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CHICAGO, ILLINOIS - NOVEMBER 10: A fan wears a brown paper bag reading 'Fire Flus' after the New England Patriots defeated the Chicago Bears at Soldier Field on November 10, 2024 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Michael Reaves/Getty Images)

Is This The Bottom?

January 18, 2025 / Paul E. Veith

I got scooped.

For the last month or so, I’ve been leisurely preparing for my return to The Sandbox, initially inspired by a simple question: for fans of Chicago’s professional sports teams, was 2024 the worst year in Chicago sports history?

It seemed this was a question capable of being answered definitively, and not just debated to no end on sports talk radio by Bob from Jefferson Park and Carl from Bridgeport. So I fired up my browser – a practice once known as “hitting the books.”

And the answer is, “yes.” If it feels like it’s been bad lately, that’s because it’s been really bad lately.

With apologies to the Fire and Sting and Hustle and Sky and various other Chicago sports franchises, I focused on the records of Chicago’s five major professional men’s sports teams for seasons that ended between 1970 to 2024 (adding the 2024-2025 regular season records through year-end for the Bears, Bulls and Blackhawks) and 2024 stands out as the worst year since 1970.[1] Chicago teams won a weighted 37.0 percent of the games they played in 2024 – comfortably “besting” 2000, when Chicago teams won 39.7 percent of the time.

Unfortunately, before I could make my case, Jon Greenberg of The Athletic stole my thunder. In a piece published December 30, 2024,[2] Greenberg drew the same conclusion about 2024, albeit using a slightly different methodology.[3] And he pointed out some of the other evidence that 2024 was truly pathetic: the White Sox set a major league record for losses (121) and endured a 21-game losing streak, the Blackhawks finished 31^st of 32 NHL teams in 2023-24, and the Bears – flush with great expectations in September – lost 10 straight games (in every conceivable fashion) and finished 5-12. Oh, and all three teams fired their head coaches or manager mid-season, generally an indicator that things aren’t going real well.

So kudos, Jon Greenberg, you beat me to the punch. But all is not lost. Curiosity got the better of me, as usual, and one of the reasons I hadn’t simply dashed off a “2024 sucked most” blog post is that I wasn’t satisfied that “2024 sucked most” tells the whole story. Several other questions popped into my head. First, accepting that 2024 is the worst year since 1970, have the city’s fans ever endured a prolonged period as bad as the current period? Are things any better (or worse) if we focus on playoff performance and not regular season success? And, finally, is there light at the end of the tunnel?

I will acknowledge the possibility that I enjoy writing about Chicago sports more than you enjoy reading my writing about Chicago sports. For that reason, I’ll give you the Cliff’s Notes answers to the questions posed above. Read on, if you wish, but here goes:

First, the five-year period that ended December 31, 2024 was the worst of the 11 five-year periods in Chicago professional sports since 1970.
Second, viewing the Chicago sports scene through the lens of post-season performance doesn’t offer much consolation – in fact, 2023-2024 marked the first two-year span in my self-proclaimed Modern Era (1970-present) in which no Chicago team played in a single playoff game.
Finally, in my view there’s light at the end of the tunnel … but it’s a long tunnel.

A Little Bit of History

During my lifetime, Chicago’s sports teams have been mostly mediocre (or worse), with occasional interludes of greatness. Put somewhat differently, for every Walter Payton, there have been a dozen Curtis Enises and Cedric Bensons. For every Michael Jordan, too many Leon Benbows and Rusty LaRues. And for every Ryne Sandberg or Frank Thomas, a seemingly endless parade of Hector Villanuevas and Wayne Nordhagens. This “mediocre-with-interludes-of-great” thesis came from my gut – a sense acquired over my 54 years or so as a very engaged fan.

As it turns out, the numbers back me up. In total, through 2024 Chicago teams have played 26,970 regular season games since 1970 and have won 13,449 of those games[4] — or 49.9 percent. That isn’t shocking, insofar as in every contest there is a winner and a loser (setting aside the occasional tie), so one would expect a professional team to win half of its games. Plus, professional leagues are specifically structured to promote parity through the imposition of mechanisms like salary caps and favoring the worst teams in setting the order of player drafts.

On the “interludes of great” side, beginning with the Bears’ Super Bowl win after the 1985 season (I was 20 years old before a Chicago sports franchise won a championship in my lifetime), Chicago teams have won 12 championships – a dozen parades in 55 years. In all, 218 teams have won championships in the four major sports since 1970, and Chicago teams have won 5.5 percent of those championships, or about 1 in 18. This seems like a fair share, with an acknowledgement that we mostly have the Bulls (six titles) and Blackhawks (three titles) to thank. Still, every team has won at least one championship during my lifetime – “which is nice,” to quote famous groundskeeper Carl Spackler.

Five Years At A Time

As I said above, it appears to me that Chicago sports fans just endured the worst five-year period since 1970, from a few different angles.

Winning percentage: On a weighted basis, Chicago teams won just 43.1 percent of their regular season games during the five-year period ending in 2024, barely edging out the period that ended in 2004, when they won 43.3 percent. For the curious,1990-94 was the winningest five-year period at a weighted 57.8% (thanks, Mike), and 2010-14 was second best at a weighted 54% (thanks, Blackhawks).

Plus-.500 seasons: A stretch of horrendous seasons by a single franchise (think Tim Floyd’s Bulls) can function as an anchor on the city’s collective performance over a given five-year period. So, I tracked another measure of respectability: seasons in which Chicago teams won more than 50 percent of their games. For comparison, the 1990-94 period saw Chicago teams finish better than .500 18 times. Sure, we all basked in the glow of the Bulls’ dominant run, but the other teams contributed a bunch of +.500 seasons in that five-year period, too. In contrast, in 2020-24 Chicago teams, collectively, finished better than .500 only seven times – the worst five-year period since 1970. That’s seven plus-.500 seasons in 25 opportunities, or 28%.

Recent playoff appearances. If it feels like it’s been a while, that’s because no Chicago team appeared in the playoffs in 2023 or 2024. Not one single, stinking playoff appearance across five teams (no, the NBA’s play-in thing doesn’t count, sorry). If this feels unprecedented, that’s because it is unprecedented. Going back to 1970, 2023-24 marked the only two-calendar-year period in which no Chicago team participated in the playoffs. Since 2000, only the 2000-2004 period was worse, with just four playoff appearances. The just-ended five-year period included six post-season appearances, but two (by the 2020 Cubs and White Sox) came thanks to MLB’s COVID-inspired expanded format. Honestly, I had forgotten those brief appearances.

To sum things up, not only was 2024 the worst season since 1970, but it’s hard to argue against the conclusion that it capped the worst five-year period since 1970 as well.

Cody Parkey – Nearly a Bears’ Playoff Hero

You Wanna Talk Playoffs?

I’m no statistician, but I suspect there is a strong correlation between regular season success and playoff success in professional sports. After all, the former is a condition to participation in the playoffs in any given season. Some sports fans, however, subscribe to the view that playoff success (or failure) defines franchises, and not regular season performance. So, I pondered, how have Chicago franchises fared in their frequency of reaching the playoffs, and how have they fared once in the playoffs?

As noted earlier, not one single Chicago team made the playoffs in 2023 or 2024. There have been only five years since 1970 in which Chicago has suffered a citywide playoff shutout (1999, 2004, and 2019 being the others). These days, with expanded playoff formats, it’s no small feat for a city to miss the playoffs in all four major sports. In fact, the Blackhawks have made the playoffs 43 times since 1970, and the Bulls have made the playoffs 36 times. The Bears (19), Cubs (11), and White Sox (7) have been less frequent participants – but appearing in the NFL and MLB playoffs is far less difficult than was the case for most of the 55 years covered by my study.
Perhaps a better measure of a team (or city’s) performance is found by comparing playoff appearances and the number of opportunities to appear in the playoffs. Focusing on the period since 2000 (to remove the years in which making the playoffs in the NBA and NHL was about as difficult as opening a box of cereal), every Chicago team has made the playoffs less frequently than expected. For example, the Bears have made the playoffs six times since 2000 – or 24 percent of the time, whereas the playoffs have included (on average) 39 percent of NFL teams each year. The Bears last appeared in the playoffs in 2020 (Doink! Doink!) and their “playoffs vs. expected playoffs” number since 2000 is minus 15 percent, the worst among the five teams. The White Sox are minus 11 percent (last appeared in 2021). The Hawks are minus 9 percent (last appeared in 2020). The Bulls are minus 9 percent (last appeared in 2022). And – best of the lot, thanks to Theo Epstein – the Cubs are minus 2 percent (last appeared in 2020). Bottom line, since 2000, no Chicago team has made the playoffs as often as the numbers would predict.
Historically, when Chicago teams have made the playoffs, they’ve won at a higher clip than in the regular season, by a whisker. Chicago teams are 468-463 in playoff games since 1970, a .503 winning percentage.
But we do have those 12 championships! That might satisfy the glass-half-full crowd, but the glass-half-empty crowd will (rightfully) point out that half of those 12 championships were won in an eight-year period by one team, which happened to luck into drafting a skinny two-guard who turned out to be the greatest basketball player to ever walk the Earth. But that counts, right? We were lucky to have that team, and that player, and those championships. And you cannot take them away. Ever.

