Several months ago, there was a lot of discussion among African-American groups that everyone, whites and blacks, should stop the use of the word “n#$$@r.” The historic putdown was considered too offensive, even for blacks to use. Even comedians like Paul Mooney eventually agreed to stop using the word.
Why do I bring this up? Because, perhaps there are some people deserving of the word. Who you ask? I have at least one candidate.
Over the past several months, the Chicago newspapers have been reporting on their front pages about the number of Chicago Public School kids who have been murdered. In the last school year, the number was around 40, and the great majority of the kids were innocent bystanders who just happened to be around when someone started shooting. Which brings me to my candidate; Sunday night, Jasmine Wilcox and her cousin, 17-year-old Kiyanna Salter were returning home from caring for a sick aunt on the Number 71 71st-South Shore bus when two men bumped each other on the hand. An argument ensued (perhaps touching hands was too “gay”), and both of these mental midgets pulled guns before the apparently younger man started to get off the bus. Obviously, this affront required potentially lethal retribution.
Ms. Salter reportedly chastised the remaining man, saying he was “crazy” for flashing a weapon, her cousin said. Maybe she shouldn’t have said anything, because when the younger man got off the bus near Cottage Grove and the doors began to close, he fired several shots into the bus and fled.
Of course, only one person got hit, Ms. Salter who died almost immediately. The age old cycle begins again. The police are using video and photographs taken from a surveillance camera on the bus to catch the shooter: a young black man with braided hair, wearing a hooded jacket with an orange zipper and “9”s in blue and white on it, blue jeans and tan boots. Inevitably, this man is going to go to jail for the shooting and he should and will get some ridiculous sentence so that, hopefully, he never gets out of jail. And the community activists will stage a march; and the preachers will preach in the pulpits and there’ll be candlelight vigils and then everyone will go back to their lives until the next young innocent bystander dies in a hail of gunfire.
So, what do we do with these “n#$$2rs?” Jail is no longer a deterrent; most come out better criminals than when they went it. The death penalty doesn’t work as a deterrent, and besides, I don’t feel comfortable having the state execute people in my name. Should the people in the low income communities take arms and begin a bloody war against those who are doing the killing? That serves nothing, although I believe that a good first step is for people in these neighborhoods (and I lived in the Englewood area of Chicago most of my life) should begin by not fooling themselves – they know who the bad people are and where they live. They risk their lives in turning them in; but if the mothers and grandmothers told these “men” that they weren’t welcome living with them, there would be one less level of “support” and “cover” for their activities. Maybe that’s a start?
I believe that as economic times get tougher, violence increases. Lives are worth even less when there’s not much money around, but even that’s no excuse. Why couldn’t these two men move on from their accidental touching and go about their business? Why did the man have to “get the last word” by firing into the bus? Maybe the last resort is something like “Escape From New York;” round all of the worst up, wall off a section of the country and throw them in there. That way, they can do whatever they please and at least, there won’t be any “innocent bystanders.”

Hubris: Overbearing pride or presumption; arrogance
-American Heritage Dictionary

I believe that the reason sports teams are “hated” is their fans. Drunken, bellicose fans are bad; but condescending fans who expect to win are even worse.
When teams do win repeatedly, we can hate their fans and by extension, the team. For decades, the Yankees have been hated and this year, many people I know have enjoyed a Yankee-less American League Playoff. By the same token, two World Series titles in four years after an 88-year championship draught have made the Boston “Red Sox” nation among the most hated in the game. The Red Sox went from “lovable losers” suffering the “Curse of the Bambino,” to today’s big money, expect to be at the top of the AL East bullies.
Even worse, however, are teams that have been bad for years, and their fans show monumental hubris expecting their team to win; that this time, the karmic wheel has turned and its their turn. Which of course, brings me to the 2008 Chicago Cubs. After 99 years of non-championship baseball, the Cubs won 97 games, the best in the National League, and all of the Cub fans expected victory. Despite some sportswriters in town warning that the Los Angeles Dodgers, the AL Western Division champions posed a serious challenge; to many of the faithful, the Dodgers were just a speed bump on the inevitable World Series drive. Unfortunately, Joe Torre, wily old manager and Manny Ramirez, left fielder acquired from the aforementioned Red Sox, had other ideas.
The Dodgers brought the pitching to town, shutting down the Cubs’ number one lineup in runs scored, shutting down Alfonso Soriano, Derrick Lee, Aramis Ramirez and the rest of the lineup to six runs in three games, while the vaunted Cub pitching staff gave up 20 runs over the same stretch. So, once again, Cub fans’ hearts are broken; the streak of 100 years without a championship remains unbroken.
Changing sports, hubris is one of the major reasons that people (including myself) hate Notre Dame. They’ve won a couple of games against Big Ten opponents having bad years (Purdue and Michigan) and beat Stanford, and you can already hear the Domers clamoring for a berth in the BCS title game. But they’re not that good; they barely defeated San Diego State in week 1, and still have ranked North Carolina, Pitt and USC to play along with the annual pushovers Navy (who is much better than in years past), Syracuse, Boston College, and this year’s version of the Ty Willingham bowl at Washington.
The reason that I bring up the Domers is that my alma mater, Northwestern, is ranked number 22 this week on the USA Today Coaches’ Poll, despite having a bye week this past weekend. If there is one team that should never be overconfident or reading their press clippings, it’s NU. The Wildcats face Michigan State this weekend at home, with their Heisman Trophy candidate, running back Javon Ringer. (It should be noted that MSU have the most obnoxious fans in all of the Big Ten. Michigan fans are obnoxious, and so are Ohio State’s, but for some reason, probably inferiority complex with the Maize-and-Blue, they come up to Evanston every other year, and my friends always come close to fights with these assholes. Strange.)
So, it’s very nice that the Cats are ranked, but they still have all but one of their Big Ten schedule before them including Michigan and Ohio State. As I wrote here last week, I like this year’s NU team because they play good defense. They’ll need to against Michigan State. If I were Coach Pat Fitzgerald, anyone caught mentioning being ranked, or reading the paper would be punished with extra pushups or laps. NU should never be overconfident.

