Tag Archives: sports

Busy June Weekend 1989

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Cubs89I have evidence that I went to a Major League Baseball game 26 years ago, and the next day saw a famed Broadway musical on tour in Chicago, at a famed venue. But I can’t really drag much of either experience out of the twisty byways of memory when I think about them now. I can make some logical reconstructions, though.

I went to one or maybe two Cubs games a year in the late 1980s at Wrigley Field, and one Sox game at the old Comiskey Park. Each time I went with some PR people that I knew. Enjoyable, and I’m glad that I got to go, especially to Comiskey, since it was demolished in 1991.

Still, I have no particular memory of the June 10, 1989 game. Data about the game is easy enough to look up, though. The Cardinals took it 6-0 and the game lasted about two and a half hours starting at 3:05 pm (night games, played at Wrigley since August 8, 1988, were still pretty rare). The temp at the start time was 62 F. and it was windy. One of those annoying early June days in Chicago when it isn’t quite as warm as June should be. We had a few of those last week.

Joe Magrane pitched for the Cardinals and Greg Maddux and others pitched for the Cubs. I was one of more than 38,000 in attendance. I probably ate a hot dog and drank a beer, but not even the most insanely complete compilation of baseball stats can tell me for sure.

The ticket, Terrace Aisle 235, Row 13, Seat 101, cost all of $7. In current money, that’s $13.36, according to the handy BLS CPI inflation calculator. So I checked the official ticketing site of the Cubs today to look up an equivalent game and its ticket prices — June 13, 2015, when the Cubs are playing the Reds. It’s too much trouble to pin down the exact current price for that specific seat, but no need to anyway. All of the Terrace Reserved seats range from $41 to $59. What’s your excuse, MLB?

The next day I went to the splendid Auditorium Theatre for a matinee of Les Miserables. My girlfriend at the time wanted to go, so I took her. I remember bits and pieces of some remarkable stagecraft — barricades, seems like — but not much else besides a feeling of not caring for it all that much. Tickets were $30, which is the equivalent of $57.24 now, up in the balcony.

LesMes89It’s a little harder to make a direct comparison to today’s prices, since Les Miserables isn’t playing at the Auditorium Theatre in 2015. Currently the Royal Ballet is doing Don Quixote there; tickets range from about $36 to $146 for the matinee on the 14th. The cheap seats are of course in the balcony, and at a discount to 1989, but then again, I suspect a big-deal Broadway show like Les Mis would command the same, and probably more, than back then. Just a hunch.

Over the years I’ve discovered that big-deal Broadway musicals aren’t really to my taste. Les Mis was probably part of that discovery. I’d rather see a regular play in a small theater. I’m pretty much in agreement with the reviewer Tom Boeker, who wrote in The Reader in 1989: “At last, two years after it opened in New York, it’s come to Chicago. It’s an event, a spectacle, a dress occasion, an opera, and a musical. It’s Les Miserables!

“I don’t know. I don’t get it… So you can see Les Miserables has everything: sentiment, revolution, and romance with a capital R for Romanticism. If you were going to see only one musical in your life, you might as well see this one and get the bloody thing over with. To inflate a quote from the film short Hardware Wars, ‘You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll kiss 40 bucks good-bye.’ “

Football, You Bet

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May Day was a genuine spring day this year, clear and warm enough for the season. I spent some of it on a walkabout in downtown Chicago, starting west of the Loop and wandering more or less east and south until I reached Grant Park. At Congress Pkwy. and Dearborn St., I noticed barricades in front of the Auditorium Theater Building. A long line of people, many of them wearing football jerseys, stood behind them.

Then I remembered hearing on the radio that the NFL draft was being held in Chicago this year, and giving it no more thought. If I had, I’d have guessed it was in a major hotel ballroom somewhere, but it turns out it was in the Auditorium Theatre.