So, Are We At The Bottom?

The true (and very hedgy) answer, of course, is who knows? Time will tell, and anything else is speculation. But speculation can be fun. And, of course, things could get worse.

To my eyes, I think Chicago’s professional sports teams (as a collective unit) hit bottom in 2024. But I also think we might linger here for another year or two. My eyes see two teams at rock bottom (the Blackhawks and White Sox) whose ascent will not be rapid, one team likely to regress a bit from its current state of mediocrity to downright abysmal before things improve (the Bulls), one team that so badly underperformed this past season that some modest ascent seems inevitable (the Bears), and one team (the 83-79 Cubs) for whom a modest ascent is predicted and should be all that is required to get Chicago back to the playoffs in 2025.

Then and Now

Because I am semi-retired, had no deadline, and am prone to traveling down sports-related rabbit holes, I set out to compare the current situation with the situation 25 years ago, when the city’s sports scene was in a similar spot.

There have been just three years since 1970 when Chicago teams have won fewer than 40 percent (weighted) of their regular season games: 1999, 2000, and 2024. After previously hitting bottom in that 1999-2000 period, things eventually improved, but slowly. After an initial jump to a 49.5 percent winning percentage fueled by a shocking Chicago Bears season in 2001, it took Chicago teams until 2005 to exceed the .500 mark collectively.

For fun, let’s review where things stood in 2000, team-by-team, and see how long it took for each to claw back to respectability, and contrast the prospects for each team circa 2000 and today.

Bulls. In 1999-2000, the Bulls were in the second year of the post-Jordan Jerry Krause/Tim Floyd Experience. They finished 17-65. Their leading scorer was Number 1 overall draft pick and Rookie of the Year Elton Brand (20.1 ppg), and the only other players who averaged in double figures were championship era holdover Toni Kukoc (18.0) and a rookie then known as Ron Artest (12.0). The rest of the roster included a raggedy collection of past-the-expiration-date role players from the six Bulls championship teams (Will Perdue, BJ Armstrong, Dickey Simpkins, and Randy Brown), among others. Fun fact: as if he hadn’t already alienated the fan base, Krause signed former Knick villain John Starks, who played in four games for the Bulls that season.

So Brand and the future Metta World Peace were on hand, which might be viewed as a decent start. Add a piece here and there and get rolling, right? Well, uh, no. In 2000-2001, the Bulls rolled out a roster that included a staggering 11 first or second-year players, including Brand, Artest, and rookies Marcus Fizer and Jamal Crawford. This squad managed to win two fewer games, finishing 15-67. Among the eight (!) rookies on the roster, the Bulls suited up a German (the unforgettable Dalibor Bagaric) and a Russian (the more forgettable Dragan Tarlac). Fred Hoiberg, with five years in the league, was the team’s most tenured player. But with all that young talent on hand, things could only improve, right?

Well, uh, not so much. Hellbent to make good on his proclamation that “organizations win championships” (as opposed to, you know, the greatest player of all time, a Hall-of-Fame coach, another NBA Top 50 All-Timer, and a bunch of really great role players), Krause decided that he’d had enough of Brand’s two seasons of 20 points and 10 rebounds per game and traded him for the rights to Tyson Chandler, a skinny 7-foot high schooler, the second overall pick in the draft. And, for good measure, Krause drafted another 7-foot high school center with the fourth overall pick in that same draft, the not-so-skinny Eddy Curry. Chandler and Curry made about as much sense together as mayonnaise and maple syrup. And Krause – likely realizing he would need someone to buy beer for Chandler and Curry – brought in erstwhile Bull Charles Oakley. Oak was so old that he had been sent out of town before the Bulls started winning championships. A shell-shocked Floyd was fired after a 4-21 start, and the team finished 21-61. In retrospect, this whole chapter in Bulls history is comedy gold.

Alas, the Bulls got back to the playoffs in 2005 under Scott Stiles. Shockingly, Chandler and Curry were still around, but neither had developed as Krause imagined nor would ever become anything remotely resembling a franchise player. Tellingly, exactly zero players on the 1999-2000 Bulls who were part of the 2004-2005 playoff team. And Curry and Chandler were discarded almost immediately after the Bulls started winning. Skiles could not sustain his initial success, and was canned 25 games into the 2007-08 season. But Skiles’ arrival did mark the start of a very good run for the Bulls – 10 playoff appearances in 11 years overall. And the core of that 2004-2005 team – rookies or second-year players like Kirk Hinrich, Luol Deng, and Ben Gordon – helped lead the Bulls back to respectability. Even then, the progress to the Rose-Noah-Thibodeau-led success later in the decade wasn’t linear. It included 164 games of Vinny Del Negro at the helm. Del Negro was perhaps the consummate Bulls head coach: 82-82 over those 164 games.

Which brings me to the 2024-25 Bulls, featuring veterans Zach Lavine, Nicola Vucevic, Coby White, Lonzo Ball, Patrick Williams, and Ayo Dosunmu, rookie Matas Buzelis, and a bunch of other misfit toys. To be fair, the Bulls have been occasionally competitive (they hovered near .500 much of the season until recently dropping to six below) and their head coach, Billy Donovan, has always struck me as perfectly competent. But I don’t expect this team to make the playoffs and I honestly don’t know if I see any player on the current roster developing into one of the multiple stars needed to elevate a modern NBA team to contender status. Nice role players? Sure – maybe even several. But the NBA is a star-driven league, and once they (please!) shed Zach Lavine in the coming weeks or months, the Bulls will be star-less.

For many years, the Bulls have been bad enough to miss the playoffs and good enough to miss out on drafting high-impact players. They have a protected Top 10 pick in the next draft – which is said to be deep in talent. That means if the pick lands in the Top 10, they keep it. If not, it belongs to the San Antonio Spurs. To guarantee a Top 10 pick (meaning a pick that cannot be jimmied out of the Top 10 by reason of the unfortunate bounce of ping pong balls during the draft lottery), the Bulls have to finish in the Bottom 6 of the NBA standings. Currently, they are not close to the Bottom 6. The Bulls might attempt to shed their best players to pile up losses to try to keep that pick, but it’s not always easy to win a race to the bottom in the NBA. Stay tuned, and get ready for some horrific basketball from the Bulls over the next four months or so.

With luck, we will never see a return to Krausefloydian depths of the late 1990s/early 2000s, but I think it’s likely the Bulls are on a descending path. I don’t expect another plus .500 season from the Bulls anytime soon. As currently constructed, the Bulls seem destined to rebuild before they field a team capable of a long playoff run. Sadly, I believe this team is further from championship contention than any Chicago team not owned by Jerry Reinsdorf.

The Sandbox Skinny: the Chicago Bulls have not bottomed out; expect them to shed players and stagger through the rest of the 2024-2025 season below .500; expect accelerated regression in 2025-2026 before they rebuild and return to playoffs (i.e., respectability) in 2027-2028.

Bears. In 2000, as a new century dawned, Head Coach Dick Jauron led the Bears to a 5-11 record in his second season, which followed a 6-10 record in 1999. But this team had some very useful pieces, particularly on the defensive side of the ball. Shockingly, they went 13-3 and returned to the playoffs in 2001. The core of that 2000 defense included Rookie of the Year Brian Urlacher, Mike Brown, Tony Parrish, Warrick Holdman, Rosie Colvin, and – not to be forgotten – dreadlocked return man and cornerback R.W. McQuarters. But the offense lagged. Former first-round pick Cade McNown started nine games in 2000, completing 55% of his passes for 1,646 yards, 8 touchdowns and 9 interceptions. McNown was traded after the season (along with a seventh-round pick) to the Dolphins for two sixth-round picks and a $25 Starbucks gift card. McNown never took another snap in an NFL game. One of the McCaskey nephews used the gift card.

