born to upperclass educators, my mother turned her back on her debutante status, emptied her trust fund, and sent her fortune to africa to help build hospitals. she raised my sister and i on the paltry salary that she was given as one of Motorola’s first female computer programmers ever.

insistant that the love of money is the root of all evil, she refused to allow me to have a job until i reached college and then i could only work at minimum wage, therefore my childhood consisted of long hours studying the bible, volunteering, and eating many bags of doritos, her treat to me after getting my braces tightened.

all joking aside, my mom raised two kids alone while working long hours in a sexist racist society where she saw her peers get promotions despite she being the one who trained them. never one to hold a grudge, my mother would sometimes tell us about her trials and then sigh and tell us that if we ever succumed to the inequities of life and gave up that she would hunt us down and beat the hell out of us. she reminded us that our ancestors did not work hard so that we spoiled suburban brats could bitch about our menial issues.

she’s an excellent chef, a master baker, a hot rod and funny car enthusiast, and one of the most peculiar sports fans youve ever met, certain that her viewership of an important pro sports event can cause the loss of the team that shes rooting for.

because of that she watched most of the 1985 superbowl from around the corner in the kitchen listening to the cheers of those in the living room.

the secret reason why oprah became a hit in chicago back in the 70s, the main reason why michael jordan stayed a chicago bull for all those seasons, and the unnamed architect of the newly remodeled soldier field, my mom always has an easter basket waiting for me days before the holiest of days, and even left me a wad of cash atop my cell phone this morning before going to work as i head off to detroit on the next leg of my journey.

atop the folded bills, a note: please dont give this to the strippers.

after lunch yesterday we walked around the mall and when we returned to the place that i had parked the car i saw that my beater was missing. looking at my mother i saw that she could not contain her smile and she motioned us to go to the nearby Sam’s Club where she had somehow found a way to pay for four new tires on my ride without my knowledge.

the real reason why Lalapalooza is only held in Chicago nowadays, my mother is in my thoughts at all times which is why im often found with either a beer in my hand or the business end of a hooka between my fingers right before im about to do something that she would disprove of.

she has given me everything a son could ask for, she calls me every saturday at 1pm so that she wont wake me, she hates curse words therefore she skims most of this blog, and she often accidentally reveals national security secrets in our phone calls to which i say ma the president is listening quit telling him things that he isnt supposed to know till tomorrow.

a former ringleader of the black panther party, and reader of all things stephen king and harold robbins, my mother is better than yours, mostly because shes put up with me all these years without somehow growing even one gray hair. and now thanks to my sister she is the best grandmother of all who seems to have boundless energies as she sings nursery rhymes and teaches them how to march as they clean up their messes.

on her death bed she will explain how i was adopted, and i will say, i know, i know, but i will pretend that i deserve to be part of your family tree.

fluent in russian and german because she wanted to be a UN translator but instead ended up driving me to cub scouts, the runner up for miss georgia 1977, my mom celebrates nearly three decades on this planet today and im blessed to even know her.

i love you mom!

tony

mike royko was the greatest newspaper columnist ever. even he would probably agree.

he was a no-nonsense toughguy who took on the biggest toughguys in chicago, namely the mayor, the cops, ditka, and the owners of the cubs.

he first started writing for real at the Chicago Daily News writing obits. Quickly they moved him to covering politics and folk music as a columnist. When the Daily News went out of business he wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times.

As a Cubs fan I made a point out of not buying the Sun-Times, which was widely regarded as the Sox paper. But in my school they had both the Trib and the Sun-Times in the library and I snuck a peek at what Royko had to say from time to time. Ok, every day. And I wasnt alone. Many Cubs fans snuck glances at his super funny takes on Chicago politics and everyday life.

When Rupert Murdoch bought the Sun-Times Royko quit and moved over to the Tribune.

“No self-respecting fish would be wrapped in a Murdoch paper,” Royko said, and the fish pretty much agreed.

Remember the story of Valerie Plame, the CIA agent who was outted by Rove and newspaperman Robert Novak? Novak is a Sun-Times columnist and has been for years. When Novak dies, he’s got an ass-kicking or two coming to him and I would bet money that the Good Lord will let Royko near the front of the line.