Let me come out and cut to the chase right away: with the exception of college fight songs, all songs supporting a team, especially professional teams, should be eliminated. I have never heard a good song related to a professional team. My current most hated “hit” is “Go Cubs Go,” a throwaway song written by the late Chicagoan folkie Steve Goodman. It went unplayed for years until it was found during last year’s stretch drive and the playoffs. This song is so insipid, it makes “Muskrat Love” sound like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
Just so you don’t think there’s bias in my hatred for the Cub song, the song from the Go Go Sox from 1959 that they played during the 2005 championship season sucks. Unlike ”The Twist” and other songs that have stood the test of time from 1959, the White Sox song has aged poorly, was never particularly memorable, and is hard to sing (if you wanted to). Making things worse, I can’t understand why teams choose popular songs that suck. It’s bad enough that the White Sox had the old 1959 song around, but of all the songs they could have used as their motto, they incorporated Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing,” a song that was bad even when it was new, back in the 1970s.
The Washington Redskins have this little ditty, that they play at home games. It sucks. The Packers have this music that leads to a cheer. It sucks too. The San Diego ”S-S-Super-Chargers song from a long time ago – terrible.
For some reason, college fight songs seem to be exempt from this rule. Maybe it’s because they all sound alike, especially when performed by marching bands. Maybe it’s because they’re all marches. But college football fight songs are OK.
As I was writing this, I had a flash of inspiration: maybe the reason is that all of the songs that don’t suck are all over 30 years old. Examples of old fight songs that don’t suck: “Bear Down Chicago Bears,” and “Here Come The Hawks.” Maybe these songs are just ingrained in our DNA that they can never be removed, and we don’t hate them because they take us back to a younger, simpler, day. However, nostalgia only goes so far: I can’t stand the “Super Bowl Shuffle.” Or maybe, the good songs just don’t suck.

It seems that running backs are being devalued at a historic rate in the NFL. Runners who have had success aren’t signing the huge contracts anymore. Edgerin James’ contract with Arizona may have marked the end of the big money running back, especially since James has had little impact on this woe-be-gone franchise. But the devaluation began a decade ago with the Denver Broncos.
The Broncos, under Coach Mike Shanahan, have built their game around their zone blocking scheme and just seem to plug running backs into their system and watch them gain over 1,000 yards per season. Back in the Super Bowl years, the Broncos developed Terrell Davis, who was just the running option needed to push the previously pass happy, John Elway led teams to the Promised Land.
Davis was severely injured and retired, but the Broncos kept humming along. Olandis Gary, Mike Anderson, Reuben Droughns, and Clinton Portis have all manned the Broncos backfield and each have at least one thousand yard season. To Shanahan, the line is the important thing, all a coach needs to do is teach a runner how to follow the blocks.
So it was this summer when Shanahan released Travis Henry, who had been a top rusher in Buffalo and Tennessee because his commitment to football was lacking. Yes, Mr. Henry is too committed to drugs to play football, and now, he faces serious jail time.
Henry rushed for over 1400 yards with Buffalo in 2002 and another 1300 in 2004. He was suspended by the league in 2005 for a repeat violation of the league’s substance abuse policy, but seemed to have come back, rushing for 1,211 yards for the Titans in 2006. He came to Denver in 2007 and was the leading rushing in football for the first four weeks of last season before being suspended for violating the league’s drug policy again.
This past summer, as I stated above, he was released and no other team gave him a look, and, I guess he needed money, so, it is perhaps little surprise that the former running back was arrested yesterday following an alleged cocaine deal. The DEA says Henry and another man were arrested after a “multi-kilogram cocaine transaction” in the Denver suburb of Centennial. Apparently, this began in Montana where a large amount of drugs were seized in a traffic stop. Either the driver of the car, or another person implicated in the bust agreed to act for the police; and it was this sting that led to Henry’s arrest.
Now, instead of just worrying about his NFL career, Travis Henry is facing long, hard time in prison, and as Chris Rock said about wide receiver Rae Carruth who is doing time for having his pregnant girlfriend killed. Rock asked “doesn’t he (Carruth) know that you need to have won the Heisman Trophy to get away with murder (O.J. Simpson)?”