The turnaround in 2001 was a credit to the defense, which returned essentially the same cast of characters from the 5-11 2000 season plus mammoth defensive lineman Ted Washington. The offense was turned over to the competent-if-not-spectacular Jim Miller, who handed off a lot to the competent-if-not-spectacular Anthony “A-Train” Thomas, who rushed for 1,183 yards and 7 TDs and edged out LaDainian Tomlinson for the NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year award. This was truly a magical turnaround. But maybe a mirage.

In true Bears fashion, that 13-3 team lost to the Eagles in the divisional round of the playoffs at home, and then finished 4-12 in 2002, and 7-9 in 2003. Exit Dick Jauron, enter Lovie Smith. By 2006, Lovie had returned the Bears to 13-3 and taken them to the Super Bowl, with several of the same defensive stars.

Can we expect an eight-game improvement from 2024 to 2025 for the Chicago Bears – a la the Jauron/Urlacher group in 2000 to 2001. Probably not, but it’s possible in the modern NFL. I won’t wallow in the misery of another disappointing season and yet another coaching hire by an organization that has distinguished itself as being terrible at hiring coaches. We cross our fingers and hope for the best.

But if 2024 did not go as planned, it showed me that the team might have found a quarterback who can – if protected and coached well – take the team to the playoffs on a regular basis. Caleb Williams survived playing a full season behind one of the worst offensive lines in franchise history, which itself is somewhat remarkable in that (a) the team has had plenty of bad offensive lines, and (b) the team is Generally Managed by a former offensive lineman. Am I ready to say the artisans at the Pro Football Hall of Fame should start chiseling away at Williams’ bust? Of course not. But between watching Williams in college and at times this season, I’m in – something I could never say for Justin Fields.

This team has holes, for sure. But it also has a core of solid NFL players. We’ll have to see who survives the coaching change, and who gets cast aside. Just three years ago, the Bears roster was pretty much torn down to the studs. I don’t think that will happen again – or that it needs to happen again at every position. The defense has players who will survive the coming purge – maybe none who are the second coming of Brian Urlacher or Peanut Tillman, but players who will suit up in the playoffs for the Bears someday.

For reasons that defy logic and historical performance, I am optimistic when it comes to the Bears. Looking ahead, I predict the Bears will be the second of the five Chicago to post a better-than-.500 regular season record from this point forward. I also believe – and this depends a lot on the quarterback – that they have a shorter path to sustained competitiveness (say, a run of three or more consecutive playoff appearances) than any other Chicago team. The depth of the NFC North gives me pause in saying all that, but the Bears were 1-5 against their divisional rivals this season and easily could have been 3-3 or even 4-2. I’m ready to label the entire 2024 season as the Eberflus/Waldron Regression and move on.

The Sandbox Skinny: the Bears have bottomed out; the Beloved get back to plus-.500 in 2025 and return to the playoffs following the 2026 season.

White Sox. Where have you gone, Jerry Manuel? It is somewhat incredible that 2000 was a historically bad one for Chicago teams, yet Manuel led the White Sox to a 95-67 record and won their division (where they were promptly swept 3-0 by the Mariners in the playoffs). Without the Sox overperforming the .500 mark by 14 games, 2000 would have been dangerously close (by just four wins) to being the worst on record since 1970. In fact, the Sox 2000 season marked the first of seven straight in which they finished .500 or better. The 2000 team’s offense was absolutely loaded. The South Siders had five players exceed 20 home runs and 90 RBI – Frank Thomas (43 and 143), Magglio Ordonez (32 and 126), Jose Valentin (25 and 92), Carlos Lee (24 and 92), and Paul Konerko (21 and 97). Heck, even Ray Durham finished with 17 HR, 75 RBI and 25 stolen bases. The White Sox’ started pitching was pedestrian; Mike Sirotka, Jim Parque, James Baldwin, and Cal Eldred each won at least 10 games with very mediocre ERAs, benefiting greatly from the Sox lineup. The bullpen, however, was above average, anchored by Keith Foulke, Bob Howry, and the obligatory crafty lefty, Kelly Wunsch. The 2000 season was a temporary high-water mark for the Sox – they slid to 83 and 81 wins in 2001 and 2002 before regaining momentum that led them to their World Series win in 2005 under Ozzie Guillen.

It is obvious the 2024 White Sox bear little resemblance to the 2000 squad.
That the 2024 team lost an MLB record 121 games is more impressive when you recall that the 2022 Sox won 93 games (and made the playoffs) and that even the 2023 team finished .500. It’s hard to imagine a steeper, faster descent for a professional franchise. (The Bulls enjoyed a similar crash post-Jordan, but that a was a deliberate act of self-immolation.)

Ninety-three wins to the all-time worst record in MLB history in two years is quite a feat of ignominy. As for light at the end of the tunnel? It’s hard to see much light at 35^th and Shields. A staggering 25 position players and 32 pitchers suited up for the South Siders last season. Many were dealt for prospects during the course of the season, and their best pitcher (Garrett Crochet) was liberated this off-season. In theory, the Sox should have lots and lots of prospects. Former uber-prospect Luis Robert remains (he of the 38 HR and 80 RBI last season). But beyond Robert and a handful of others, the names of the other players the Sox will roll out on Opening Day 2025 are mostly unrecognizable. I’ll go out on a limb here: they won’t be very good.

The Sandbox Skinny: almost definitionally, the White Sox have bottomed out – they’ll hang out at the bottom for a little while. I don’t see this team returning to .500 or the playoffs until 2028, at the earliest – and even that takes some faith that the law of averages works its magic and that a handful of the many prospects they’ve acquired become solid major league players.

Blackhawks. In 1999-2000, the Blackhawks won 33 games, got 12 into overtime, and missed the playoffs under Lorne Molleken and Bob Pulford. Tony “Bones” Amonte led the team with 43 goals, and the roster was littered with a collection of serviceable veterans (Amonte, Alexei Zhamnov, captain Doug Gilmour), promising younger players (Steve Sullivan, Eric Daze, and Bryan McCabe), and amusing relics (Bob Probert, Dave Manson, and Eddie Olczyk). The following year’s team – known in the annals as The Alpo Suhonen Experience – was worse, with much of the same crew. Suhonen was plucked out of Finland by Pulford, the team’s on-again-off-again GM, coached the team for one year, and then was gifted a one-way ticket to Helsinki, never to stand behind an NHL bench again.

The Hawks rebounded nicely in 2001-02 and made the playoffs, coached by Brian Sutter, with much of the same core from 2000. But by 2002-03, they were out of the playoffs again. In fact, between the 1999-2000 and 2008-2009 seasons, 2001-02 marked the only playoff appearance. Until very recently, that period was by far the worst stretch in modern franchise history. In addition to Molleken, Pulford, Suhonen, and Sutter, the team also employed Trent Yawney and Denis Savard behind the bench before finally turning to Joel Quenneville four games into the 2008-09 season. The Hawks made the playoffs in Q’s first year, won a Stanley Cup in his second, and didn’t miss the playoffs again until 2017-18. The core of the Hawks three Stanley Cup team first arrived on the scene in 2005-06, when Duncan Keith (81 games), Brent Seabrook (69), Patrick Sharp (50), Dustin Byfuglien (25), and even Corey Crawford (3) donned the best sweater in the NHL.

Which brings us to our 2024-2025 Chicago Blackhawks. I feel safe in saying this franchise has bottomed out (31^st of 32 two years running, and currently 32^nd out of 32 ). Despite surrounding teenage center Connor Bedard with seemingly competent veteran scorers, the team has regressed. Head coach Luke Richardson was canned, and former Rockford boss Anders Erickson is now keeping the seat warm for the next Q. Time will tell, but folks in the know seem to think the Hawks have a wave of young talent coming. On January 13, The Athletic published a list of the 139 top prospects under 23 years old, and the Blackhawks had nine players on the list (and a couple of highly touted prospects who were too old or just missed the list who are already on the NHL roster). In theory at least, the Hawks have positioned themselves for a return to respectability, if not greatness. But who knows? Is there a Toews or a Kane or Keith or Seabrook or Hossa on that list of nine? A Hjalmarsson or Shaw, even? Or are we talking about role players like Burish and Eager and Bickell? We’ll see. The volume is impressive, however. The “experts” who rank players for a living seem to like them some Blackhawks. So there’s hope.