But I digress.

in his 40 year career Mike Royko wrote over 7,000 columns. Right up to the end of his life when he suffered from a brain annyerism, he continued to be biting, critical, and funny. For example, when he made a list of his favorite Westerns someone asked him about his pick of The Magnificent Seven, asking him if he felt weird that one of his faves was actually a remake of a Japanese classic.

Royko replied, “if the Japanese producer had a choice, he would surely have made a western rather than a movie in which the heroes were stumpy, bowlegged guys who wore bathrobes and couldn’t speak English.”

Out of context some of that might appear racist in this PC world, but that sort of crude, street, common language, delivered in an intentionally ignorant manner was part of Royko’s charm. And trust me, he wasnt any easier on the… lets say… plump mayor of Chicago.

Or the cops. In fact late in his life Royko was arrested for drunk driving and resisiting arrest. In the police report the officers wrote down at least a half-dozen ways that Royko insulted them, many times questioning their heterosexuality.

Maybe its a Chicago thing, maybe its a big-city thing, but to me it’s classic.

As I’ve said several times here, there have been a few major influences in my life that are mirrored in this blog. Mike Royko’s hard-hitting tell-it-like-it-is style is all up in this piece. He was afraid of no-one no matter how big they were or how much clout they carried. And ultimately he was the champion for the common folk, and the Cub fans.

And for that he will be loved forever.

here is a column he wrote the day Jackie Robinson died.

Jackie’s Debut a Unique Day

All that Saturday, the wise men of the neighborhood, who sat in chairs on the sidewalk outside the tavern, had talked about what it would do to baseball.

I hung around and listened because baseball was about the most important thing in the world, and if anything was going to ruin it, I was worried.

Most of the things they said, I didn’t understand, although it all sounded terrible. But could one man bring such ruin?

They said he could and would. And the next day he was going to be in Wrigley Field for the first time, on the same diamond as Hack, Nicholson, Cavarretta, Schmitz, Pafko, and all my other idols.

I had to see Jackie Robinson, the man who was going to somehow wreck everything. So the next day, another kid and I started walking to the ballpark early.

We always walked to save the streetcar fare. It was five or six miles, but I felt about baseball the way Abe Lincoln felt about education.

Usually, we could get there just at noon, find a seat in the grandstand, and watch some batting practice. But not that Sunday, May 18, 1947.

By noon, Wrigley Field was almost filled. The crowd outside spilled off the sidewalk and into the streets. Scalpers were asking top dollar for box seats and getting it.

I had never seen anything like it. Not just the size, although it was a new record, more than 47,000. But this was twenty-five years ago, and in 1947 few blacks were seen in the Loop, much less up on the white North Side at a Cub game.

That day, they came by the thousands, pouring off the northbound Ls and out of their cars.

They didn’t wear baseball-game clothes. They had on church clothes and funeral clothes·suits, white shirts, ties, gleaming shoes, and straw hats. I’ve never seen so many straw hats.

As big as it was, the crowd was orderly. Almost unnaturally so. People didn’t jostle each other.

The whites tried to look as if nothing unusual was happening, while the blacks tried to look casual and dignified. So everybody looked slightly ill at ease.

For most, it was probably the first time they had been that close to each other in such great numbers.

We managed to get in, scramble up a ramp, and find a place to stand behind the last row of grandstand seats. Then they shut the gates. No place remained to stand.

Robinson came up in the first inning. I remember the sound. It wasn’t the shrill, teenage cry you now hear, or an excited gut roar. They applauded, long, rolling applause. A tall, middle-aged black man stood next to me, a smile of almost painful joy on his face, beating his palms together so hard they must have hurt.

When Robinson stepped into the batter’s box, it was as if someone had flicked a switch. The place went silent.

He swung at the first pitch and they erupted as if he had knocked it over the wall. But it was only a high foul that dropped into the box seats. I remember thinking it was strange that a foul could make that many people happy. When he struck out, the low moan was genuine.

I’ve forgotten most of the details of the game, other than that the Dodgers won and Robinson didn’t get a hit or do anything special, although he was cheered on every swing and every routine play.

But two things happened I’ll never forget. Robinson played first, and early in the game a Cub star hit a grounder and it was a close play.

Just before the Cub reached first, he swerved to his left. And as he got to the bag, he seemed to slam his foot down hard at Robinson’s foot.

It was obvious to everyone that he was trying to run into him or spike him. Robinson took the throw and got clear at the last instant.

