Part III, May 29-June 4

Due to various forces, lunch did not happen yesterday, and as we do occasionally, Saturday C.J.’s was moved to Sunday. Sondra greets us and takes our order, and as luck would have it, all four straws work. Mom attempts to set up a parental alliance in some kind of ill-advised intimidation strategy, but Mike and I are not to be intimidated. We both do fake-outs, aiming at Dad before quickly shifting over at Mom and firing. Mom blocks mine and takes Mike’s in the shoulder. Too bad. Dad shoots me, bouncing it off the top of my hat as I duck down. Mom then aims at me, and promptly sails her straw over my head and into the table behind me, hitting an old women in the back. She does not notice.

“Hey there folks,” Art says, walking over. “How ‘bout that Derrek Lee, eh?”

“We need these pitchers to get going,” Art says, leaning in with his hands cupped on the table. “Then we’d really have something.”

Art is chewing on a toothpick, and he scoots it from one side of his mouth to the other. “I know. They’ve been hittin’ the ball, getting’ on base.” He laughs, and slaps his robust belly in a state-of-the-union kind of way. “I tell you what, Lee and Ramirez, that’s it right there. Those two guys…I mean, when have our corners been that strong?”

Dad sips his Green River. “Well, we had Grace, but almost nothing at third.” He thinks, and then: “Probably with Banks and Santo. That’s probably it.”

Art slaps his belly again with both hands. “Now those guys were ballplayers…”

We eat and talk, my eyes shifting around to the three TVs in the restaurant. Lots happening. The Cubs game is on, and it turns out to be a good one, with the Cubbies taking down Colorado 11-6 behind big bats from D-Lee (3-for-4, one run knocked in, one walk, 3 runs scored, with his average up to .366) and Aramis (3-for-5, one home run, two runs scored, four knocked in). Jeromy Burnitz gets into the action with his eighth homer of the year, and Todd Walker officially returns from injury with his first of the season. Excellent. The Cubs are now back up to .500 at 24-24, and more importantly, they seem to be finding an identity outside of “Power Pitching,” which is obviously on the shelf with the injuries to Wood, Prior, and Zambrano. The non-replacement of Sammy and Moises still isn’t good, but Burnitz has made friends with the right field fans, and Jason Dubois, though struggling, has shown some pop. And we still have Corey, who is now hitting .274, and if he could just figure out how to be a leadoff hitter, and if Lee can continue his rampage, and when Aramis gets his average up…and then when we get our pitching back…well, you can see why we’re always excited.

Meanwhile, along with the win, the Wrigley faithful were treated to Seventh Inning Stretch guest conductors Dee Brown, Luther Head, James Augustine, and Roger Powell Jr., with Coach Bruce Weber doing the in-booth interview. Even though Deron Williams wasn’t there—I’d assume that he missed due to NBA Draft preparations—it was great to see the guys up there, smiling and repping Illinois and their teammates. Last we saw them, they were a disappointed bunch…

I’m listening to the Score, where Rick Telander and Mike Mulligan are talking about women in sports. With the Katie Brownell story still in the news, Michelle Wie poised to go pro at some point in the next year, and the WNBA getting into its ninth season, women are playing more and more of a role in sports.

How do we feel about women in sports? And perhaps more to the point, how do we feel about women in men’s sports? As for the former, I don’t care. Female athletes have just as much a right to play the games they love as male athletes. That said, I have more difficulty getting into female sports. Or maybe it’s that the female sports that I enjoy are one’s without a strong male counterpart. Softball, for example. I love watching fast pitch softball. It’s such a cool, fast game, and so different from slow pitch clincher, and certainly different from hard ball. Gymnastics as well. The floor routines that some of these gymnasts do blow me away.

Basketball, on the other hand, no thanks. Many basketball fans laud female hoops for their focus on fundamentals, but a large part of what I love about basketball is the athleticism and the feel of improv. Sure, it’d be nice to have more fundamentals in the men’s game, but that doesn’t mean that I want to sit and watch UConn and Tennessee square off in a battle of two-handed set shots and bounce passes. Conversely, my love of the dunk does not mean that I want to see the women’s game subverted by the “insane thrill” of a one-handed fast break dunk with no defenders in sight. Candace Parker winning the 2004 McDonald’s All-America dunk contest with a jump-and-place dunk was a joke. It was certainly not a more impressive dunk than anything done by her male-counterparts—including LeBron and both Smiths, Josh and J.R.—yet because she was a female, she was given the prize. That doesn’t seem healthy for the women’s game, to gain success and publicity by doing something less impressive than men, but having it deemed more impressive due to gender. Silly.