The Sandbox Skinny: This team is at the bottom as I write these words. It won’t get worse (will it?). Using the last glorious run as a guide, I project this arc for the Blackhawks: balance of 2025 sees increasing youth movement and a period of lump-taking; 2025-26 sees arrival of 8-10 “future core” guys (think 2005-06 as a comp) and a significant stride forward; with a free agent acquisition or two, we can dream of a return to the playoffs in 2026-27. Beyond that, this should be a group that can have a playoff run for many years – if the experts know are right.

Cubs. In 2000, the Chicago Cubs were smack in the middle of the Sammy Sosa Era – an era of many homeruns and kisses blown to the dugout camera, and not a lot of success as a team. Sammy hit 63 dingers in 1999 for Jim Riggleman, and the Cubs won 67 games. He hit 50 dingers for Don Baylor in 2000, and the Cubs won 65 games. Sammy hit 64 dingers for Baylor in 2001, and the team improved dramatically, winning 88 games (but missed the playoffs). And the Samster hit 49 more homers for Baylor, Rene Lachemann, and Bruce Kimm in 2002, only to see the club win just 67 games. In 2003, Dusty Baker arrived and led the Cubs to their only playoff performance at his command, which ended in a soul-crushing seven-game loss to the Marlins in the NLCS. Dusty eventually yielded to Lou Piniella in 2007, and he promptly led the Cubs to back-to-back playoff appearances in which they were swept 3-0 in the first round. So post-2000 the Cubs returned to respectability immediately in Year 1 of Don Baylor’s tenure (88 wins), but returned to sub-mediocrity immediately thereafter, and then alternated between playoff-contending respectability and putrid over the next several years.

The 2000 Cubs improved by 23 games in 2001. Don’t expect a 23-game improvement from the 2025 Cubs, but even modest improvement should be enough for the Cubs to break Chicago’s playoff drought. Poking around, prognosticators seem to agree. On paper, the Cubs seem poised to field a better-than-average lineup (helped by the acquisition of outfielder Kyle Tucker from the Astros) and return a better-than-average starting pitching rotation. This team was built a little differently than the World Series winner in 2016, which was substantially more homegrown (Bryant, Baez, Contreras, Happ, Schwarber, Almora). The current edition of the Cubs was built largely through trades and free agent acquisition.

Unless he re-signs a long-term deal, Tucker will spend one year on the North Side, so 2025 feels a little like a “now or never” year. In a best-case scenario, Tucker flourishes, loves playing at Wrigley, signs a long-term deal to stay with the Cubs, and anchors the lineup for the rest of the decade. But best-case scenarios only occasionally come to fruition.

The Sandbox Skinny: The Cubs – the city’s only team that could stake a claim to having been respectable in 2024 – will return to the playoffs in 2025. Given the fact that the Los Angeles Dodgers apparently are playing in another economic universe than everyone else, I don’t expect any of us will need to worry about attending a parade in November. As for the future, the Cubs should remain respectable, if not world-beating, for several years.

The Final Word

In June 2010, after giving up five home runs in a game, former Cubs ace Carlos Zambrano famously said: “We sucks.” He could have been speaking of Chicago sports in 2024: indeed, “we sucks.” And we will probably sucks for a little longer. You can see rays of light in the form of the Kyle Tuckers, Justin Steeles, Caleb Williams, and Connor Bedards. But keep an even keel and a flashlight on hand: given how bad things are and could soon be for the White Sox and Bulls, it could be dark for a bit.

[1] For the Blackhawks and Bulls – teams whose regular seasons have always spanned two calendar years – I assigned the record to the year the season ended. For example, a 1971-72 season result is counted in 1972. For the Bears, I count the record in the year the season started, notwithstanding that NFL teams typically now play one regular season game in early January given the extension of the season to 17 games. Thus, the Bears record in 2023 was 7-10, even though the last game took place in January 2024. I started with 1970 because I was five years old and cannot really claim to have been a fan before I entered kindergarten. Plus, the Bulls first played in 1967-68, so the 1970-2024 period gives us a 55-year sample size that covers all five teams.

[2] See https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6015785/2024/12/30/chicago-sports-2024-worst-year-modern-history/.

[3] Greenberg seems to have used actual calendar year wins/losses, thereby splitting the Bulls and Blackhawks wins and losses in each regular season between the two years. As explained in note 1, my analysis counted wins and games played in the year in which the season ended (or, in the case of later-year football seasons, the year in which all but one of the regular season games was played). Also, my winning percentage numbers were calculated on a weighted basis. Because baseball teams have historically played about twice as many regular season games as NBA and NHL teams, and about five times as many as NFL teams. To account for this discrepancy, I used the NBA/NHL “about-80 game” season as the norm and weighted the teams’ wins and games played accordingly. Weighting the win and games played totals gives proper credit for excellent Bears’ seasons and reduces the outsized impact of an especially good or bad baseball season.

[4] I counted ties as one-half a win. Hockey did away with ties many years ago, but an “overtime loss” occurs after a game is tied in regulation time, so it was counted as a tie.

A Letter to DeMar DeRozan

January 2, 2022 / Paul E. Veith

Dear DeMar DeRozan:

I am writing to thank you, and to apologize.

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.

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.

Your pal,

DePaul

The Story of My Life

June 1, 2021 / Paul E. Veith

If you ever met my Mom, you probably heard The Story. But you didn’t get the whole story.

Imagine this. You are a woman and married at 18, to a man roughly two years older, recently out of the Marine Corps. He had barely a high school education and an uncertain future, but he was handsome and a bit of a rake, and you were about to start a journey together that would last six decades.

You start having kids at 19, in 1950. First a girl. Then a boy, and a girl … and a boy. And then a run of four more girls. (With two miscarriages sprinkled in for good measure.) By 1960, you are the mother of eight children, from newborn to 10 years old. Somehow, you and your husband had just lived through a blur of a decade of baby bottles and diapers and jobs and half-baked business ventures.

After your eighth child is born, you become pregnant again. That’s just what you did. You carry another child nearly to term, but late in the pregnancy you feel something’s not right. The baby isn’t moving. The doctors confirm your fear, and you give birth to a stillborn baby girl. You return home to the house full of eager big brothers and big sisters ready to add another to their brood, but without a baby. The crib that had been readied got banished to storage, or somewhere else.

At that point, a doctor counsels that your child-bearing days are over, that your body cannot take any more, and that another pregnancy could threaten your life. Though you were heartbroken to have lost that little girl, you follow his advice and have a tubal ligation performed. That’ll do it, you think.

And then, in late 1964, when you start feeling a little off. You tell your husband, “if I didn’t know any better, I would think I am pregnant.” You visit the doctor and a pregnancy test confirms the unthinkable. You are pregnant, again. After having decided on a procedure that would prevent you from ever hearing these words again, you hear them loud and clear: “you’re pregnant.”

Imagine that.

If you’ve heard the abridged version of The Story, you know the punchline: the person on the receiving end of that news was my Mom, and I was the surprising addition to the family. Number 9. And I am typing these words because she made a decision to give me a chance at life.

* * *

My mother died on Memorial Day. She was 90 years old. Her last two weeks or so were spent at home, in her bedroom, under hospice care. A series of chronic medical issues, mini-strokes, falls, and a pandemic that confined her to her apartment for the better part of 15 months sapped what remained of her physical health and her will to live. She was ready to go, and my siblings and I all came to the conclusion that it was time to let her go. She died peacefully, having lived a full life. She is reunited with my father, who died in 2009, and the third oldest of my siblings, Elaine, who died in 2015.

* * *

My Mom spent the last couple decades of her life in Park Ridge, Illinois, first in the condominium she shared with my Dad, and for the last two years in her own apartment in a nice, new assisted living facility that she jokingly called “The Home.”

