Zorn and Ebert Play Beanball
I E-mailed Ebert my thoughts, and we had an exchange. We agreed that Royko lost something when he crossed the street. It seemed to me he might have been happier being unhappy at the Sun-Times than he was being unhappy at the Tribune, and I tried to imagine the columns he would have written about the new lights at Wrigley Field if he’d stayed at the Sun-Times to write them. He might have done one extolling the time-honored compact that guaranteed Cubs fans the opportunity to see their heroes lose and still get home for dinner. And another explaining that Cubs baseball had always been something you snuck off to see, and that if it became possible to see a game without lying to your boss the Cubs would lose all their appeal. I told Ebert, “He’d somehow encompass both sides of the argument (even if his heart lay with one), and he’d be amazingly funny.”
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“It’s amazing how sensitive aldermen have suddenly become,” he wrote. “They’re in a rage because they were described as ‘boneheads’ and ‘political bums’ in an editorial in this paper….The point was that some aldermen and other City Hall officials are trying to use the lights issue to blackmail The Tribune into being kinder to them and switching some of its editorial positions. I don’t know why that upset them, since it happens to be true. What probably bothers them is that they can’t pull it off. Some of them mistakenly believe that because they’re adept at shaking down contractors and other businesses, they can muscle editorial writers.”
On a cheerier day, Royko addressed Alderman Bernie Hansen’s sanguine prediction that people living near Wrigley Field would avert the scourge of drunken Cubs fans wandering the streets late at night by voting the precinct dry. Royko suggested voting the entire 44th Ward dry. “If Cubs fans, who include many children, elderly people and peaceful rubes bused in from Iowa and Wisconsin, will pose a terrifying menace only 18 evenings a year, what about all those thousands of drunks who are in Hansen’s ward every night of the year. Don’t they ever urinate on someone’s lawn? Are we to believe that only Cubs fans have erratic bladders? Nonsense. They come lurching out at 2 a.m. and 4 a.m., (long after any ball game will have ended) and carry on shamefully. They fall down, throw up, urinate, shout, fight, perform lewd acts and take the Lord’s name in vain….Hansen seems perfectly content to have a million people getting drunk in his ward year in and year out. He just wants to prevent Cubs fans from having a few beers before the 7th inning, 18 evenings a year.”
But by this time Zorn was on to the facts. So he replied by offering his own excerpts of long-forgotten Royko columns–excerpts not as savory as the ones above–and concluding with something he’d spotted in Richard Ciccone’s Royko biography. Back in 1984, in only his third Tribune column, Royko had written, “I used to be against lights in Wrigley Field. Now I’m on the Trib payroll. Therefore, good company man that I am, I’m no longer against lights in Wrigley Field. So I’m a fink.”
For the Love of Mike is a posthumous anthology published last year. Ebert wrote the foreword. There’s a copy on the shelf over my computer. On page 46 there’s a column that ran in the Tribune on August 8, 1988, the day of the Cubs’ first night game. “Tonight in Chicago,” Royko wrote, “we’re going to begin finding the answer to a fascinating psychological question that concerns the debilitating effect of night on the human mind: Does the coming of darkness cause otherwise decent, polite, hygienic Cub fans to have a fiendish compulsion to make wee-wee on a stranger’s lawn?” He imagined “Nadine Yuppwife” telling a concerned news anchor how the bladders of Cubs fans had destroyed her home. “We lost everything. Even our beloved BMW has floated away with my husband in it.”
Michael Lundbom, who was Screen’s special projects manager, saw the writing on the wall. Certain that Ratny was about to close up shop, he raised money and recruited Jane Burek (a former Ratny columnist) and Lisa Hemminger and Carl Kozlowski (former Ratny reporters). Last August he launched Chicago Imaging & Sound, which looked so much like Screen Ratny called it “the clone.”