And this is where we get into the sticky subject of women participating in men’s sports.

Since Ann Meyers became the first woman ever to sign a contract with an NBA team, the idea of women playing in men’s leagues has been a constant source of controversy. Heck, forget playing. When the NBA hired Violet Palmer and Dee Kantor in 1997 as the NBA’s first-ever female officials, many fans, critics, and NBA personnel questioned the hirings.

Well, I’ll tell you, because I tend to be one of those men. Not all the time, mind you. Manon Rhaeume suiting up in goal for the Tampa Bay Lightning never bothered me, and I think that is for two reasons:

1. Goalies are so ensconsed in the thicker goalie uniform, bigger stick, and enormous helmet, that you rarely know who is in goal. In other words, what you don’t know won’t hurt you. But that’s not really it. The real reason was…

2. Goalies are out of the action, to a degree, which means that the physical differences between the majority of men and the majority of women was not exploited.

So you wanna play goalie? Fine. Kicker? There’s another good one.[1] With direct-physical contact sports such as hockey or football, I feel like it would be difficult for women to participate at a high level. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve also yet to see a woman do it. But if they could, that would be fine. That’s all hypothetical, though. The point is that women participating in men’s sports when there is no female counterpart is fine.

No, what bothers me is when women wish to play against male competition despite the fact that there is a women’s league readily available. Take Annika Sorenstam, for example. Here is a supremely talented golfer, a woman who is far and away the finest female golfer in the world. She has taken on every challenge within the women’s tour, and so, in 2003, she became bored with female golf and decided to try her hand on the men’s tour. This is annoying. Would women like it if a male golfer decided that he would rather dominate the women’s tour than be middle-of-the-pack on the men’s? I don’t think so. Of course, no male athlete would ever consider subjecting himself to such lows…

It’s all in the intent. That’s where it breaks down for me, and I would assume it’s the same for most guys. Manon Rhaeume wanted to play professional hockey. That’s it. There was no professional women’s hockey league, so she joined the NHL. She was good enough to do so, and she did it. Sweet. Annika Sorenstam, on the other hand, had a different intent. Her purpose for joining the men’s tour, as far as I understand it, was to do so as a personal challenge as she felt that she had nothing more to prove on the women’s tour. The inherent suggestion there, of course, is that men are better athletes than women, but that’s for her to figure out, not me. No, I’m just bothered by women who aren’t willing to let men have places that are just their own.

Am I being foolish? Ignorant? Bigoted? Possibly, but I don’t think so. I realize that I am seemingly walking a very thin rope here, because my attitude towards Sorenstam seems to be close to falling into the realm of the ugly hate spewed at Katie Hnida, as well as the attacks on gays in sports. I realize that my sentiment could be read as being on my way towards those sentiments, but that’s only because this is a smudgy area that most people do not want to get into. My dislike of women wanting to participate in men’s sports simply to “prove themselves” has nothing to do with gender and certainly nothing to do with sexuality. After all, the Katie Hnida situation wasn’t about a woman in a man’s place; it was about sick, violent men who felt threatened by a woman doing what they were doing and took it out on her in one of the most disgusting, awful, ungodly ways possible. The quotes from the jackass Gary Barnett summed that mindset up perfectly. When asked about Hnida’s allegations and her subsequent release from the team, Barnett spouted out this gem: “Katie was not only a girl, she was terrible. OK? There's no other way to say it. She couldn't kick the ball through the uprights.” Barnett essentially blamed Hnida for being a girl, and then basically implied that it’s OK to rape someone if they’re not good at football.

As for gays in sports—or more specifically, gay men in team sports—that’s a whole different beast as well. Men who oppose gays in team sports are really just showing their own insecurities about their own man-ness. Gay men are men first and gay second, and to me, that puts them in the club. Singling out gay guys simply because they dig guys instead of chicks is dumb. In fact, it could be argued that people are just as much defined by how they approach sex as much as by who they go after. There are plenty of gay guys who are “players,” guys who approach sex in the stereotypical “straight” manner. And of course there are plenty of straight guys who are terrified of women. So where does that leave us?

