Chicago Daily Observer

My father, an All-American football player in college and a professional coach later, could never totally commit to the Olympics after they went professional. (You don’t think they’re professional? You thought you were watching Kobe Bryant on another channel?)

My dad looked on sports as training fields for living rather than grand slams for sponsor endorsements. (Nor did he think the players should be the sole pride of cities after they become high-paid gladiators. But we’ll get to that later.)

I really don’t know what he would have thought of the tiny, grim-faced girls hurtling themselves into knots this week in China. (We’re now discovering that they’re what? Ten years old?). I think he might have suggested – as I do – that there is a kind of child abuse involved here.

My father would have remembered names like Jesse Owens and Jim Thorpe and the real pride of watching ... Read More...

Jay Mariotti, the Sun-Times sport oracle, had left a message on my voice mail, and, ooh, was he mad.

It was, maybe, a dozen years ago when I was an editorial board member and columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times. As a White Sox fan, I had written something (I presume it must have been nice) about the team and its owner Jerry Reinsdorf. Mariotti disagreed. Furiously.

Don’t you know, Mariotti raged, that “they” are talking about “it.” By “it,” it turned out that Mariotti had written a contrary column on the same subject (I hadn’t seen or heard about it before I wrote mine) and “they” were, presumably, his sports writing colleagues who were having a chuckle that someone from the same paper would disagree with His Majesty.

Most of the rest of the irate message is lost in the fog of my memory, except for this ending: “The next ... Read More...

Another setback for the sport of kings as labor and management quarrel in Cicero A sit down strike delayed the start of live thoroughbred racing at Hawthorne Park Race Course earlier this afternoon (Friday, April 25th). Jockeys staged the work stoppage in order to dramatize their demand to receive a higher percentage of racing purses from the track owners.

The scheduled 3:00 p.m. start of the first race was delayed for almost
ninety minutes. Racetrack spectators observed that the temporary shutdown seemed
to be timed to coincide with the closing weekend of the Spring Thoroughbred
Meet at Hawthorne. On Monday, April 28th, racing will conclude at Hawthorne
and the next series of thoroughbred dates will be held at Arlington Park Race
Track beginning on May 2nd.

According to some sources, a tactical decision was made to stage the strike
at Hawthorne on a slow ... Read More...

Can you remember when a Governor Moonbeam held office in California rather than Illinois? Our zany adolescent masquerading as a fifty-one year old has hit upon a new scheme to bolster his sagging popularity with the electorate: Blagojevich is reported to be considering purchasing venerable Wrigley field and assigning its operations to the habitually inept Illinois Sports Facilities Authority.

Since the State of Illinois cannot attend to its most basic responsibilities, Blagojevich feels that an afternoon at the ballpark is just the cure for what ails us. Moreover, state ownership of the ninety-five year old stadium will help keep the team in Chicago rather than moving to the suburbs. As an added benefit, the deal may aid the Sam Zell’s purchase of the Tribune Corporation. Zell has indicated that he will sell the Cubs franchise and the associated real estate separately to pay for his purchase of the media conglomerate.

... Read More...

The Mixture Could Really Stir the Pot at Wrigley!

“Wait till next year” came later than usual in 2007 for us Cub fans. While we’re waiting, some of us are turning our attention to billionaire Mark Cuban and his interest in buying the team. Given his success in the business world and with the Dallas Mavericks, Cuban looks like he could reverse the curse and save the lovable losers from another full century of despair.

But at what price?

Cuban, a Pittsburgh-area native, made his money in computers, but he’s equal parts aspiring jock and tinkering geek. A graduate of the University of Indiana’s Kelley School of Business, Cuban went on to create a number of successful ventures, before co-founding Broadcast.com along with fellow Kelley-grad Todd Wagner. The online service combined his passion for sports with his devotion to technological innovation, delivering game audio to fans via the Web. After ... Read More...

Not surprisingly, the second-guessers have become unglued because the Chicago Marathon sponsors didn’t do—what?—enough about the blazing heat that laid many runners low. But, to compare what happened here over the weekend to the deadly disaster in New Orleans, isn’t that a bit much?

That’s what host Carol Marin did when she mentioned to her panel on WTTW’s Chicago Tonight that “some people” are calling the marathon, “the Katrina of Marathons.” The ridiculous analogy probably should have been expected considering how “some people” figure that someone (else) must be prepared on a moment’s notice to take care of every damn problem in sight.

You can bet if the marathon happened to have been run on a record-breaking cold day in a sleet storm, “someone” would have been blamed for not foreseeing the need to have an army of volunteers at the ready to chip the ice off the streets.

... Read More...

As the weather forecast last week kept getting hotter and more humid every day, my fears for Sunday’s Chicago Marathon grew and grew. At age 53, I was hoping I could finish in 4:15. It would be my sixth marathon, and I was feeling nearly as good as I did when I ran my first one in 1990.

I had trained hard over the summer and averaged about 9:40 in a 22-mile training run on a record cold morning three weeks earlier. I was hoping for cold conditions because I knew I would do well in the cold and I suffer miserably in the heat.

As we approached the starting line Sunday morning, Mary Jo, a friend from the Elmhurst Running Club asked me why I was so quiet. “I am thinking about the second half of the race,” I responded. By that time I knew the sun baking on ... Read More...