I was shocked. That Cub, a hometown boy, was my biggest hero. It was not only an unheroic stunt, but it seemed a rude thing to do in front of people who would cheer for a foul ball. I didn’t understand why he had done it. It wasn’t at all big league.

I didn’t know that while the white fans were relatively polite, the Cubs and most other teams kept up a steady stream of racial abuse from the dugout. I thought that all they did down there was talk about how good Wheaties are.

Late in the game, Robinson was up again, and he hit another foul ball. This time it came into the stands low and fast, in our direction. Somebody in the seats grabbed for it, but it caromed off his hand and kept coming. There was a flurry of arms as the ball kept bouncing, and suddenly it was between me and my pal. We both grabbed. I had a baseball.

The two of us stood there examining it and chortling. A genuine major-league baseball that had actually been gripped and thrown by a Cub pitcher, hit by a Dodger batter. What a possession.

Then I heard the voice say: “Would you consider selling that?”

It was the black man who had applauded so fiercely.

I mumbled something. I didn’t want to sell it.

“I’ll give you ten dollars for it,” he said.

Ten dollars. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what ten dollars could buy because I’d never had that much money. But I knew that a lot of men in the neighborhood considered sixty dollars a week to be good pay.

I handed it to him, and he paid me with ten $1 bills.

When I left the ball park, with that much money in my pocket, I was sure that Jackie Robinson wasn’t bad for the game.

Since then, I’ve regretted a few times that I didn’t keep the ball. Or that I hadn’t given it to him free. I didn’t know, then, how hard he probably had to work for that ten dollars.

But Tuesday I was glad I had sold it to him. And if that man is still around, and has that baseball, I’m sure he thinks it was worth every cent.

rokyo collection donated to library – nothing from former mayor + some classic columns + a nice piece by salon on royko + royko on daley

Actually, I’m older than you. 38 to be exact. I know who my family was descended from on the South Side, and we were the bottom of the barrel, like the rest of our neighbors.

According to this wikipedia article, the Near North side is 69% white.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Nea…h_Side,_Chicago

Hell the median income of Wrigleyville is $53,811.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Lak…go#Wrigleyville

The median U.S. Income? $43,318.

Let’s face it, the Cubs have always been a rich man’s team, just as the South Side has been a poor man’s neighborhood and the Sox, a poor man’s team. When I was a kid, not far from where you grew up, the Cubs were the team loved by 90% of the populace. Sox, the also rans. The die-hards kept the flame alive.

If you mean to say that the Cubs had more fans while both teams sucked, that’s damn right. That’s what makes being a Sox fan so great–we stayed with the team despite its unpopularity. The bandwagon Cubs fans stayed with theirs.

Dan l, shut the fuck up. I live in Washington, D.C. now, am I not a “real” Sox fan? Who the fuck appointed you king, asshole. What a dumbfuck.

Rob,

Ignore Dan. his theory is unless you were born in the city and stayed in the city you have no right to root for anyone except the sox or else youre fake, a bandwagoner, a rich white yuppie, or the taliban. he also believes the world is still flat, that brownie did a heck of a job, and cock tastes better fresh from the ass of a third man preferably a sleeping teen. he gets no hits on his blog and his attitude is just as repulsive as frat boys drinking Bud Light with their caps on backwards at my beloved Wrigley. for the sake of this discussion, i will throw out his type of sox fan, if you also admonish the above type of cub fan, which i think we both agree dilute the scientific nature of our discussion.

as for median incomes, etc. i have never argued that the north side hasn’t been far more affluent than the south side – thats obvious. nor am i arguing that the Cubs had more fans than the Sox did when they both sucked, because i think that’s obvious too but i dont think that the affluence of the neighborhood means that the teams belong to those tax brackets.

what i am saying is your bandwagon theory is faulty because, to me, a bandwagon is a phenomenom that happens when a team is winning and fence-sitters and quasi-fans suddenly love the team and become fans for a short period of time when the team is hot.

the cubs have never been hot (or good) for more than a year or a year and a half. therefore there hasn’t been a bandwagon for years. its not that bandwagons didnt exist, they certainly did with the bulls with mj and with the bears during the super bowl shuffel. it was then that people who never went to the old chicago stadium or the unforgiving benches of soldier field suddenly donned jerseys and packed the stands.