This may be the best time to be a sports fan in Chicago ever. For the first time in 102 years, both the Cubs and White Sox are playing October baseball. The Bears are playing .500 and winning games against better teams (on paper), and losing to teams they should beat (again, on paper). The Bulls are about to open camp after having drafted Derrick Rose with the first overall pick in the draft. The Blackhawks are showing more hope than they have in a decade, and most important to me, Northwestern University’s football team is 5-0 for the first time since 1962.
Despite what I wrote a couple of days ago (and still stand by), I am happy that the White Sox have made the postseason for the first time since winning the championship in 2005. I’m happiest for Jim Thome and Ken Griffey, Jr., old timers who may be playing their last playoff games ever. I’m also happy for Ozzie Guillen, who has done everything except take the field himself to coerce, cajole, beg, plead, borrow, and steal to get this team of old, slow players into the playoffs.
Now, can they go deep into the playoffs? Probably not. They still have Javier Vasquez pitching, which is an automatic loss every time he takes the mound. And they didn’t exactly tear up the AL down the stretch, although they were the first team in baseball history to win three straight games at the end of a season to make the playoffs against three different teams, and if history has taught us anything, it’s that a team can get hot at the right time and win it all. See the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals if you don’t believe me.
Meanwhile, the Cub juggernaut has rolled through the NL all season, and they face Manny Ramirez and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Again, on paper, they should have little difficulty, but in this battle of ex-Yankee skippers, Joe Torre has won four titles to Lou Pinella’s one. Which is to say; take nothing for granted Cub fans. After all, the team meekly lost to Arizona last year. This is a deeper team and a better team, and they should win, but we are talking about the Cubs; the team with the Century-long championship draught.
I have talked about the Blackhawks a lot here, so there’s little left to say other than drop the puck. The Bulls are interesting because they brought in Vinnie Del Negro as new coach along with Rose and face the question: with we see the 2007 Bulls who competed for the Eastern Conference title, or the 2008 Bulls, who finished so far out of contention; they couldn’t see it with a telescope?
As I said earlier, however, I am most excited about my 5-0 Wildcats. I had expected them to compete this year, and go to a bowl game, based on the number of returning players. And, the Big Ten appeared to be, other than Ohio State and perhaps Penn State, wide open: Michigan was rebuilding; Wisconsin was good, but we didn’t know how good, but NU doesn’t play them this year. We don’t play Penn State either. The best players had left Illinois for the NFL. My early enthusiasm was tempered by the fact that they hadn’t played anybody, but then the Cats went into hostile Iowa City and the University of Iowa’s Kinnick Stadium. They fell behind by 2 touchdowns, and earlier NU teams would have folded like a house of cards. Instead, Northwestern fought back to 17-10 at halftime, and ended up winning the game 22-17.
What is best about this year’s team is defense. Previous bowl bound NU teams (with the exception of the 1995 Rose Bowl team) outscored opponents. Defensive stops were in short supply. But this year’s defensive unit has shown amazing grit: stopping Ohio University on a day when Tyrell Sutton was injured and the rest of the offence didn’t show up, especially Quarterback C.J. Bachér who threw four picks.
Against Iowa, NU had five takeaways, and did something that we never did well before – make good adjustments at halftime. While Head Coach (and anchor of the 1995 team) Pat Fitzgerald will get a lot of the credit, a lot of the credit for the resurgence has to go to new defensive coordinator Mike Hankwitz, who we somehow stole from Wisconsin. They stopped Iowa from scoring the entire second half including a big stop inside the NU 10 on fourth down late in the game. Maybe, growing up in Chicago made me appreciative of good defense (especially since the Bears have rarely had a good offense), but the old adage goes “defense wins championships.” I believe that, and this may make the 2008 NU team something really special.