There, and at a large white temporary tent in Grant Park, across Michigan Ave. at Congress. As the NFL’s senior vice president of events, Peter O’Reilly, explains on league’s web site: “Every year we can’t really satisfy the demand for fans that want to be inside the theater, so now we’re creating this Draft Town in Grant Park, just across from the Auditorium Theatre, in order to allow more fans to experience the excitement of the draft.”

The line of people, a block long, was waiting to get into the tent, and I’d bet they paid hard gold coins for the thrill. A large electronic sign on the tent said, “Look, Another Profit Center for the NFL!”

Actually, it said “Chi-Town is Draft Town.”

The sidewalks along Michigan Ave. were lousy with fans wearing football jerseys and lanyards with plastic badges, which probably let them into the tent. Cops were everywhere, presumably to keep a lid on any sports riots later. (Which were probably no new thing even at the time of the Nika Riots.)

The NFL draft wasn’t on my mind when I started walking, and it didn’t remain top of mind very long. I pressed on toward the far southern end of Grant Park, away from crowds, cops and mass-market sports.

Grant Park, May 1, 2015I don’t remember the last time I was in this part of Grant Park. It was a fine place to be on a warm Friday afternoon.

My Online Encounter With Yabba

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I woke up this morning wondering, is there really a statue of a baseball player in London? I dreamed about it. I made notes in my dream, so that I could write about it. I didn’t think it the least bit odd. Such are dreams.

As far as I can tell, there are no such statues, at least not in a public setting. I didn’t spend a lot of time looking into it, though. But I did come across the Sporting Statues Project, which seems to list sport-themed statues all over the world. I looked at a couple of its maps out of idle curiosity, including the World Cricket Statue Location Map. At a glance, you can see where people care about cricket: the UK, the Indian subcontinent, Australia and the Caribbean.

Look a little further and you can examine curious works like “Yabba.” The web site says: “Sydney Cricket Ground. ‘Yabba’ (Stephen Gascoigne). A tribute by the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust to every spectator who has ever come to these Grounds. Sculptor: Cathy Weiszmann. Benefactor: Basil Sellers.”

“Yabba” was one Stephen Harold Gascoigne, “remembered as a heckler at Sydney Cricket Ground cricket and rugby league games in the early part of the 20th century. Yabba was known for his knowledgeable witticisms shouted loudly from ‘The Hill’, a grassy general admissions area of the SCG.” – Wiki

Good useless fact for the day. You never know where your dreams will lead you.

The Field & the Basilica

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As of June 21, 2014, there was no new development that I could see at the Field of Dreams movie site, which is near Dyersville, Iowa, about 20 miles west of Dubuque. Apparently there’s been a hubbub – or maybe a brouhaha (not sure which is greater dustup) – about plans for further development at the site.

I won’t dwell on that. Enough to say that the new owners of the property, who have a mortgage to feed, want it to be more than a baseball field amid the corn, while some residents of greater Dyersville and others very vocally do not want that to happen. More about the fracas here.

This is the kind of tourist that I am: although I’ve never actually seen Field of Dreams, I wanted to see the accidental tourist attraction created in haste in the summer of 1988 to serve as one of the main sets for the film. Why? Because it’s there. Or more exactly, because I was going to be near there anyway.

Besides, Yuriko had seen the film. As we drove in the vicinity of the Field, her eyes widened a bit. “This is what it looked like in the movie,” she said. She saw it a long time ago, and couldn’t really remember the story. I’d never seen it, but knew that the movie involved ghost baseball players, including Shoeless Joe Jackson. (Maybe Shoeless Joe got a raw deal from Baseball in his lifetime, but in terms of posthumous fame, he’s one of the better-remembered ball players of the early 1900s.)

The site is appealingly simple. You drive down a small road to get to it, park nearby, and walk a short distance over to the baseball field. It looks pretty much like any other non-pro baseball field, except in a wet late June, the backfield is bordered by lush rows of corn.

Field of Dreams, June 2014The immaculate white house stands nearby, along with a red barn. I understand that the movie producers added the white picket fence around the house to make it look more like our collective notion of rural Iowa (and they had to paint some of the surrounding vegetation green in that drought summer of ’88). Odd, it didn’t even occur to me to go see if the house was accessible. It looks like someone’s house, which it was until recently, so approaching too close would have seemed like trespassing.