i once went to a pre-mj bulls game at chicago stadium where the bulls faced the boston celtics with larry bird, and the san diego chicken was there, and still the bulls couldnt sell out for a sunday afternoon game. six years later you couldnt see the bulls if you tried and everyone was suddenly an expert on all things bulls. thats a bandwagon in my mind.

the reason i think the cubs have had more fans over the last 50 years than the Sox is two-fold.

the first is how i became a Cub fan: wgn. now, at 113, approaching 114 years old, i am indeed older than you, but perhaps a 38 yr old like yourself remembers the wgn lineup in the early 70s during your formative years.

you woke up with Ray Rayner at 8am or maybe Garfield Goose at 7am if you were an early riser, and then watched Ray. when noon rolled around you had Bozo which somehow kids watched despite having to be in school and despite tivo being nowhere to be seen. then the Cubs would be on, for free, at 1:00p with the Lead-off Man and the game would begin at 1:20p. meaning that if you were a kid your dial would be locked in to wgn from 8am to 3pm. for most of the spring, all of the summer, and part of the fall.

decades of that schedule created a familiarity with the Cubs via WGN that carried through the 80s.

now in the mid 80s the second reason why there are now more cubs fans who are loyal and real appeared, the greatest ambassador to baseball ever came to Wrigley with an act that he started on the South Side that was good down there but better on the North Side because everything is better in natural sunlight with a backdrop of ivy: mr. harry caray. it also didnt hurt that the Cubs had a great team in 84 and 89 led by a soft spoken second basemen who was adored by women and respected by men: hall of famer ryne sandberg.

harry + ryno + wgn over the period of years and years added later with sammy sosa’s 500 homers and kisses to his momma via that dugout camera in the 90s created a momentum and a tradition that established not bandwagoners, but serious fans who learned to enjoy baseball for baseball because harry showed us what love was.

the same amount of fans could have turned into Sox fans if the Sox had had the same relationship with one station (instead of jumping around from 44 to SportsChannel to WGN and now a weird mix of WGN and CLTV). But as my buddy Bobby D says, when they pissed off Harry by trying to charge extra through the failed pay-per-view scamola in the 80s, it was over for them in Chicago. not because Hawk Harrelson isnt/wasnt good – he was great – but because nobody could touch Harry at Wrigley on WGN for free. and it also didnt hurt that ex-sox owner Bill Veeck was also in the bleachers with his beer and shirt off and wooden leg exposed – validation that there was only one true place to watch baseball in chicago.

not only did it sway the fencesitters in the city, and the young kids in the suburbs, but also millions of orphaned baseball fans across the country who had no team to root for, particularily fans in states and cities that had no mlb team at the time. cities like phoenix, and denver, and miami who got wgn via cable, and grew up with the team and flocked to wrigley when either they moved here as adults or visited the second largest city in the nation.

but as Chicago’s suburbs boomed in the 70s, my belief is, so did the real fanbase of the Cubs in Chicagoland because those kids who were brought up on the Rayner > Bozo > Brickhouse (and later Caray) diet drove or took the train into the city as often as they could and experienced the greatest ballpark in the world and were instantly made lifelong fans.

Part of that was because of Harry’s 7th Inning Stretch which was an inclusion of the fans who were there in the park, which, like i said, got started in Sox Park, but made into a national phenomenon when he brought the act to clark & addison and it got beamed through the superstation.

Bozo taught us that every circus needs a ringmaster, and Harry was that star, and when the Cubs get the long parade of guest conductors for the stretch his legacy continues in a way that continues the great tradition at Wrigley.

added with the mess that the new Sox park is, the corporate whoring of the name, the lack of charm, and the team’s inability to market itself against the behemoth that is the wgn + cubs one-two punch, it is not surprising to me that there will be many more days to come where a cubs team in last place on a friday at 1:20p can draw just as many fans as a sox game 4 games out of the wild card on a warm monday night. it has nothing to do with median incomes, it has to do with how one was raised.

i will be in DC in two weeks, we should drink!

tony

writes in to say:

Tony, Tony, Tony. For all of your insistence that the Sox fans are haters, I see 1600 and 44 words up here saying how much the Sox suck.

The first step is admitting that you are jealous of our success. You’ll feel much better then.

The Sox and their fans are the real underdogs, even if they did win. When everybody in town was on the Cubs bandwagon, all day long, we were the real die-hards, the ones that stuck with our team while it was cool to love the Cubs.