Though I’ve made the drive from my home to “The Home” many times, last Wednesday’s drive was different. On that particular drive, The Story came rushing to the front of my mind and wouldn’t go away. I’ve heard The Story dozens of times, usually when my Mom had cornered some unsuspecting neighbor or colleague on the occasion of some gathering. The Story was one that my Mom never hesitated to share, no matter the audience or occasion. The Story became her shtick.

And that was okay with me, though I rolled my eyes a lot. Truth be told, throughout my life, The Story never really fazed me. OK, my Mom was done having kids, I snuck through. Thank goodness for medical malpractice. On rare occasions, a sibling might have said, “you were a mistake” or “you weren’t even supposed to be here” – to which my Mom would always say, if she heard, “don’t listen to them, you were a blessing.” I was never fazed because I did not much care how it all came down. It was always good enough for me to be alive, if not anticipated.

* * *

What hit me on that drive last Wednesday was a realization that the frail, dying woman I was about to visit had faced a gigantic decision more than five decades ago, and I owe my very existence to the choice she made at that moment in time. My Mom was baptized and confirmed a Lutheran, but she did not regularly attend church as an adult and no one would peg her a “religious woman.” I am certain that her decision to give birth to me was not compelled by dogma or fear that terminating her pregnancy would lead to her eternal damnation – maybe in part because Lutherans aren’t big on dogma or eternal damnation. But I am equally certain that her decision was supported by a simple, almost quaint faith that God’s will would be done. That is, against evidence and professional counseling, she followed her instincts and gave it up to God. That kind of thought process is the very definition of faith. Despite the prospect that it would all end terribly, or worse – she carried on with a little bit of faith.

Who really could have blamed her if she had made a different decision? Eight kids at home, all under 15. And then, “you’re pregnant”? Could anyone have blamed her for choosing to be done – forever – with baby bottles and diapers? Could anyone have blamed her for wanting to avoid the prospect of enduring the crushing disappointment of a second stillborn child? Could anyone have blamed her for wanting to avoid the tragedy of leaving eight children motherless trying to give birth to a ninth?

My oldest sister – who was 15 when I was born – does not recall any hesitation on my Mom’s part. And knowing my Mom as I did, I doubt that she made a show of the decision. After the initial shock of “you’re pregnant,” she most likely quickly decided to forge ahead with the pregnancy without a second thought. But beneath the surface, she must have been terrified of the prospect of a another stillborn child. In fact, I am told she did absolutely nothing to ready a room for an infant. No crib. No changing table. No diapers. Nothing. She lived in fear of being enveloped again in the darkness of a stillborn, or worse. She could not prepare herself for the joy of a newborn baby against the prospect of that darkness.

Once the news came back from the hospital in July of 1965 that she had given birth to a healthy, 5-pound, 7-ounce baby boy, friends and family scurried about setting up the house for my arrival. The darkness averted, my family prepared to squeeze one more child into the bungalow on Sacramento Avenue. With eight kids packed into two tiny bedrooms, I have no idea where they put me.

* * *

For reasons that now leave me feeling a little selfish, until last Wednesday I really had not thought much about the moment when my Mom was told, “you’re pregnant.” How did she react? Did she cry? Did she laugh? Did she curse the doctor who apparently botched the tubal ligation? I know now that she was terrified that she might carry another child to term, go into labor, leave for the hospital to give birth, and come home empty-handed. I never really, truly appreciated the gravity of the moment. Eight kids at home. A stillborn daughter. Tubal ligation. A high-risk pregnancy. No more diapers. No more bottles. Every kid off to school. Finally, she had started to see light at the end of a tunnel full of babies and toddlers. And then, out of the blue, “you’re pregnant.” Mom did not flinch. She made a decision, endured what must have been an excruciating pregnancy, and brought me into the world.

* * *

My Mom’s last few months (heck, years) have been a roller-coaster ride – for her and for her children. In recent weeks, after her umpteenth fall and hospitalization, she was intermittently in pain, agitated, always tired, mostly sleeping. For brief stretches, she rallied and communicated coherently. About 10 days ago, she noticed I was wearing a golf shirt and asked if I had played. “Yep,” I said. “How’d you do?,” she said weakly. I said, “not so good, but I made a birdie on 18.” With my wife as my witness, my Mom’s face lit up and eyes got wide and she said, “You made a birdie!?! Good.” (Apparently, she understood the rarity of such an event.)

By last Wednesday, she was seemingly nearing the end, and she was resting. No pain. No agitation. Just the labored breathing of a dying woman. At that moment, I closed her bedroom door and we shared a room no more than a mile or two from Lutheran General Hospital, where she brought me into the world. Just the two of us, alone. Though I had thanked her many times for many things, I don’t think I’d ever thanked her – specifically – for making the choice that led to The Story. For soldiering through a high-risk pregnancy. But I did it. I said it out loud, through more tears than I’ve shed in a long, long time. And it felt good.

I cannot be certain that she heard me, but I’ll die believing she did. And I’ll die only because I lived, and I lived only because my Mom decided that I should have that chance. She was willing to face the prospect of darkness – or even death – to give me a chance to see the light of day.

* * *

Rest in peace, Mom. And forever, and finally, thank you.

What’s Wrong With Purple?

February 7, 2021 / Paul E. Veith

On January 24, 1967, the high temperature in Chicago was a toasty 65 degrees. Two days later, it started snowing. Between January 26 and 27, a cold front ushered in a blizzard that dropped a 23-inch white blanket on the city’s streets, still a record single-storm snowfall to this day. I was not quite two years old, and I have no memory of the storm, but I’ve heard about that storm many, many times – anyone who lived through that storm and its 50 mile-per-hour winds and 15-foot drifts will never (let you) forget it.

The Blizzard of ’67 was surely the seminal weather event of that winter, but the seminal political event that winter – at least for my family – was the contest for alderman in Chicago’s 40th Ward in the Albany Park neighborhood. The race wasn’t particularly close or notable, except that the loser was Herb Veith – my father. And – as the photo at the top of this post illustrates – it marks the first and only time I have lent my likeness to campaign literature. Not that I had a choice; I’m the little kid nestled between the bespectacled candidate’s buzz cut and my mother’s sporty bouffant.

Like the Blizzard of ’67, my Dad’s brief dalliance with politics was something I heard about growing up. It was not the subject of a lot of discussion or reminiscing, by any means. Until recently, all I really knew is (1) that Dad ran against Seymour Simon, a machine-backed fixture of Democratic politics in Chicago who later became a justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, and (2) that Seymour cleaned Dad’s clock. A couple of months ago I noticed the campaign flyer, which hangs in a frame in my office at home. It got me to thinking about Dad’s run for alderman and his politics and my politics and what it all meant, if anything.

The Bliss of Political Apathy

For most of my adult life, my engagement with politics at all levels – local, state, and national – was minimal. At some point, I became very cynical about politics and, mostly, politicians. I came to a view that I hold today more than ever: most politicians (particularly the legislators in Washington) don’t give a rat’s ass about me, or about “doing what’s right,” or “upholding the Constitution,” or anything else. Their purpose is gaining and retaining power, and to do that they need to be re-elected. Every. Single. Thing. They. Do. It’s all about being re-elected. For that reason, they vote with their wallets in mind. It’s really that simple. It’s all about self-preservation. The office is the source of their power, and the power is the thing. And you vote however you need to vote to keep the money flowing into your campaign coffers. If a member of Congress is from a district that is solidly Blue or Red, the way to retain power is to be more Blue or more Red than his or her primary opponent, to please the donors. Upholding the Constitution? Doing what’s right for the country? Compromise? Quaint ideas all. Quaint.

I studied political science a little bit in college, attended law school, and entered the legal profession – so I did not entirely avoid the cohort of citizens who follow and, in many cases, have strong opinions about politics and policy and government and all that. As I got busy with life – becoming an adult, working, starting a family, honing my sports trivia knowledge, etc. – my cynicism may have drifted to apathy. I just did not have a lot of time to invest into following politics, given my other interests. Typically, I voted – and I believe I always voted in the Presidential election – but at no point did I really dig in and engage, and pick a side. I have always been someone who voted for people, not parties. I believe I’ve voted in 10 Presidential elections – and I’m 6-3-1, meaning I voted for the ticket of one political party six time, the other three times, and on one occasion I abstained because I could not in good conscience vote for either candidate. But aside from reading up on the presidential candidates and their policies and doing a rough assessment of what seemed, at the time, to fit my view of what is best for the country, I was mostly apathetic. It was blissful, frankly.