The other big Item Of Concern that always comes up when discussing gay men in team sports is life in the locker room, as in: “How can I shower with a gay guy? He’ll be eyeing me with his gayness the whole time.” Brilliant. Does it ever enter their minds that this gay guy is, well, gay? Some gay guys will hit on straight guys, but why would they do it in the locker room, particularly with the current pervasive attitudes of straight male athletes towards their gay counterparts? And of course, were a gay athlete to hit on his straight teammate, what better way to prove your straightness and man-ness than by beating the crap out of a gay guy? If that doesn’t prove you’re straight, I don’t know what will.

No, men are men, gay or straight. And that’s what this is about: men and women. The division of the genders. Gender should not determine anything on the job, and it should not determine who gets to play sports and who doesn’t. The great thing about sports is that they are for everyone. But to me, there is value in having a place in life that is just for men. There are certainly places in life that are just for women. Just look at “Curves,” the nationally recognized all-female exercise joint. I have heard that some centers now allow men to join, but that’s on a center to center basis. I understand that some all-women places were created in response to the “no girls allowed” mentality, but spite and an anything-you-can-do mentality are not enough to sustain a business. There must be something that women find appealing about exercising with only women, and that mentality exists in men as well.

Men and women are different. There’s no denying that. And while that does not justify discrimination and certainly does not justify violence, I think that there is value in maintaining gender-specific areas in life. If women can have their places in life that are “just for women,” then why can’t we have some places that are just for men? Not everything needs to be about universal togetherness. Maintaining gender differences makes life more interesting. Let’s not dilute that for something as trivial as athletics.

June 1^st. This is where the baseball season begins to take shape. Though a team can make a run at a pennant late in the season, the first two months of games are plenty to get a sense of which teams may still be around on August 1^st.

We are now two games over .500, riding a five-game win streak, and sitting six and a half back from the perpetually-talented St. Louis Cardinals. Things look good…but I can’t yet see the driving forces to a World Series team. Wood, Prior, Zambrano, and Maddux—that’s supposed to be the driving force. That has not been the case as of yet; Prior began the season on the DL, and then after he came back Woody went down, and now Prior’s out again. Meanwhile, Derrek Lee has turned into a Triple Crown threat, as he continues to plug away. And yet…we still have no leadoff man, our corner outfield spots are questionable, and I can’t escape the sinking feeling that the ’04 collapse was a drawn-out version of the eighth inning of Game 6. Goo.

And so we turn to the other side of town, where the White Sox ended May as they began it: with the best record in the major leagues. Unlike the Cubs, the Sox present a clear vision of how they would, hypothetically, win a World Series. While we’ve been gleefully skating on the thin ice rink of Prior, Wood, and Zambrano, the Sox have suddenly built a very sturdy and effective rotation in Buehrle, Garland, Garcia, El Duque, and Contreras. Take a look at the two teams’ rotations (or in the Cubs’ case, the mish-mosh that they call a rotation):

There are three large stats that stand out above, and none is earned run average. The first is innings pitched, where the Sox have an early 24-inning advantage despite the Cubs’ numbers including six pitchers. The second is wins, where the Sox hold a 27-17 advantage. And the third is walks, with the Sox allowing 22 fewer free base runners than their crosstown rivals. Even with the Cubs playing a fun switcharoo with Rusch (bullpen first, now a starter) and Dempster (starter first, now the closer), they still cannot measure up to the Sox stellar group…and Jose Contreras has been a wash thus far. Imagine if he gets going…

Meanwhile, the Sox offense—the so-called “Ozzie Ball”—has been terrific. The Sox have been the opposite of the Cubs. Where the Cubs’ corner outfield changeover has been rather problematic, the Sox have seen their two newbies jump start the offense. The signing of Jermaine Dye to replace Mags has been good, despite J-Dye’s brutal April (.175, 3 HR, 8 RBI, 16 SO). Dye came through with a decent enough May, and seems to be settling into a groove. But the big move was the offseason left fielder trade which sent Carlos Lee to the Brewers in exchange for the speedy Scott Podsednik. The move has been significant for two reasons. One, it is a bold symbol of Kenny Williams’ commitment to speed rather than power. Two, it has provided the Sox with a tremendous leadoff hitter. After a slow yet productive April, Pods has taken off in May, hitting .304 with a .383 on-base percentage to go with 17 runs scored and 16 stolen bases in 23 attempts.