Funny how for Cubs fans being on the bandwagon makes you the underdog. Where I was from, not far from Hanover Park (insert Anthony voice here, all Dahl fans), it was so easy to be a Cub fan because everyone else was. It was hard to be a Sox fan because you were the outcast, the loser.

Nope. We are the ones who have been long suffering and its our suffering that made our World Series title so tasty.

The Cubs have always been the rich man’s team in Chicago and the great unwashed on the South Side (where my gene pool originates), loved the Sox. Basically Irish drunks and African Americans from the projects, not the rich Northsiders, were the Sox fans. The rich ones up North were the Cubbie fans. Yes, we are your janitors and trashmen and all of that. Apparently you think there is something wrong with that. That’s fine. You’re entitled to look down on whomever you want.

Rob, Did you miss the comments from one of your fellow Sox fans that started all this nonsense? To summarize, it was boring and pretty much taken care of. Your bro wanted some attention and it was given to him. Even during the World Series i had no problem ignoring the Sox, as you remember. Trust me when I say I have no jealousy to any AL team, particularily the Sox.

As for your comments… clearly im much older than you. for when i was in high school there was no such thing as a “rich man’s team” in Chicago – for any sport as they all sucked – and there definately was no such thing as a Cubs bandwagon. and if there was any bandwagon in the 70s to mid 80s it arrived first on the south side for the Sox who made it into the playoffs in 83 with the Winnin Ugly fisk-baines-luzinski team.

at that time our school was evenly split between cubs and sox fans and the kids who switched allegiances over to the Sox were rightly pummeled by both real Sox and Cub fans. and, again, these were the days when bleacher seats for either team only cost a few dollars.

if there was a cubs bandwagon it happened after i had moved away, and the question you should ask yourself is why more joined the 84 Cubs playoff run than jumped on with the Sox a year earlier? and why would they stay after the heartbreak that was the 84 playoff series against the Padres that lead to four sub .500 seasons in a row before they made it to the playoffs again in ’89?

Since the 80s the cubs have only six seasons where they were above .500 and only two seasons where they placed first or second, meaning in the last 16 years those who have jumped on this imaginary bandwagon of yours have only been rewarded twice. thats not exactly why people join bandwagons.

meanwhile your claim that the Sox fans are the real die-hards is also as ridiculous. remember that Cubs game that i went to last Friday afternoon? at the time the Cubs were more than 30 games below .500 and they still drew over 37,000 fans.

meanwhile your Sox, who last night were still in the playoff chase (albeit it, not a great chance, but still in it) played a night game and only drew just 39,427

you’re telling me that the defending champs, during a pennant race, playing on a 68 degree night, with the wind blowing out, against a first place Detroit team (who should be responsible for at least a few thousand transplant fans) can only barely attract 2k more fans than a Cub team fielded by players who are not named Wood, Prior, or Maddux?

what sort of bandwagon is it when a team is in dead last place and the fans still nearly sell out the game? thats not a bandwagon, that’s called loyal fans.

not selling out during a pennant race against the first place team in your division, at night is an embarrassment, and nothing for Cub fans to be jealous of.

perhaps the attendees of Wrigley have increased in affluence over the years, but they were not the lovable Bleacher Bums who were portrayed in the famous play, or the hapless losers painted in the Rockwell classic.

the Cubs have always been the team for the average man. for the exception of the last few years they were the ones who televised nearly every game on free, local, non-cable tv. which attracted the likes of Harry Caray away from the south side who said that he didn’t want to work for a team that would charge the working man extra to see his team on tv.

and when talking about african-american fans, the north side had plenty to root for: Buck O’Neil was MLB’s first black coach, Ernie Banks was the first black to win back to back MVPs, Hall of Famer Billy Williams played at Wrigley from 59-74, the torch was passed to Bill Madlock who won back to back batting titles in 75 and 76, which is to say nothing of Fergie Jenkins who had six consecutive 20 game win seasons from 67-72.

just because the south side had more african americans living closer to Comiskey didnt mean that the north side didnt have blacks worth rooting for. indeed, with all due respect to larry doby, bobby bonds, and harold baines, the cubs had better ones. which again prompts me to say, we had nothing to be jealous of. nothing.

