Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
That said, the book is full of pleasures. I want to go back to some passages I marked as I read A Century and share what I was thinking when I marked them.
In his introduction, Rapoport argues that early in the 20th century, Charles Dryden and Ring Lardner introduced a new kind of sportswriting to Chicago. It quickly spread: “Nor did it take long for New York and the rest of the country to catch up with the Chicago writers who were making sports and the men who played them seem like so much fun.” I wrote in the margin, “Who’s having fun today?” Bernie Lincicome (three of his pieces are in the book) used to write sports columns that treated his beat as a joke that he was in on, but the Tribune ran him off in 2000. And yet what is the preposterous A-Rod if not someone very, very silly?
“It was not until the first round of men’s competition had begun that Lassiter went downstairs,” Greene writes. “He took a look into the main room. A young guy named Pete Margo was winning his match. Margo was wearing two-toned shoes with raised heels, a dark blue shirt with a white tie, and a wide-lapeled windowpane-pattern jacket. Lassiter took one look and went over to the warm-up room.”
Champions! . . .
For a long time, Jordan sat along one of the long benches in the visitors’ locker room. In many ways, it was his party.
He hid his head in the arms of his wife for a long time after receiving the MVP trophy and cried.
It was in another faceless hotel, on another minor-league road trip, on another rainy day good for nothing but watching cable movies, and that was exactly what Jordan was doing.
“It was a Wesley Snipes movie,” he said. “And at the end, his father died. The room was dark and I was lying on the bed and I guess it hit the right buttons because all of a sudden, I couldn’t stop crying. I talked to my wife. I called everyone I knew. And I still couldn’t stop crying. I never had a day in my life that I felt that sad.”