But perhaps the biggest surprise for the Sox—and the one of the largest reasons why the Cubs have struggled—has been the stellar play of new closer Dustin Hermanson, who has ripped the job away from Takatsu Shinjo with these mind-blowing numbers: 21 innings pitched, 11 of 11 on save opportunities, and, most notably, NO RUNS ALLOWED!!! Holy hell! Hermanson has been a revelation, the leader of Don Cooper’s terrific pen. Meanwhile, back on the North Side, Borowski is hurt, Hawk has flamed out and been shipped out, and Rusch and Dempster are playing starter-bullpen tag, the two being underwhelming at both spots. Perhaps the biggest excitement on the North Side has been the unveiling of nameless home jerseys. OK, maybe that’s not very exciting, but Ben has been enthused: “I like it. You buy a jersey, and it’s just a number, so you don’t have to worry. It’s good forever.”

A good point, and a useful one if the Cubs are unable to sustain success. Will we see new 34’s, 22’s, or 31’s in the near future? I sure hope not. But anything’s possible.

All that said, the Cubs could still get it going, and based upon the talent on this club, they should. Playoffs are still the realistic goal. But we do not have the stability or obvious blueprint for winning that the Sox have.

“I don’t know,” I say, dragging out the “o” sound in “know” like a child being asked why he knocked over his little brother’s tower of blocks. “I just am. It’s weird.”

She looks at me, and everything feels fine. “Baby,” she says, “breathe. It’s cool. We’re going to finish getting dressed, and then we’re going to get into your car, and then we’re going to drive over to Nevin’s and meet our parents for dinner. That’s it.”

So here’s the scoop: for the first time ever, Meg and I are getting our respective parental sets together for dinner. Needless to say, this makes me nervous. Why? Do I think that my parents will not get along with her parents? Absolutely not. All four are super nice people, and they’ve all met at various points already, just never in a formal setting, particularly not one in which the sole purpose of the meeting was to get them together. I guess it’s just one of those things that makes a fella like me noi-vuss.

When we get there, my parents and Bon and Don are already seated, carrying on like old friends…

…which they are at this point, since Meg and I are fifteen minutes late. Can’t be helped. We sit down, order, and get on with it. And you know what? It’s great. It’s very relaxing, and the fact that it’s relaxing is relaxing in itself. My folks and Meg’s folks are getting along great, and Meg’s keeping me loose, rubbing my hand every so often to comfort me, and then things turn to baseball, and Don and my dad start rapping old man, heading back to the Go-Go Sox and the ’69 Cubs, and my dad hears Don’s story about the conversion and Don hears my dad’s story about going to Cubs games while picking up the Jameson Journal.

“I’ll tell it,” I say. “This was when I was about,” I look at my mom for confirmation, “five?”

I proceed. “Alright. I’ll proceed. I was about four, and I was going to my first ever Cubs’ game. I had my little crappy-synthetic baseball glove, I had the black cheek bone paint that ballplayers use, and I had my first ever Cubs hat. So we’re standing on the El platform at Noyes, and all of a sudden this gust of wind whips up and my Cubs hat blows onto the tracks.”

“That sucks!” Meghan says. Then she thinks. “Why do all of your stories start with a sudden gust of wind?”

“Nothing. We went to the Cubs game, and I never got another Cubs hat. I figured it was a bad omen.”

“That’s been it.” I take a swig of my Guinness. “But Cubs fans are not determined by their hats.”

“And Sox fans are not determined by theirs,” Don says, reaching for his Sox hat.

“Yeah,” I jump in. “You should hear this freakish story. Cubs fan all his life, and then one day, that’s it. No more. Bizarre, ain’t it?”

“Come on, Jack.” My mom glares at me. “You don’t have much room to talk.”

The table drops. Bonnie looks at me curiously. Don is smiling. Meghan is shocked.

“What?” She asks incredulously. Don’t look at me. Just pretend nothing was said. I’m not here.

