Part VI, December 28-December 31

In a very bizarre Vitalis Sun Bowl, Northwestern lost 50-38 to the UCLA Bruins, bringing their bowl record in my lifetime to 0-5, in my parents’ lifetime to 0-5, and in Northwestern’s lifetime to 1-5.

1. Cats force UCLA to punt on their first possession, then drive 61 yards on 14 plays for a Joel Howells field goal. 3-0 Northwestern.

2. Four plays later: the Cats’ Kevin Mims intercepts a Drew Olson pass and returns it 26 yards for a touchdown. 9-0 Northwestern.

5. Four plays later: receiver Mark Philmore runs 19 yards for a score. 15-0 Northwestern.

Dad to me: “This is kind of like the time that I was listening to the radio in 1968, and they announced that Kennedy had been shot, and I was wondering why they were replaying a five-year-old broadcast.”

7. Four plays later: the Cats’ star linebacker Nick Roach intercepts a Drew Olson pass and returns it 35 yards for a touchdown. 21-0 Northwestern.

8. Joel Howells makes the extra point. 22-0 Northwestern, with 4:21 remaining in the first quarter.

9. UCLA mounts an 80-yard drive capped off by a six-yard touchdown run. 22-6 Northestern.

12. On the first play following a Northwestern punt, Olson goes 58 yards to Ryan Moya for a UCLA touchdown. The extra point is good. 22-14.

14. Five plays later: Khalil Bell runs seven yards for his second TD of the game. 22-20. UCLA sets up for the two-point conversion.

ME: “Ah, the ol’ two-pointer trap. This is dumb. Coaches always do this, forgetting that the two-point conversion rate is all kinds of low, and that you’re better off waiting until you absolutely need one.

16. Cats drive to the UCLA 20, and then Joel Howells has his field goal blocked. He is now 1-4 on all kicks.

17. Off the missed field goal, UCLA drives 80 yards and scores on an 8-yard pass. Extra point is good. 29-22 UCLA.

19. THIRD QUARTER: UCLA gets a touchdown, followed by Northwestern driving the field and then going to the backup kicker (not the punter…the backup kicker) for a field goal. He hits it. 36-25 UCLA at the end of three.

20. FOURTH QUARTER POSSESSIONS: UCLA punts, NU punts, UCLA fumbles, NU punts, UCLA punts, NU is intercepted, UCLA punts, and finally…

21. …with under three minutes to play, still 36-25, Basanez hits Phimore 8 yards for a touchdown. 36-31.

23. Down five with 2:29 to play, Joel Howells trots out to attempt an onside kick. The kick is fielded cleanly by UCLA’s Brandon Breazell…

24. …who runs it back 43 yards for a touchdown. Extra point is good. 43-31 UCLA.

25. Cats mount very impressive 16 play, 83 yard drive, capped off by a four yard TD pass from Basanez to Shaun Herbert. The backup kicker drills the PAT. 43-38 UCLA.

26. Down five with 24 seconds to play, Joel Howells trots out to attempt an onside kick. The kick is fielded cleanly by UCLA’s Brandon Breazell…

27. …who runs it back 45 yards for a touchdown. Extra point is good. 50-38 UCLA.

Ultimately, the game is a disappointment, but it was so entertaining and so illogical that in the end, I was happy. It was basically the football equivelant of the classic Van Damme movie Sudden Death, in which Van Damme—an off-duty firefighter—single-handedly thwarts a band of terrorists (who have managed to take the Vice President hostage at Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals in Pittsburgh between the Pens and the Blackhawks) by drawing a free-hand map of the bowels of the stadium, guessing where the bombs are, and then going around to defuse them, all of which happen to be at his assumed spots. Great flick.[1]

The day is done, and now I find myself thinking back to today’s bowl game. It will be reported in the tomorrow’s paper, and a bit will be done on SportsCenter, and maybe, just maybe, it will get some pub on the Score, and then that’ll be that. We will forget and move on.

