How can you tell a doctor from a sports columnist at a party?
The line for the doctor is made up of people waiting for an opinion. The line for the sports columnist is made up of people waiting to give an opinion.
Over the years, when readers wanted to fill me in on what truly ailed their favorite team or player, I occasionally was tempted to say, “I don’t recall asking for your thoughts.’’ It wouldn’t have made any difference. If I had said, “Call my office on Monday, but in the meantime, let’s get you started on a course of antibiotics,’’ they would have just kept talking. Chicago sports fans want to be heard.
Fair is fair. It was never lost on me that nobody asked for my opinion, either. I gave it anyway. I plopped down on readers’ doorsteps, laptops and devices. I was part of the package deal that came with a subscription, along with the comics, the puzzles and the hair-restoration ads.
I got paid to write my opinion, which was a crazy, stunning thing, a fact some of you regularly pointed out to me. We agreed to hear each other out, or to shout each other out. We laughed at the predicament of being in this city with these exasperating teams. We agreed it was a privilege, too.
This is my last column as a regular at the Sun-Times. I’m taking a buyout after 15 years with the company, 28 years at Chicago newspapers and 43 years in the business. Those are some big numbers and reason enough to move on. I’ve eaten so much press-box food that my vital organs have retained legal counsel. While working where I grew up, I was fortunate to have written about the Cubs, White Sox, Bulls and Blackhawks winning titles. When the Cubs won Game 7 of the 2016 World Series, I looked around the Cleveland press box that night, saw fellow scribes madly typing on deadline and took a moment to appreciate that we were doing what no Chicago sportswriter had been able to do the previous 108 years. I’m not given to shivers, but I think there might have been a flutter or two.
The Bears and a winning formula
Can you keep a secret? The Bears’ inability to win a Super Bowl in my time working in Chicago turned out to be the gift that kept giving for a sports columnist. Ineptitude is a good story, in its own way. Good stories are all writers ever want.
In 2019, three seasons after the Bears used the second overall draft pick on Mitch Trubisky, I asked then-general manager Ryan Pace at a press conference what he had gotten wrong about the quarterback.
“I don’t think we’re there yet,” he said. “We’re still watching the guy grow.”
A year later, the Bears released Trubisky, and a reporter asked Pace the same question at a press conference.
“Not to get fixated on the past, we are focused on the future,” he said.
If there’s no one to ask the questions, no one gets to hear the inanity.
Everyone’s an expert
I started writing a column in Chicago in 2000, and it didn’t take long to realize that when callers, emailers and assorted pen pals said I was a hack, a dimwit or Satan’s stenographer, it was because they didn’t agree with what I had written. It had nothing to do with the word choice, the descriptions or the lumbering similes. I could have been Shakespeare. You’d have a better chance of moving a mountain than moving them off their opinions. I don’t think that’s unique to the world of sports, but it’s good to know what you’re up against. It’s hard to be an expert when everybody else is one.
My first job out of college was covering the village of Orland Park. The discussion at one of the first government meetings I attended was about berms. I didn’t know what a berm was and, upon finding out, decided that if I was going to get paid to write, it wouldn’t be about how far raised dirt mounds needed to be from right-of-way lines. There was an opening in the sports department to cover high school sports and … I’m not sure I let the person telling me about it finish his sentence.
Why, yes, I would be interested in that.
Even when the detailed notes I was taking during one rainy, windy football game blew onto the field and were summarily crumpled up and stuffed in the referee’s pocket, I was not deterred. This job was for me.
So many people helped me along the way. I don’t want to mention any one person because I don’t want to leave anyone out. But some of them saw something in me that I didn’t, and others might have seen something in me that wasn’t there. Whichever the case, I’m grateful.
Anne, he’s your problem now
This job took me all over the world, and I was able to write about some very interesting people and some very cool events. But this is the truest thing I’ve ever written: What I wanted most out of every trip was to get home to my wife, Anne, and then when our kids were born, to get home to her and them.
When I’d get on her nerves, she’d smile and say, “Don’t you have another trip to take?’’
Now she has me to herself. All alone. Twenty-four/seven.
Pray for Anne.
Dan Jiggetts, the former host of a long-gone Comcast SportsNet Chicago show, nicknamed me the Viper on air because he said I was nice in person but quick to bite someone in print. I guess that makes me Viper Emeritus now.
What will I do? What should I sink my teeth/fangs into? I don’t know. I had thought I might work another year or two, but then the buyouts were offered, and I asked myself if the world really needed another column about the McCaskey family’s congenital awkwardness. Answer: Yes, just not from me.
I consider not knowing what I’m going to do a good thing. I might contribute a column to the Sun-Times down the road. Who knows?
But this is goodbye, for now.
It means I won’t have the McCaskeys, the Rickettses and Jerry Reinsdorf to write about.
And here I promised myself I wouldn’t cry.