yesterday my buddies took me to the bears home opener.
they totally crushed the hapless lions of detroit.
we got drunk, tailgated, met hot babes, and even saw a fight.
totally perfect day and night shared with a stadium full of fans
who wore their colors, talked to everyone around them and demanded
that the bears give up no fucking points. they settled for seven.
bears are now 2-0 and clearly the team to beat in the nfc.
lots more pics here.

not that there really is a problem, its just nice to start posts with declarative answers.

the problem is that i havent written anything first thing in the morning on this shit. the problem is i started taking no for an answer on this trip. the problem is that this isnt sixteenth century hanover where people dueled for a living until the black man showed up and made swiss cheese outta people so they went to guns cuz the brotha was deadly with the sword.

the problem is the pen is mightier than the sword but the bullet is mighter than the pen and the edjumacated lawyer is mightier than the bullet.

the problem is the press cares what the public thinks about them which is why the public only reads the paper for on average 2 minutes a day, aka when theyre taking a crap. the problem is the public only listens to the president on average of 20 seconds a day and not-to-secretly thinks hes full of crap.

the problem is the people really dont think that they can do much better.

the problem is that the best people seriously care what others think and the worst people couldnt give a shit what people think and the inbetween people get squooshed by the worst people and the best people pity not love them. the problem is the republicans arent the worst people but the leadership of the GOP are the worst people because they lie not about huge things like wmds or tapping our phone lines but about sexist things like hillary clinton will make the terrorists think that they can just fly planes into buildings even though they did that with rich white men on duty.

the problem is that we dont have an ammendment that says the people can impeach the president at any time. the problem is that we dont have an ammendment that says the people can impeach the congress at any time. the problem is that theres not an ammedment that says one day a year the congress has to appear on local tv for eight hours straight, ok fine they get an hour lunch break, to take non stop questions from the public, followed by a state-sponsored vote of confidence or no-confidence and if they fuck up there gets to be a new election two months later.

the problem is that people are having too many kids and kids distract you worse than hos do worse than jobs do worse than sports do worse than driving while cell phoning does.

the problem is that this bears game starts in two hours and my buddies have been tailgating since freaking 8am and i still havent taken a shower yet and its sunny out but the weatherman says its gonna start hailing during the 4th quarter. so the problem is what to wear cuz if you bring a jacket and a hat capable of protecting you during the hail and it turns out to be sunny and 75 degrees then youre all tied up with bullshit but if you play it cool and then it starts hailing then everyones all look at that idiot with shorts and a busblog tshirt on.

therefore the answer is to shave the hair off your chest and paint a big 34 on your body so that if the hail comes you just drink a shit ton of beers, take your shirt off and smile pretty for the camera and die of exposure.

because the answer has always been if youve gotta die somewhere it should be at wrigley field or if that fails soldier field with your fingers smelling of a girl from lake forest who didnt even know you existed yesterday.

sox still suck. youd think after waiting close to 100 years to win their world series, sox fans would be satisfied with going back to their lives as plumbers and garbage men and bottle collectors and street cleaners, but apparently some of them have decided that this is the time to rub it in that their cross-town rivals were snake bitten by injury. class act all the way which is why michael barrett is so beloved on the north side for bashing the sox catcher in the jaw for being the bitch that he is.

the other day some loser sox fan googled “sox suck” or some shit and found the world famous busblog and took offense at the obvious and tried to pick me apart for growing up in the suburbs and for being a loyal cub fan. i suppose when you live in the worst part of town and root for one of the most disrespected teams ever youve got nothing else to do other than start virtual arguements about zip codes and which colors you fly.

i saw his post on his blog and ignored it because that sort of shit bores me, but when he commented on this holy blog i had to reply and then he replied and because i have to wake up early tomorrow to tailgate and then enjoy the bears regular season home opener, i figured id post our dialogue so that you’ll see that decades after moving away from Chicagoland aint nothing changed other than Comiskey being uglier.

the gentleman first quoted this line from my post about driving halfway across the country and being greeted for the first time with toll roads, of which i wrote: fuck richard daley jr. fuck the white sox. and fuck tolls.

to which he commented: Who asked you?

which i then said:

from the look of things, dan, thousands more a day than ask you.

poor sox fans, always jealous, always ignorant, always pissed off at something.

hell if i rooted for a team who played in the crappiest park, who had the dumbest fans, and the lousiest tradition in baseball i guess id be constantly bitter too.

and then he wrote:

Bitter about what? Having a World Series and a future? The Cubbys and their group and their North Side transplant fans will always be second best in this town.