Amazing, isn’t it? My Northwestern Wildcats just finished a blasé bowl game. A blasé Northwestern bowl game? How is that possible? Imagine: the Cats go to a Bowl game, and hardly anybody notices. Far cry from my childhood…the Rose Bowl season happening ten years ago…and now Randy Walker has become the first Northwestern coach to take the Cats to three bowls. Very cool.

I’m on the phone with Jake Bressler right now, AKA Jakey B, the two of us rapping old Bears. Slide ‘em, Albert Fontenot!

Jakey is one of my favorite people in the world to rap Bears with; we trade names that only the guys who have been there from the get-go would ever remember. This is fun to do with any team, but for me football is best, probably because there are so many players, and since the Bears have been predomiantly awful since 1992—the year of my hoops knowledge expansion—there has been a good deal of player turnover and, in turn, lots of lousy players to remember.

The key is doing it by position. Moving from Tomczak to Harbaugh to Peter Tom Willis to Will Furrer to Kramer to Walsh to Stenstrom to Krieg to Moreno to Shane Matthews to Cade to Jim Miller to Chandler to Hank Burris to Kordell to Rex to Quinn to Krenzel to Hutch and then into Orton and even Jeff Blake. That’s the fun stuff. Championships, division winners, Pro Bowlers…they’re good and all, but let’s face it: those are the commercials. The fill-in breaks. The majority of the time though, you’re watching Troy Auzene and Jeremy Lincoln and Tim Worley running around out there.

But those were the schlubs. You also had a bunch of guys you like, guys like Mo Douglass and John Mangum and Jerry Fontentot. That’s part of what I love about dedicating yourself to a sports team. Knowing everything. That’s the fun. Everybody remembers Jordan and Pippen. Only Bulls fans remember Bobby Hansen. Everybody remembers Sammy Sosa. Only Cubs fans remember Julio Zuleta and Courtney Duncan and Matt Mieske. Some of the name-droppers illicit smiles (Matt Steigenga), while others produces a grimace (Mike Caruso). But every one of them is fun, because they represent dedication. The full experience. The time in the trenches, as it were.

And while you get plenty of good names watching hoops, you get loads and loads more in baseball and football. And since the Bears are my favorite team, I most enjoy doing the Bears slide ‘ems. Over the past fifteen years, this team has been filled with memorable nobodies, including less-than-good starters, stale and crusted veterans, fluke stars, underskilled/overloved fan favorites. P.T. Willis, Jeff Graham, Lewis Tillman, Jerry and Albert Fontenot (no relation), Lemuel Stinson, Dante Jones, Mike Wells, Auzene, Curtis Conway, Myron Baker, Michael Stonebreaker, Anthony Morgan…I could go on, all, night.

Only a Bears fan remembers how the Bears went from Butthead to Carlos Huerta to Jeff Jaeger to Brian Gowins to Chris Bonehead to Paul Edinger to Doug Brien to Robbie Gould. The same can be said for any fan of any team…

…and as I’m saying this, rapping back and forth with Jake, I start to wonder: have I been all wrong on my thoughts towards a jersey purchasing? If much of the fun of rooting for a specific team is knowing all of the specific players, then doesn’t that mean that a jersey that is very season-specific is, in its own way, just as much fun as one of a Legacy Guy?

It’s five minutes until the New Year, and everybody at Ric’s is in the living room waiting for the countdown, getting their champagne glasses ready. As always, December 31^st has been a fun day…well, of course it has. How can a day that peaks at midnight not be fun? But that’s not what makes this day one of my favorites, and it’s not the partying or the fact that nearly everyone around is mad for sex. All that stuff is terrific, but what does it for me is that it is a universal holiday, ya know? Christmas, Thanksgiving, The Rosh and The Yom Kip, Fourth of July…these holidays are group-specific. But New Years is Earth-specific, and since everyone in the world is preparing for it in some way or another, it means that everyone on Earth is connected, even more than usual.