OK. That’s not fair. Baseball was always big. But the Bears, well, they were BIG. We watched the Bears every week. We went to the games. We sang the songs. Papa made his picks for his pool, and later, so did I. And while Chicago has never been a Bulls’ city, I grew up at a time when the Bulls were on their way to becoming the biggest show around, on the strength of having a player who already was the biggest show around. On top of that, there was always such a choppiness with the Cubs. Two playoff trips five years apart, and yet two entirely different teams, with only Sandberg and Sutcliffe (and Scott Sanderson, if you want to be generous) stemming the tide from the ’84 club to the ’89 club. Meanwhile, the Bears were at their absolute best and biggest, and the Bulls were climbing: between ’84 and ’89 they acquired all six starters[2] for the first Three-Peat, and promoted Phil Jackson to head coach.

So while baseball was always beloved, it was rarely the talk of the Silverstein household.

The Larmee household, on the other hand, was huge into baseball. They were Sox fans, however, and as my friendship with Luke grew stronger I spent more and more time at his house and I heard more and more Sox talk from Luke and his father Jay. And what a time it was on the South Side. The year after the Cubs were rocked by San Fran in the postseason, a 22-year-old named Frank Thomas made his South Side debut, joining young Sox Robin Ventura (rookie in ’89), Lance Johnson (’88) and Ozzie Guillen (Rookie of the Year in 1985). 1990 also featured breakout seasons for Black Jack McDowell (14-9, 3.82) and Bobby Thigpen (major league record 57 saves, 1.83 ERA, All-Star), along with the first season for Alex Fernandez. The 1990 White Sox won 94 games, leaving them nine games behind Oakland and out of the playoffs despite having the AL’s second-best record. The Sox finished eight games behind Minnesota in ’91 at 87-75, and then finished third in ’92 behind both Oakland and the Twins, clocking in at 86 wins.

Still, the Sox were moving up with All-Star performances from Guillen (1990 and 1991), Thigpen (1990), Pudge (1991), McDowell (1991 and 1992), and Ventura (1992). No All-Star appearances for Frank between ’90 and ’92, but he was plenty busy himself, finishing third in the MVP voting in ’91 while winning a Silver Slugger and finishing in the top ten in the AL in batting (.318, 9^th place), home runs (32, 5^th), RBI (109, 5^th), walks (138, 1^st), OBP (.453, 1^st), Slug (.553, 4^th), OPS (1.006, 1^st), and runs scored (104, 8^th). Yowza. By the spring of 1993, Luke and I were Best Friends, and the Sox were on the cusp of Something Big.

To this day, the ’93 Sox remain one of my favorite teams. Along with Frank, Rockin’ Robin, One Dog, Ozzie, Black Jack, and Fernandez, the Sox had added Rock Raines, Joey Cora, Roberto Hernandez, Wilson Alverez, and Bo Jackson in ’91. Ron Karkovice took Pudge Fisk’s starting catcher job in ’92, Gene Lamont took over the managerial reigns from Jeff Torborg in ’92, Jason Bere came along in ’93, and the Sox traded a young, cocky outfielder named Sammy Sosa to the Cubs for the veteran George Bell. The pieces, as they say, were in place.

The ’93 White Sox were exciting, much more exciting than anything happening on the North Side, and as the majority of Team Silverstein’s attention was focused on the Bears and the championship Bulls, the Larmees’ passion for Sox baseball combined with an incredible season pushed my baseball alliance to the other side. Frank made his first All-Star game in ’93, won his first MVP, Black Jack won the Cy, and the Sox took their division by eight games, capped off by Bo’s incredible home run to beat Seattle and win the division. I was hooked.

But the White Sox season ended at the hands of the defending champion Toronto Blue Jays, and as Joe Carter’s walk-off home run off of former Cub Mitch Williams cleared the fence and captured the ’93 Series, the Sox sulked at home. They came back strong in ’94, getting another MVP performance from Frank and adding a huge bat in Julio Franco (.319, 20/98 in 112 games), but that all ended on August 12^th when the players began the longest work stoppage in the history of professional sports.