And what would you know about Comiskey? You’ve never been there. You couldn’t find the place if you tried. Try again, sparky.

unfortunately for the hapless fellow i had been to Comiskey, plenty of times. the old Comiskey, back when it was dubbed Chicago’s Largest Saloon because it served hard alcohol and attracted… people interested in going to the city’s largest saloon. i was just a grade-schooler at the time, but those memories never left me and solidified my allegiance to the Cubs. not because i didnt enjoy drinking, i just didnt enjoy being around people who couldnt drink and thought that the designated hitter was something worth paying money to see.

so i replied

if you actually read the posts that i wrote here before you opened your big yap youd see that i live in LA and i am traveling around the country and i have made my way back home to the town that i grew up in, a place i left 20+ years ago.

with that said, you are the epitome of sox fans: delusional, bitter, and jealous that the Cubs are loved by people all around the world and the Cubs fans are loyal and clearly the #1 team in Chicago.

as for your obsession with finding places in chicago without a map. what are you a cab driver?

anyways its always been easy to find Comiskey without a map: roll down your window and follow the scent of shit and vomit. as you get closer you’ll notice the undeniable aroma of spread open ass and there you’ll find Sox park.

nose bloodied, but sack emptied thanks to his sister, he rolled off her and asked:

Isn’t that everybody’s story? Is your hometown even chicago? Or some burb? Come on now—be honest.

[in reply of the Cubs’ world-wide and city-wide status of being Chicago’s #1 team:] Hardly. Just as in the days of Lee Elia, cubs fans are almost entirely full of shit. They actually thought Mark Prior was a good pitcher and that Kerry Woods was the Messiah. And now they sit, firmly in last place while the White Sox (which coincidentally, have real fans that are really from Chicago) are enjoying some relative success this year. Not quite the ya know….World Series from last year. But better have won one in ’05 then…wait…when was the last Cubs series?

[in reply of how to get to US Cellular Field aka Comiskey Park:] Like I said brother. You definitely wouldn’t come South of Madison to say that. Posers like you try it once in a while, and end up getting their asses whupped.

Ignoring the fact that he doesnt know that Kerry Wood doesn’t put an S at the end of his name i ended the discussion thusly:

Ass whupped? like the one Michael Barrett delivered to your guy?

Look, i didnt come into your blog and start talking shit, you came to mine with all your bullshit about “omg i live in THE CITY i am therefore cooler than you and i root for a team that took 95 years to win a pennant while your team is taking about 100, therefore my team despite its criminally insane history is better than yours who are beloved.”

i realize that these are the days of Sox fans pounding their chests and believing that their cocks are bigger than Cub fans’ but the difference is Sox fans are just cocks.

Why on Earth would i be ashamed of going to school in Hanover Park, IL 60103 from K-12? did i have any choice in the matter? would i have rather grown up on the South Side? you’re the faker if you’d say yes to that.

but i did have a choice of which team i pulled for and from day one i was a Cub fan and those were the days when they spent more time below .500 than above it, and i took shit from loser sox fans then as well as loser Lee Elia. when he said that, me and my buddies ditched school, got $5 bleacher seats and let him know the idiocy of a manager taking out his frustrations on the fans.

so you can have your pathetic stadium that nobody talks about, you can have your projectile vomiting fans that no one except gang members and rednecks want to associate themselves with, and you can have your Black Sox and midgets and shorts and bowl haircuts in centerfield.

theres a reason theres a shower in Comiskey you know, its because i was dead right about how to find the way to your beloved park, its because the best way to find sox park is to roll down the windows and follow the stench or simply drive south and look for the horseflies.

as for going south of madison to talk shit about the sox, same would happen to you if you came up to clark and addison,

only difference is you’d simply get your ass beat outside the cubby bear, while if i went down to your neck of the woods, i would first get offered crack from your uncle-father or suckysucky from your momma. so i suppose in that sense the south side rulez.

yay you.

and now you know why i left the day after highschool and rarely return. because most days here are like the day after highschool.

either way, enjoy the pics i took of Wrigley Field on a Friday afternoon as real fans enjoy their team despite that team being 30 games below .500 – an image you see nowhere in the major leagues during the last weeks of the regular season, particulary if the team is on free local tv, and especially during a year when their three best players were hurt for a huge chunk of the season and their best pitcher was recently traded away.