A fair number of people were visiting on that Saturday in June. No one was playing a game, exactly, but people were tossing and hitting balls, including a man taking swings at a ball pitched by a kid who probably was his son.

Field of Dreams, June 2014Naturally, there’s a gift stand. It’s a modest operation, not generating enough revenue to feed a large mortgage, I bet. In any case I bought a few postcards and a souvenir spoon for Yuriko.

Field of Dreams, June 2014The Field of Dreams isn’t the only thing to take a look at in Dyersville. The town is home to the National Farm Toy Museum, and while in theory that might have been interesting to visit, we bypassed it to take a look at the Basilica of St. Francis Xavier, an enormous and very ornate Gothic church right in town.

The interior was restored in 2000 and ’01, so it must have some of the brilliance of the original 1880s design. How many small-town basilicas are there in this country? Not many, I think.

Despite Everything, Spectacle

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It’s a little unusual these days when we sit down to watch the same thing at the same time on TV, but it happened on Friday, when we saw a fair amount of NBC’s chopped up, dumbed down coverage of the opening ceremony of the Olympics. Despite the coverage, there was no denying the spectacle of the thing. Tsar Vladimir wanted spectacle, so there was spectacle, and hang the cost.

Spectacle is nothing new for Russia. It’s the country that gave us the Potemkin village, after all. (Spectacle, pseudo-spectacle, what’s the difference, as long as the tsar is pleased?) And who can forget those May Day parades with their ICBMs on wheels? That pleased the red tsars.

Note some of these pictures from the Sporting News, especially the shots of unfinished or poorly built Sochi toilets. Funny to see in photos, not so funny to find in your hotel room. Just carping by Westerners, no doubt. We have spectacle to put on, don’t bother Russia about plumbing details! It reminds me of the Hermitage. A spectacular building indeed, with a spectacular art collection. But – at least when I was there in 1994 – dank, crummy, hard-to-find bathrooms.

Why did NBC leave this out? It was part of the pre-ceremony festivities, but easy to include, since everything was on tape anyway. Maybe it was considered too surreal for mainstream tastes.

I enjoyed the Parade of Nations, especially the athletes walking over maps of their nations, projected somehow or other onto the floor of the stadium. Now that’s a great special effect. Glad to see minuscule Euro-nations in the Games, too — Andorra, Liechtenstein, even tiny San Marino (but it turns out that country’s been in the Winter Games since 1976). No one from the Vatican City, but I guess it would be hard to scare up an Olympic-class athlete from its 800-odd residents.

Also glad to see Togo in the parade. Go Togo! I cheer the sporting aspirations of Togo. One athlete, Alessia Afi Dipol, will be competing in two events for the country, women’s giant slalom and women’s slalom, while another athlete, Mathilde-Amivi Petitjean, will compete in the women’s 10 km classic cross-country skiing event.

Since Friday, I haven’t watched any of the coverage. For one thing, I’m not that excited about winter sports, but I also know how NBC will cover the Games: first, figure skating. Then some more figure skating. After that, a little speed skating, and hockey (if Team USA is in the medal rounds), and then some highlights from figure skating, even though that event is over, plus interviews with Team USA figure skaters, complete with more highlights of the event. With occasional coverage of death-defying sports, such as luge and skeleton, but not without constant yackety-yak commentary.

Summer Ephemerals

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Late in the afternoon today, after a mostly sunny day, storm clouds rolled through, and for 15 minutes or so we had a heavy downpour. About 30 minutes later, the skies were clear.

Early this evening, I saw the flick of fireflies. Brief but luminous. Luminous but brief.

Another thing with a brief life: stands set up to capitalize on the Blackhawks’ victory. This one stood in Schiller Park, Ill., on Tuesday.

I have no intention of being among the madhouse crowds downtown tomorrow.  It’s enough that I got to see the Art Institute lions in headgear last time around.