Five years ago, all that changed. This isn’t a post about the last five years in America or the events of January 6, 2021 or anything else. Frankly, I don’t have the energy. But about five years ago something – more like someone – happened that punched me in the face and said, “you have to pay more attention to what’s going on here!” And I did. I paid a lot of attention, because it was hard not to. And I emerged from those five years a more engaged, educated citizen. With higher blood pressure. And anxiety. For that, I am … thankful? Well – I am thankful for the “more engaged, educated” part, at least.

The Color Purple

Today, politics in America is all about being Blue or being Red. If you are Team Blue, you’re a far-left liberal socialist Antifa-loving police-hating open-borders China-loving radical Democrat. If you are Team Red, you are a far-right conservative Limbaugh-loving QAnon spouting Proud Boy Oath Keeper Capitol lynch mob racist.

It’s all so stupid. We are all human beings. We are all Americans. Many of us are blessed with comfortable lives and more “things” than we need. Most of us have good hearts and would help a friend (or even a stranger) in need without hesitation. Most of us take no pleasure in seeing others suffer. Most of us take no pleasure in unfairness and injustice in any form. Most of us are law-abiding and norm-respecting. Most of us admire people who work hard and make an honest living, but are also empathetic and understand that some people have been dealt an impossibly difficult hand of cards with which to play the game of life.

What’s wrong with Purple? Why Red or Blue? Why isn’t it okay to be Purple?

Why Do I Prefer Purple?

I’m officially declaring myself Purple – an Independent. Many of my friends identify Blue or Red. I have close, close friends on both sides. Happily, the political cauldron of the last four years has not caused me to lose any friends – at least as far as I know. I have had many calm, civil conversations with people on both sides of the political spectrum with whom I disagree. One observation: many, many people are single-issue voters. And that single issue is money. Like, which candidate is more likely than the other to (a) keep the stock market humming, and (b) minimize my tax bill? But that’s obviously not universally true; one well-taken lesson learned from recent political history is that your net worth does not necessarily predict whether you are Team Red or Team Blue. And both the rich and poor can chafe at the so-called “establishment” if it suits their world view, and they do.

But living in the cauldron did get me to think a lot about how people come to have such strong and seemingly unshakeable political opinions – or, more to the point, why some people who I know to be smart, generous, thoughtful, and rational are so willing to look the other way when it comes to objectively indefensible, awful behavior by someone on “their team.” Many, many people ask one question when determining whether to support a candidate: “Republican or Democrat?” I think that’s nuts. It was one thing for fans of the Chicago Cubs in 2016 to cheer for Aroldis Chapman, the closer with domestic abuse issues who came over in a mid-season trade and was instrumental in the Cubs winning the World Series. He could throw a ball 102 miles an hour, after all. But I wouldn’t have voted for him had he run for President, or the Senate, or for the local Water Reclamation District. I am convinced, however, that there are people who would happily vote Aroldis Chapman for President – as long he was on the right team. Character be damned.

Part of the answer to why some are so staunchly Democrat or so staunchly Republican is that we all live in our own information bubbles. The opinions I reach about candidates or elected officials are based on the information I consume, which is a set of information unique to me. I get that. But in some cases it’s also at least a little bit about where we come from, where we live now, where we work and – most importantly – who we grew up around, who we live and work and play with on a regular basis.

“Vote for Our Dad”

I’m not sure I ever noticed it before I looked at the campaign flyer, but Herb Veith ran as a “Non-Partisan Candidate.” I knew he didn’t run as a Democrat, because I knew he ran against Seymour Simon and the Machine, and the Machine won. And I thought about something else. When I was a kid I would occasionally ask my Dad or Mom on election day, “who’d you vote for?” The answer was always in the form of a question and was always the same: “Can you keep a secret?” Me, with the excitement of someone about to be entrusted with a secret: “Yeah!!!” My parent (either one): “Well so can I.” Every. Single. Time. To this day, I do not know my parents’ politics. In researching this post, my oldest brother had a minority view – that my parents were staunch Republicans at one point. But none of the other siblings I spoke to shared that memory. They all remember what I remember vividly: “Can you keep a secret?”

If my brother is right and my Dad was a Republican in the 1960s, so be it. I had no clue. I’m thankful I had a clean slate, coming out of childhood. Or at least that I could approach politics without the burden of my parents’ political beliefs.

I love that campaign flyer. I love the front side because it shows may parents and our dog, Pirate, and all nine of the kids jammed into the living room in the best clothes we could dig up to stand still (or be held without fussing) for a couple minutes. And I love seeing those baseboard radiators that would hiss and moan on days like today, when the temperature flirted with zero. And I really love that the front of the flyer describes my Dad as a “Non-Partisan Candidate for Alderman.”

And I love the backside of the campaign flyer, too. I love the simplicity of “VEITH IS …” and “VEITH WILL …” And the reminder to anyone conditioned to think otherwise, “YOU NEED NOT DECLARE YOUR PARTY TO VOTE THE ALDERMANIC BALLOT.” I asked a few of my siblings and my Mom why my Dad threw his hat in the ring and decided to take on Seymour Simon, who was pretty much a sure thing. No one knew for certain. The consensus was that he’d gotten a taste of political activism when the Chicago Public Schools wanted to re-draw boundaries in a way that would have resulted in his kids having to cross bustling Irving Park Road to attend Cleveland School, which was about a half-mile away, rather than attend Bateman School, a short block-and-a-half walk north on Sacramento Avenue.

What seems certain to me – based on the flyer, and on my family’s recollection, and my own knowledge of my father’s life – was that he was not on a power trip, and that he had no desire to make a life in politics. By then, after a decade of working every type of job imaginable to feed a growing brood of children, he had settled into what would become a life-altering gig for him, a job as a State Farm Insurance agent. In short, my Dad most likely ran for alderman because some buddies at the local tavern said, “Herbie, you should run for alderman!” And my Dad – who was endlessly curious and adventurous in his own way – likely said, why not?! And thought … maybe, just maybe, I can do some good for the neighborhood.

My Dad was the ultimate neighborhood guy – he lived in and raised his family in a brick bungalow he bought from his in-laws. He served the neighborhood, and that service was returned with the patronage of generations of friends and acquaintances who insured their cars and their homes with State Farm, through him. He took a run at Seymour Simon not because he thought it was going to make him rich, or powerful, or notorious, or run up his number of Twitter followers. Maybe he’d get a few more people to stroll into his agency – which was located in a different ward. I suspect he just wanted to serve the neighborhood. To make living in the ward incrementally better.

I Have A Dream

About 10 days ago, I was talking to a guy who has served for close to a decade on the park district board and school board in his suburban Chicago community, and is presently running for an aldermanic seat. I mentioned my Dad, and the fact that he ran for alderman more than half a century ago in the 40th Ward. I asked him about serving on a school board during a pandemic, and serving in local government – generally – during such a polarizing time in America.

He confirmed my worst fears, frankly. He said parents and teachers and administrators advocating their positions are more strident than ever. Compromise is rare. Public meetings are heated. Respecting different points of view? Not so much. Members of the school board are routinely accused of “playing politics.” A school board!! Red vs. Blue is perceived to be a thing – even at the school board level.

Ever the optimist, I am hopeful that this day in American political life passes – just like the Blizzard of ’67. I am certain that by the time the voters of the 40th Ward – about 20% of whom took the opportunity to “Vote for Our Dad” – trudged to the polls about a month later, the streets were clear and the sidewalks were shoveled. The storm was etched in the city’s history and the memories of all who survived. But it passed, and life went on. Perhaps this period of intense polarization in America will pass, too.

I have a dream. Mine is less noble and aspirational than Dr. King’s, to be sure, but I dream of a day of selfless, intelligent, public service at all levels of government. I dream of bipartisan legislation of real significance. I dream of politicians who can reach across the aisle and cut deals, and not have to worry about being “primaried” to oblivion. Better, I dream of politicians who do the right thing because their terms are limited – politicians who serve the public for a reasonable number of years, and then go back to being teachers or lawyers or doctors or insurance agents.

Imagine that world. Just imagine it.