what sox fans hate about cub fans isnt just that wrigley is a gem among gems, nor that harry carey jumped ship and had his best years on the north side, or that Sammy Sosa didnt produce shit while a southsider and then hit 500+ homers for the cubs,

the white sox fans hate cub fans because the white sox will always be in the shadow of the cubs whether the cubs win or lose, not because babe ruth called his shot at wrigley or because of the famous scoreboard at wrigley, or the ivy, or the neighborhood, or the billy goat, or the organ, or day games, or the tradition of throwing the ball back, or the lack of drunken imbeciles doing the fucking wave,

its because there are no finer sports fans in the entire world better than cub fans. no one has taken more shit, been dealt a worse hand, or put up with more rotten luck than us and we only become more loyal and attract more well-wishers. meanwhile the only people who root against us are our jealous neighbors to the south, and our inbred rivals in st. louis.

theres a reason why after bill veeck sold the sox he returned to the bleachers of wrigley and took off his shirt and drank beer with his wooden leg. because rich and poor, black or white, anyone who truly loves sports knows that theres only one place to watch baseball in chicago: 1060 w. addison.

you can come home again, but be prepared to remember why you bailed.

more interviews with these fellas on LAist

chicago. the guy who said you cant go home again clearly didnt have google maps. hi, im in my mommas house. its 455am and i hafta wake up in a few hours to go to wrigley field.

i shouldnt have accepted the generous offer from one of my busblog readers to meet him at the park and hang out with him in the bleachers because i havent had a good night’s sleep in weeks, but how often do i get to go to the greatest park in the world to see my favorite team? decades maybe? yes, decades.

and i have nothing planned for saturday and i begged my mom to let me sleep in then so she will allow it. however you know a phone will ring or a vaccuum will get turned on or neices or nephews will arrive or the planet will explode which is probably why my body forced me to pull over this evening in wisconsin as the sun set to grab 4 winks and instead gave me 14.

yes all these instances where i entered a rest stop to actually rest only afforded me 4-5 minutes of actual shut eye, but today for some reason when i was hoping for only 10 minutes of z’s it turned into 150 minutes of zzzzzzzzzzzz’s, totally fucking up my travel plans and making me arrive in the windy at 1am. thus here we are 4 hours later, ive finished my work for most of tomorrow’s LAist and leaving the best for last here i am writing tomorrows blog post tonight. or something.

hi america.

i got a very sweet phone call from an x as i drove through madison tonight. i told her that i had not been kissed during this entire journey so far and she said you forgot to pack your mojo, i picked up your mail this morning and i saw it on top of your cd wallet and your pumas. she told me she’d fed ex it tomorrow which is killer cuz i wondered wtf was happening.

this morning i woke up early and took a looong shower and packed up and went over to the mall of america where i interviewed some people and wasnt all that impressed by the largest mall in the world. for some reason i was expecting more. still i bought some cool toys which i will send to africa to impress the kids over there and then i went to chipotle and worked for about two hours and hit the road.

minnesota truly does have all those lakes and they seem to end as soon as you cross the border into wisconsin. i seriously saw a 10 foot cow in the dairy state as well as some buffalos. the rains have made everything super green and the sun made everything so pretty. i bought a bunch of cheese for my friends back in LA but the lady said are you crazy you cant mail that shit. and so i guess i will have to eat it all.

getting into IL i was greeted with the first toll roads on the journey. when i lived in frisco i didnt mind paying $4 or $3 for the bridges because you could always see people on the bridges painting them and whatnot but $1.60 for two miles of roadway? i didnt understand that concept. here i had driven 3,000 miles for free, why was this ugly stretch of illinois highway costing me anything? and then two miles later they asked for another buck, and then as i exited off the 59 they asked for fourty cents.

fuck richard daley jr. fuck the white sox. and fuck tolls.

somehow i made it to the town next to the town where i grew up and i had no idea where i was. i called my mommy and i said omg Streamwood Lanes! the bowling alley where i learned my secret skill. it looked so modern. there i knew where i was. i turned down lake street past the little league where i learned my not so secret skills and soon i was home. it was warm, my mom was waiting on the porch, the dogs were barking when i pulled up into the driveway and the neighbors turned on their lights to see what the commotion was but i was so tired i pulled out my .38 and shot one of their porch lights out and you could hear the kids whisper so thats him.

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