technical foul or ejection occasionally, but when he bought in to what the Bulls were doing and followed Jordan and Pippen’s lead, the Bulls went from being the best team in the league to arguably the best team in history.
So beat me up if you want – tell me Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman were not role players. But hear me out first. A role player, to me, is not simply a John Salley or Jud Buechler – someone who mostly sits on the bench and plays a few minutes a game as a backup, often in garbage time, or as a last resort if someone is injured or in foul trouble. A role player in basketball is anyone who clearly does less than his talents allow him to do, who sacrifices for the sake of the team. Next to Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen was always going to play second fiddle. Next to Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman was always going to be the non-scorer, counted on to do everything else – and especially to get them the damn ball back when someone missed a shot.
As great as Jordan was, the first several years of his career proved he could not win championships on his own. For the sake of his legacy, he was lucky to have played alongside Pippen and Rodman and the many others who bent to his will and played supporting roles. Jordan was known to be a gambler. In playing with Pippen and Rodman in 1996, he drew pocket aces.
Trivia Answer: Bill Wennington (Canada), Luc Longley (Australia), Toni Kukoc (Croatia) and … get this one … Steve Kerr (Lebanon). (Kerr’s father, Malcolm, was President at the American University in Beirut. Malcolm Kerr was murdered when Steve Kerr was in college at the University of Arizona.)