-30-

43 Minutes

October 25, 2020 / Paul E. Veith

It’s temporary, I promise, but my level of give-a-shit about following sports is at an all-time low. Don’t get me wrong, as I write this I have college football on the television a few feet to my left. And for the last few months I’ve dabbled in online, now-legal sports betting for the heck of it – putting small wagers on baseball, hockey, basketball, golf, a soccer game, and most recently, college football. (I won $43 when Ohio State covered yesterday, so there’s that.) Because some habits are hard to break, I will still carve out time to watch the beloved Bears every week, manage two fantasy football teams, read the sports section, and generally try to maintain my sports literacy.

So yeah … I still care a little bit, and I still watch to a point. But there is no doubt that the tumult and gravity of 2020 has occupied a lot more of my brain space than is the norm, and my attention to sports has ebbed. Maybe that’s a sign of personal growth and appropriate redistribution of attention from subjects that don’t matter a whole lot, at the end of the day, to subjects that are critically important – like dealing with a pandemic, widespread social unrest, elections, and the new Borat movie, to name a few.

But this past Friday night, I was ready for some sports immersion. All week, I looked forward to watching the Illinois-Wisconsin football game – the kick-off to a delayed, truncated Big Ten season. I am a die-hard Illinois fan across all sports. It’s my alma mater, and that’s reason enough for me to care about the Fighting Illini. Rationally, no person would invest the time and energy I have invested following the Illinois football team over the last 40 years or so. During that period, Illinois football has been … well, mostly awful. Two Rose Bowl appearances (both losses), irregular and mostly forgettable appearances in other bowl games, and memorable upset wins approximately once a decade – that’s about all I have to show for four decades of devotion to the Illini.

But that’s okay. From time to time I’ve asked, why do you do this to yourself? At times it does feel that I’m stuck in an abusive relationship of sorts. But the short answer is this, I went to school there – that’s my team. So I’ll pay attention and root for the Illini forever – it’s just part of what I do and who I am.

Leading up to Friday night, I was optimistic. At the start of every season for any team I care about, I tend to be an optimist. Illinois had a four-game Big Ten winning streak last year, upset a Wisconsin team then ranked in the Top 10, and made its first bowl game game in Lovie Smith’s four years as head coach. This year, it returns a fairly experienced team, a senior quarterback, and has added some reinforcements through the NCAA’s transfer portal. I noted early in the week that Illinois was a 23.5-point underdog. What? That’s outrageous! No respect! – such were the wailings of the fan base. For my part, I eagerly awaited confirmation that he Fighting Lovies had turned the corner, and could compete with the Big Boy Badgers.

Well, I made it for 43 minutes of action. With about two minutes left in the third quarter of what eventually would be a 45-7 Wisconsin win, I quietly turned off the television in one room of my house, walked a few steps, and joined my wife in watching an episode of Season 2 of The Handmaid’s Tale, an “American dystopian tragedy television series” premised on the chilling aftermath of a Second American Civil War.

No matter how bad it gets for Illini fans, Offred has it worse

One lesson learned (again): Never question the line. Vegas knows. And Illinois was awful. It is too upsetting to re-hash all of the details here, so I’ll hit some highlights. On the second play from scrimmage, Illinois’ tailback fumbled. Wisconsin’s quarterback, starting his first college game, completed 20 or 21 passes. (And the one incompletion was a drop.) Illinois’ defensive backs apparently took admonitions about social distancing very, very seriously, because they seemingly were never within six yards – let alone six feet – of a Badger receiver all night. Process this: Illinois successfully defended zero of the passes thrown by Wisconsin’s starting quarterback all night. Zero. The Badgers’ QB is good – probably Wisconsin’s most-heralded quarterback recruit ever. I knew that before the game. But never in a million years did he or I imagine that his first outing would be the equivalent of a seven-on-zero walkthrough.

Oh, and Illinois’ best linebacker made a great play to stop Wisconsin short of the line to gain on 4th-and-1 when the game was still a contest – only to be concussed and knocked out the game in the process. He wobbled to the sideline being held up by trainers as the head linesman added about a half-yard in Wisconsin’s favor to the spot of the ball, giving the Badgers a new set of downs. The Illinois coaches decided a potentially game-altering play was insufficiently important to throw the coach’s challenge flag to have the play reviewed. That’s what happens to the Illini. Always. But Wisconsin didn’t need officiating help Friday night; the Badgers won by 38.

The Illini dropped passes, missed tackles, and committed costly penalties. The players played poorly, the coaches coached poorly. It wouldn’t surprise me if the trainers taped ankles poorly. This game was a train wreck. And even Illinois’ one touchdown was almost accidental. A Badger receiver fumbled, and the ball laid on the ground surrounded by Illini, several of whom grabbed and pawed at the ball but could not corral it. Serendipitously, another Illini who was late to the party snatched the ball and sauntered into the end zone. A brief glimmer of hope, the lead narrowed to seven points. By halftime it was 28-7. Curtains.

Basically, the 43 minutes of Illinois football I could bear to watch Friday night was a microcosm of 2020. A complete and utter disaster. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. In a span of about two hours, my optimism about 2020 and my hope that the momentum of 2019 would carry into this season was basically erased. Illinois football did not provide a respite, as I’d hoped. It simply piled on the angst and despair. We’re back to wondering not whether the team takes another step forward, but who’d be available if the Lovie Experience ends.

It says something that I was driven to take refuge in The Handmaid’s Tale. If you haven’t watched it yet and are a little on edge about America in 2020, don’t watch. It’s dark. It’s depressing. It depicts as real what should be unimaginable. Why do I watch? Essentially, because I started, and now I’m invested, and I have some interest in seeing how the story evolves. And the series is brilliantly acted and produced. It’s just not a light, feel-good 45 minutes. Ever.

So, my night went from the light (Big Ten football’s back, baby!) to the dark (oh no, could we be awful again?) to the darker (the seemingly hopeless plight of the main character in The Handmaid’s Tale). Not the night I’d envisioned, to be sure.

But the sun rose on Saturday. I woke up, walked the dog and went to the Village Hall and voted. That felt good. A step back toward normalcy, I hope. As is sometimes the case when a team I follow loses horribly, I consciously avoid the next day post mortem. My team lost and is 0-1. We move on, life goes on.

And there’s always the next game. Purdue is traveling to Champaign next Saturday for an 11 a.m. kickoff. I’ll watch. For better or worse.

My Rushmore: Games I Played As a Kid*

May 11, 2020 / Paul E. Veith

“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.

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.

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.

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.

-30-

PHOTOS

Honorable Mention: Mattel’s Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots

Honorable Mention: Aurora’s Monday Night Football

Honorable Mention: Slot Hockey

This Ain’t No Party, But This Ain’t No War

April 4, 2020 / Paul E. Veith

Unsettled. Anxious. Uncertain. A little bit scared. Disoriented.

That’s a summary of my feelings about the Covid-19 pandemic. But something good – maybe – came out of Covid-19. I cleaned my closet, and my long-threatened blog became a reality because there is no time better to start a blog than a once-a-century global pandemic. I don’t plan to make this a Covid-19 diary chronicling the existential questions I find myself facing every day, like “Should I shower today?” “Did I shower yesterday?” “Is it Tuesday or Wednesday?” “Do I watch Better Call Saul or Homeland tonight?” “Two episodes or three?” I promise to move this blog to other topics soon, but humor me for now.

For whatever reason, a lyric came into my head the other day as I was thinking about our nation’s engagement with Covid-19. It was part of the soundtrack of my college years: “This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no fooling around.” I did know that the lyric came from a Talking Heads song; what I did not know was the name of the song in which those lyrics appeared: “Life During Wartime.” It starts:

Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons, Packed up and ready to go
Heard of some grave sites, out by the highway, A place where nobody knows
The sound of gunfire, off in the distance, I’m getting used to it now
Lived in a brownstone, lived in a ghetto, I’ve lived all over this town
“Life during wartime,” the talking heads, 1979

Fighting the “Invisible Enemy”

Is this wartime in America? I don’t think so. To be sure, you may have heard politicians on television likening our current situation to war – albeit war against an “invisible enemy.” And politicians are not the only people who have compared pandemic to war – Bill Gates did the same in 2018, when he warned of the need to prepare for a pandemic (you know, the pandemic that no one could have predicted).