My day began at Meghan’s, waking up around ten and then heading home. My parents were cleaning for most of the day, getting the house ready for their own New Years plans. All the while, the feeling that the New Year was approaching stayed strong with me.

New Year’s Eve Day—if there is such a term—is the only day of the year that always feels like a movie, with the characters all preparing for a deadline that dictates their actions before hand and will determine their fates afterwards. Actions are heightened; everyone you see is planning their night, making countless, brief phone calls to the same five or six people, searching for just the right combination of booze and finger snacks and trying to figure out who they will kiss when the clock turns and where the highest percentage of single people will be. It’s like 25^th Hour, only not horribly sad.

The couple that my parents are entertaining tonight are not big on television, but they’ve seen some Seinfeld and so Mom was interested in showing them “some of the good ones.” After most of the cleaning was finished the two of us went through the show’s first four seasons on DVD and picked out ten good episodes, (Not that we’ll watch them all, but you never know.) During our search, it was revealed that my mom had never seen “The Bubble Boy,” and so we sat down and had a good laugh at that, with me trying to count the number of times that the word “bubble” was spoken in that episode. (I got to about 32 and then stopped.) Meanwhile, I was busy organizing dinner with The Guys, or “The Gang” as Papa used to call them. We finally settled on Champps, the same one we went to for Game 1 of the World Series. Ben came over to watch some football, as did Josh and Rota, and we headed out to meet Sven, Ric, and Luke at the restaurant.

When we got there, the Bulls had just started a game with Phoenix. The team has looked brutal lately, as we’ve slid down the standings with a five-game losing streak. Skiles was quoted in the Trib today that “nobody’s job is safe” and that he would be changing the starting lineup, even dropping in the possibility that Captain Kirk would be sent to the bench. That freaked Ben and me out, and when the game began Kirk was indeed moved…to small forward, with Duhon and Gordon at the guards, Luol at the other forward, and Tyson back in the starting lineup at center.

Chandler has been a real disappointment in the early going. Part of it has been his health, but a lot of it has just been his play. He’s putting up a career low 5.2 points per game despite shooting a career high 57% from the field. His boards are down a shade from last year (9.7 to 8.4), and his fouls are up to 3.7, also a career high. He just hasn’t been producing the way we need him to, which has led to a lot of small lineups, often with Sweetney at center and Noce at power forward. Ben Gordon also has not been playing well…although you can say that for nearly everyone on the team except for Duhon, who continues to improve.

The bottom line is that the talent is there. This is still a team that should go to the playoffs, and I still fully expect them to. Ben and I keep reminding each other that our record will be better on January 1, 2006 than it was on January 1, 2005, and this is still a young team without a superstar scorer to ease the burden of being defensive-minded. The Bulls should be able to pull themselves out of this slump, and I have no doubt that they will do it soon.

After a nice meal, we all went home to get sleeping bags, pillows, and in some cases a change of clothes, and then it was over to Ric’s at 9:15 for another fun New Year’s party. While last year was definitely low key, tonight has been even more so. Along with the seven guys, Meghan is here with Lorrie, Shanna, and their friend Rachel. Shanna’s boyfriend is here, and two guys who live in the neighborhood who we haven’t seen much since middle school stopped by briefly. It’s been a quiet night, but a fun one, with lots of music and lots of singing and lots of videotaping of people singing to the music. Soon we’ll countdown from ten to zero, and we’ll raise our glasses to another year gone and another one beginning.

The Bears play their final game of the season tomorrow, and the word came out tonight that Rex will sit to avoid injury…meaning that Kyle Orton will be back in the starting lineup, if only for a day. This bothers me tremendously. Grossman has played a game and a half this season. He played three games a year ago, and two and some change during 2003. That’s about seven games total, and now we’re going to bench him and then ask him to lead us to victory in the playoffs against a Super Bowl contender with a Super Bowl quarterback? Not good. Plus, we’re putting Orton into a lame-duck situation…two weeks ago this guy started his 14^th game of the year, and now he’ll start number 15 as a backup protecting the starter. How is that going to affect his play? The starter-backup-starter as backup move that Orton has done in three weeks is nearly as bizarre as Chad Hutchinson going from NFL starting quarterback to unemployed in less than a week...