I remember Tony Mandarich when he was at Michigan State. He was a behemoth among very large young men; larger and just put defensive linemen on their asses and the turf. Never mind the enlarged head and bad acne that seems to come from steroid use. So, it comes as no surprise to me that Mandarich says he used steroids at Michigan State and faked a drug test before the 1988 Rose Bowl during an interview on “Inside the NFL” that will air tonight on Showtime.
No, you think? Also, Mandarich goes on in the interview to say that he did not use steroids in the NFL but was addicted to alcohol and painkillers; which explain why he became a gargantuan bust, some say, one of the worst first round picks in NFL history. Of course, he was drafted by the Green Bay Packers, which makes his failure better in my opinion.
Why is Mandarich coming clean now, over a decade after he left the NFL as nothing more than a trivia question? Because he is looking to cash in on his autobiography, that will be released in March, that’s why. Mandarich says that he provided a fake urine sample to evade detection before the ’88 Rose Bowl in which Michigan State beat Southern California 20-17, but when he got to the NFL, he had quit steroids, but was so high, he couldn’t focus on football. “I got to the point where it was a struggle to work out three or four times a week because the priority of getting high was above the priority of working out,” Mandarich said in the interview.
Personally, I don’t believe that Mandarich didn’t use steroids in the NFL because he didn’t get appreciably smaller once he joined the Packers, but his other addictions do explain why he was so bad when he should have been dominant like he was in college. Maybe I’ll watch the interview tonight, but I won’t be buying the book. I have better things to do with my time.

I admit that I work in the financial services industry and I don’t know what to make of this week’s economic developments. First, of course, after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the sale of Merrill Lynch, the government stepped in, with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsen and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke proposing a $700 billion bailout of the banking system. This bailout would purchase bad assets from banks and permit them to continue to lend money.
The problems with the bill, as initially proposed, were numerous. First, how do we know $700 billion is the right number? Is it $300 billion? Is it $1 trillion? No one knew then, and no one knows now, and there is no relief in the bill for the people who are trying to pay the mortgages that the banking systems hoisted on them. These are the people that deserve relief, not the bankers who threw lending standards out of the window and gave money away like leaflets on a busy streetcorner. Second, the Treasury Secretary had almost unlimited power, with no oversight from the courts or Congress. I know that Bush, Cheney, et.al. believe in an Imperial Presidency, but an Imperial Treasury Secretary as well? Third, there were no limits on executive salaries; and no provisions for governmental repayment from any recovery. Finally, and most troubling was that there were no teeth in the bill; no way of punishing the people and corporations that had gotten the country into this mess in the first place. Huge factors, but not ones that could stop the bill from passing, could it? After all, we have had bailouts before, and generally, they have worked pretty well. The Resolution Trust Corporation helped stabilize the economy during the Savings and Loan crisis by doing essentially the same thing. Besides, we had Bush, Republican and Democratic leaders pushing for passage. (Of course, now, finally, the rest of the country does what I have done since he took office – dismiss everything that Bush says. Now he looks like a little boy stomping his feet and holding his breath trying to get his way.) Paulsen reportedly got on his knees and begged House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi to get the bill passed.
But, with the spirit of the country moving toward a need for change and a general distrust of government, several members of the House, particularly Republican members who are most at risk, didn’t want to be seen as giving more of the treasury to big business. Meanwhile, people as diverse on the issues as my fellow liberal Michael Moore and CNN pundit Lou Dobbs are proclaiming victory now that the bill has failed; that the common people are striking back. I’m not as sure. Banks are not lending money; and people and small businesses are not able to get needed funding. So, I definitely see the need for the bailout. But, the lack of oversight, penalties, and oversight on the process has bothered me since the start. And as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the level of regulation has waned over the past two decades, to the point that the regulators have little power or authority anymore. When I was a bank examiner, we wielded great power and we actually examined banks and holding companies regularly. We looked at everything. Today’s regulators are “remotely” monitoring institutions. How? And where from? Mars?
In addition, the President and advisors said that the economy was in meltdown and we risk depression-type events, but other than the 770 point fall on Wall Street yesterday after the initial package failed, the lights are still on; people are still working; and life continues. Even the market has rebounded today, bouncing back 496 points today, so perhaps, the market is more resilient than we give it credit for. So, while Wall Street is important, perhaps, most of the real economic “work” that is done in this country isn’t on the floor of the markets.
There has to be support for the overall economy, which the Fed has already done, pumping approximately $600 billion into the system. And I do think that some kind of further bailout is necessary and inevitable. But the controls that the no vote will force onto the finished bill will be much better for the common person than the CEO, and after all, haven’t they gotten more than their share of the goodies lately. Now if they really wanted to clean house, Congress would repeal laws that treat corporations like people; and pass legislation that can force a corporation to liquidate if it is caught too many times selling tainted goods, or polluting the environment, or breaking the law. In other words, I propose a “three strikes and you’re out” (of business) rule. That would clean up corporate boardrooms and CEO’s offices.