At a certain level, I get it. By telling people “we are at war,” leaders might hope to convey the gravity of the present situation. “We are fighting a war” makes for a better soundbite than “We are attempting to mitigate a global health emergency by flattening the curve.” Strangely, using a familiar word like war might even bring comfort to Americans dealing with an unfamiliar predicament. Some might think: “We’re in a war? Oh, then we’ll be OK. After all, we have the strong, powerful United States military protecting us.” And, if I can wear my cynic’s hat for just a second, a politician might even summon war and all the best words about war hoping to benefit from what some have called a “rally ‘round the flag effect.” Politicians live to give the voters candy: and who doesn’t want a strong, powerful ally in a fight? Who doesn’t marvel at the spectacle of a big, gleaming military ship sailing into port promising to provide backup hospital beds – even if gathering to marvel at a ship is exactly the wrong thing to be doing right now?

This Ain’t No War

Like many, I have immersed myself in reading about Covid-19. I am powerless to turn away. Give me my candy: teach me all about things I knew nothing about until recently, like R-naught, shelter-in-place, asymptomatic transmission, N95 masks, PPE, and social distancing. I devour epidemiological models and articles explaining what it means to “flatten the curve.” Some of what I have read has been helpful – mostly stuff written by experts and those who skillfully explain the work of experts. Other stuff I’ve read … not so much. I don’t pretend to be an expert, but I know a heck of a lot more today about pandemics than I did two months ago. Thankfully, I don’t consider myself an expert on war, either. The wars that have been fought during my lifetime are not wars that had a great impact on American life at home the way, say, World War II did on those living in the 1940s.

But from my seat on the couch, I cringe a little whenever I hear our national engagement with Covid-19 compared to war, or when I hear this time compared to war time. This isn’t wartime, and it might be really dangerous to think so.

The differences are plain. During wars, humans on one team attack humans on another team for the purpose of securing land or resources or a way of life, I suppose. The end goal of a war is submission of one team to the other – surrender. Wars are fought with bombs, battleships, planes, drones, guns, and tanks – often on some godforsaken far-off battle field in a place we would never think to visit. They typically end with agreements to stop the bloodshed and divide the spoils. During pandemics, viruses attack humans on all teams. While we all can easily visualize enemy soldiers trying to kill our soldiers, it’s not so easy to visualize a virus – or to even understand what a virus is. Try this explanation. Fascinating. What jumps out at me are the numbers. I am a sucker for numbers.

For starters, viruses are easily the most abundant life form on Earth, if you accept the proposition that they’re alive. Try multiplying a billion by a billion, then multiply that by ten trillion, and that (10 to the 31st power) is the mind-numbing estimate of how many individual viral particles are estimated to populate the planet.
see link immediately above

And viruses are described as “very efficient. Viruses travel light, packing only the baggage they absolutely need to hack into a cell, commandeer its molecular machinery, multiply and make an escape.” In short, the “enemy” in a pandemic is way different than an enemy in a war, and viruses don’t much care what team you are on.

During wartime, it’s good to be “strong” and “powerful” and have more planes and boats and guns and stuff to wage an attack on the other team. Good luck with your planes and boats and guns in dealing with a highly contagious virus. During pandemics, the machinery of war is pretty much useless. Sure, military resources can play a role – the aforementioned hospital ships and the Army Corps of Engineers’ assistance in building temporary hospitals are examples. But for the most part, the weapons of war stand idle when the enemy is a virus.

During wartime, you usually need to confront your enemy to win. We are largely past hand-to-hand combat and it seems much modern warfare aims to keep the warriors off the battlefield. But eventually, to win a war there must be some physical human-to-human confrontation. Beating the coronavirus, as a nation, involves literally the opposite of confrontation. During a pandemic like this one, the only surefire way to defeat the enemy is to take all measure to avoid confronting it. Sure, we might find some pharmaceutical solution – a way to “take the fight to the virus” with medicine. That might help the infected, but the national goal here is to minimize infection.

When history is written about wars, the heroes tend to be the commanders and generals and soldiers – the warriors. That’s not to minimize other contributors during wartime, including the code breakers and medics and mechanics and countless others. But – with a few notable exceptions – the movies are made about the fighters. During a pandemic, the heroes are the caregivers (and those who allow them to do their jobs). The doctors and nurses and paramedics and administrators and medical technicians and lab technicians and janitors … the many, many people who come into direct contact with the sick are the heroes during a pandemic.

During wartime, many of us – to be honest – don’t have much of a direct role to play. Sure, for the general civilian population a wartime effort might involve supporting the troops from afar in many ways – by working for industries at home that provide direct support, buying war bonds, paying taxes, etc. But during a pandemic, every single citizen has a direct role to play – avoid getting and, especially, avoid spreading the virus. This is why social distancing is being encouraged or, in most places, mandated. This is why many of us are working remotely and spending most of our waking hours in sweatpants. Sitting in the same house or apartment, day after day, week after week – it’s not great. But keeping to yourself or your family unit is a 100% surefire way to “beat” the virus – if everyone does it. The old adage of a chain being only as strong as its weakest link applies – and that’s why we get so infuriated at Spring Break revelers and elected officials demonstrate stunning ignorance of the basics. They are weak links.

The Wartime Comparison Is Dangerous

Last Fall, my wife and I stood on the beaches of Normandy where young American men were dropped off into a Nazi shooting gallery. We stood in the very same concrete bunkers where the triggers were squeezed. During actual wartime, young Americans joined the military in service to their country, got trained up, were sent overseas, loaded on to landing boats, and led to violent deaths on a beach. During the same trip, we visited the American cemetery and its meticulous, staggering sea of white crosses marking 9,388 grave sites over 172 acres. We also visited small towns and the surrounding countryside where thousands of other young Americans jumped out of airplanes into enemy-occupied France to play their role in winning the war.

Having that experience, it seems incongruous to compare what I am doing – working from home, watching Netflix a lot, eating Klondike bars, and practicing social distancing – with what Americans have done in serving their countries and risking their lives during actual wartime.

But the real danger does not lie in diminishing what the soldiers have done or in pretending like we are doing something heroic. The danger in the wartime analogy is something I alluded to earlier. For most Americans, winning a war is largely the job of others. We are happy to go on with our lives and allow others to be heroes. We will stand and cheer them when they are saluted during sporting events, we’ll vote for politicians who promise to make it a priority to keep our military strong (spoiler alert, every politician makes this promise), and we’ll generally maintain respect for the military as an institution. That’s a small price to pay for the people and the machines that win wars.

Overcoming a pandemic – I use that word because I’m not sure a virus can even be defeated, exactly – is not the job of others. A pandemic does not end until the virus runs its course and stops infecting people. We “win” by reversing exponential growth of the number of infected. Most viruses aren’t a super big deal – they aren’t infectious enough to shut down large swaths of the economy for the sake of saving lives. But this virus is a big deal. I am impressed that most of us – at least in my circles – seem to be taking this really seriously. But I fear what happens when April turns to May, and the weather improves. The pressure to re-start the economy will ramp up steadily. Cabin fever will drive people to leave their homes, to take risks – all of us. Those who lead us – both in the public and private sector – have difficult decisions to make.

Let me wrap up with my old friend: numbers. The focus of the reporting of most models has been on the question of how many Americans will die under various scenarios? The models are all over the place. The “open up the economy” set like some; the “shut it down” folks favor others. The thing about models is that they are, well … models. Predictions based on assumptions; educated guesses, at best. One thing I know is this – our ability to make valid assumptions right now is dubious, at best. We are in uncharted waters. Thankfully, pandemics don’t happen a lot. But the one set of numbers that the federal task force referenced earlier this week in extending the stay-at-home recommendation projected deaths in the range of 100,000 to 240,000. Again, I have no idea – and they have no idea – if 100,000 Americans are going to die after contracting Covid-19. But that’s far from the ugliest estimate, and that’s still a Rose Bowl full of people. And among those who die – among those who already have died – are people who had a lot of life yet to live.

If we get through Covid-19 and only 40,000 or 50,000 or 60,000 die, should be pat ourselves on the back, collectively? Should politicians take a bow? I think not. But I know this for sure: the one and only surefire way to make sure that you don’t contribute to that number is to behave as if you have the virus – even if you don’t – and make it your mission not to infect anyone else. You don’t need to be a warrior to do that, you just need to be smart and respectful of others.

If it motivates you to be a good citizen, go ahead and consider this wartime. Wartime with Netflix and Zoom meetings, if you will. We can agree, at least, with the Talking Heads in this respect: it’s no time for fooling around.

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