Baseball returned in 1995 with a shortened season, with the Sox finishing under .500 for the first time since 1989 and the Cubs finishing above .500 for only the second time since 1989. Meanwhile, Northwestern began their Rose Bowl season in August, right around the same time that the Bulls aquired Dennis Rodman…and Michael Jordan began his first full season since 1992-93. In the summer of ’96, the Sox got back to respectability, the Cubs faultered, and Michael, Scottie, and Dennis won their first title as a trio. In ’97, Frank won a batting title, the Sox finished at .500, and the Cubs tanked out, losing 94 games to finish in last place.

But things changed soon after, as Sammy Sosa altered his brutal batting stance by dropping his hands and began popping Flintstones vitamins like nobody’s business.[3] By June 1^st, 1998, the Cubs were a game and a half behind Houston at 32-24, with Sosa and the rookie Kerry Wood supplying the buzz. By July 1^st, the Cubs were seven games behind the streaking Astros, yet right in the Wild Card hunt. More importantly, Sammy had just finished ripping off the greatest single-month home run barrage in the history, cranking 20 balls out of the park to push his season total to 33 before the All-Star break. The Great Home Run Race of 1998 had begun…

…and it was during the first three months of that magical season that I began to notice some changes in my attitudes. I was still very much a Sox fan, and yet my enthusiasm for this Cubs team was growing, and it was doing so in a way much different than I could have imagined. Rather than simply being amazed by what Sosa and the Cubs were doing, I found myself growing emotional over this team. Of course I said nothing; on the outside, I respected the Cubs for what they were doing, but I wouldn’t dream of jumping on the bandwagon. I co-hosted a sports radio show at New Trier, and even as my co-hosts berated me on the air for being a Sox fan while the Cubs were In The Midst, I said nothing. Of course, my parents had never approved of my being a Sox fan, particularly not my mother, who took it rather hard. But what is a parent to do? Rather than attacking me and pummeling me with Cubdom, Mom allowed me to grow and find my own way, and as the Cubs’ 1998 season revealed itself as Something Special, Mom kept an eye on me, waiting for me to crack.

My parents took me and MJ to Wrigley for the third game of a three-game interleague set between the Cubs and the Sox. The Cubs had taken Game 1 6-5 in 12 innings, and then won the Saturday game 7-6. Sosa was streaking; he went deep in each of the first two games, his 17^th and 18^th of the season, his fourth and fifth of June, his average up to .342. The third game of the series saw Jeremi Gonzalez squaring off against Mike Sirotka, with Sosa hitting another home run and the Cubs prevailing 13-7.

There I was, my birth team against my adopted team, the sun shining bright at Wrigley as we sat on the first base side, half way up, watching the game. The feeling of Cubbie love had been growing inside me for three months, and I was finding it more and more difficult to keep it down, and then that game…

Cynics and skeptics will tell you that I was a fair-weather guy in ’98, that my conversion took place when the Cubs were up and the Sox were down at a game at which the Cubs beat the Sox 13-7 to finish off a three-game sweep. They’ll tell you that I was faking, and frankly, if I took an objective viewpoint on my conversion, I’d come to the same conclusion. But I can promise you that on that day, something clicked in for me, and it had nothing to do with wins or home runs. It was The Love. The Love clicked in, and when it did there was no use pretending any longer. The Seventh Inning Stretch came around, and my mom eyed me as we sang, and then all of a sudden it just burst out of me like Joliet Jake in the Triple Rock Baptist Church: “So it’s root, root root for the CUBBIES!” and we finished the song, and I looked over at my mom and said, “Mom, I’m a Cubs fan,” and she smiled, and said, “I know.”

Naturally, I took some crap from my friends, particularly my co-hosts, who called me out as being fair-weather. Nothing you can do about that. It’s the price one pays. But I stayed true, and with the support of my family I was able to slowly show my friends and anyone else around that I was a true Cubs fan. A born-again, if you will.

“Wow,” Meghan said later when we got back to her place and I had told her the whole story. “I never would have guessed.”

“Yeah, well, I know where he’s coming from, even though his story is a ton stranger than mine.”

GO TO NEXT SECTION: June 8

RETURN TO readjack.com

[1] I suppose if a women was physically able to play a football position other than placekicker, then more power to her, but I’ve yet to see a woman who was physically able to do so.

[2] Pax started at the opposite MJ guard spot in ‘91and ’92, but lost his job to BJ in ’93.

[3] Nobody’s business. Not even Congress’.