But the Orton angle is an aside. The big concern is Rex on the bench. I’m not saying that it will necessarily be enough to knock the Bears out, but it’s certainly Of Note.

The game is at 3:15, and we’ll be heading over to Sven’s to watch it on the big TV with Bill, Ingrid, Will, and The Gang. “I’d say they’re two years away from the Super Bowl,” Bill told me earlier today. “Enjoy that defense, Jack.” The Bulls’ next game is Monday against Allen Iverson and the 76ers, and hopefully they’ll be able to get off the schneid and get a winning streak going. It was the game against the Sixers in January that was their coming out party, the game that signaled to me that this team was On Their Way.

I’ve nearly run out of time on 2005, and I can hear Luke and Sven making toast upon toast to the champion White Sox. Soon we will be in a new year, and baseball’s winter meetings will heat up, and the Sox and Cubs will go out to Spring Training and get ready for the new season, one team as defending champs, the other in perpetual “wait and see” mode. The Bears are heading into the playoffs as the number two seed, meaning they will either lose another home playoff game or they will be in the NFC Championship, needing one more win to advance to Super Bowl XL. And as much as I’ve tried to keep it all in perspective and hope for the Great Season Story Arch, I can’t lie: I’m pumped for the playoffs, and for a legit shot at going to the Super Bowl. Why not? Why not go for it this year? Why not approach a painted brick wall, knowing full well that it’s not a real tunnel, and then bull rush it anyways Wile E. Coyote-style, just in case? Why not smash my heart and brains together, and fling myself fully into a shot at a title. It might be the only one I get…

…and now we are a minute away, so I will say goodbye to this year of 2005, a year that very well could go down as the Greatest Year in Chicago Sports History, or at the very least a damn fun time for all. My glass is filled, and Meghan and my friends and I will now make it six straight years that we’ve ended a year at Ric’s, six straight years that we’ve begun a new one here as well. What will 2006 bring?

RETURN TO readjack.com

[1] “Great?” Dad asks. He always does this.

“Fine,” I say, giving in. “Not great. But, well…no. It’s a great flick. It’s not a beautiful film, and it’s not a terrific movie, but it’s a great flick. It’s entertaining as hell.”

“So what makes it great?”

1. Powers Boothe as the villain. Wonderful. Not quite in Hans Gruber’s league, but closer than anyone else I can think of. Intelligent (blackballing the stadium’s chef by taking his wife hostage at their home, knowing that only the chef can get into the V.P.’s suite), kind of funny, kind of classy, not that mean to children…and, perhaps best of all, actually follows through on his threats, killing hostages when he says that he will kill them.

2. Van Damme as the hero. He’s a fireman (everybody loves firemen)…he’s a dedicated single parent…he’s very sincere…he has a European accent despite being named “Darren McCord”…and he’s crafty as hell. Along with the “bomb map,” he makes a homemade dart cannon that straps in through his sleeve. Wicked.

3. The plucky young daughter who goes eye-to-eye with Powers Boothe.

4. The feisty young son who listens to his father to a fault: “Don’t move,” says Dad, and the kid obeys, even as the stadium nearly explodes around him. (Oh, and by the way, the kid looks like the lost Lawrence brother. That’s always fun.)

5. The black guy who plays the “double-crossing good guy/bad guy” terrorist/cop movie stock character.

6. Sweet fight scenes.

7. Reminder that the Blackhawks went to the Stanley Cup Finals in the ’90s.

8. The Hawks getting to Game 7 against Pittsburgh in the movie instead of getting swept.

“All that.”

“Oh.”