The weather outside is frightful and frigid and I don’t really want to inform you that it is a bleak time of 12 months. That is particularly true for native sports activities followers, a few of whom appeared to take out their ongoing frustrations with our native skilled groups by booing the spouse of former Bulls common supervisor Jerry Krause on the United Center over the weekend.
In order to provide you some aid from the seasonal sports activities weariness, I fortunately provide you with two books that ought to heat these winter days.
One travels again in time. Charles Billington’s “The 1963 Chicago Bears: George Halas and the Road to the NFL Championship” takes us to an easier sports activities time, earlier than Super Bowls, huge cash and towering egos. The Bears workforce of that 12 months was a colourful bunch, and included working again Rick Casares, who Billington tells us was considered one of “the higher paid players in the NFL at $20,000 a year”; halfback and return specialist Ollie Matson; “intelligent, patient” quarterback Bill Wade; linebacker Doug Atkins (“the most feared player in the NFL”) and people “youngsters” Johnny Morris, Mike Ditka and Ed O’Bradovich.
But the main target is firmly on George Halas, workforce proprietor and coach.
That 1963 triumph has been eclipsed by the 1986 Super Bowl win and even these of you or tender age will come to grasp why this has occurred and why that’s a disgrace.
As Billington places it in his preface, “The mission of this book is to help readers remember, and gain a better understanding of, the unique year in NFL history. Younger Bears followers have no appreciation for how influential the Bears franchise was in this critical NFL era.”
Billington is a tireless researcher, a expertise first displayed a decade in the past in his “Wrigley Field’s Last World Series: The Wartime Cubs and the Pennant of 1945.” Here can also be a wonderful author and, brings us vividly to the video games performed at Wrigley Field, then the Bears house. As he remembers and writes, “The very idea of going to Cubs’ park in the cold weather was an event in itself, but to sit that close to the field for a pro football game left a deep impression.”
As wonderful as Billington is at writing about video games, he’s equally adept at offering historic and societal views. It’s not possible to not be grabbed by his particulars about a few “individuals well known in Chicago gambling circles,” Abe Samuels and Ray Edward. You will find out how Edward picked up the nickname “Zsa Zsa Yitcovich,” and the way playing forged a critical shadow on the sport on the time.
Halas is movingly captured by Billington. He tells how the growing old coach orchestrated not solely this successful season but additionally made the subsequent 12 months’s exceptional draft picks, within the face of a “signing war between the NFL and AFL heated past a boil,” by deciding on and signing a few future Hall of Famers named Gale Sayers and Dick Butkus (in addition to ill-fated Brian Piccolo).
But he was by no means in a position to handle these gamers right into a championship and there’s something unhappy about Halas’ want to hold on. We get particulars, with Billington providing this closing commentary: “One would think the championship in 1963 might be reason enough for Halas to end his legendary career in a blaze of glory … (But) blind envy seemed to overcome Halas’ rational thinking, and for more than a decade his beloved team would pay the price.”
George Ofman offers us some soccer, within the types of Gary Fencik, Dan Hampton and others, and he offers us a really totally different guide in “Tell Me a Story I Don’t Know: Conversations with Chicago Sports Legends.” But it’s no much less satisfying and passionate.
Ofman is, if the title rests simply on the tip of your mind, a longtime sportscaster, working for greater than half a century in entrance of microphones, charting the various heartbreaks and fewer triumphs on the native and nationwide sports activities panorama.
His roots on this profession return to his undergraduate days at Southern Illinois University and onward, as he grew to become one of many authentic voices of WSCR 670-AM, the place he labored from 1992 to 2009 earlier than shifting to WBBM 780-AM as a sports activities anchor and reporter for the subsequent decade.
There have been another sports activities media jobs and Ofman remains to be stuffed with power, most lately swimming within the more and more crowded waters of podcasting. His “Tell Me a Story I Don’t Know” podcast has grow to be a rewarding, energetic and sometimes enlightening oasis. As is that this guide, primarily based on 50 of the 100-some folks he has interviewed on his podcast. They are former gamers and coaches from baseball, soccer, basketball and hockey, in addition to journalists and media personalities and some he classifies as “In a Class by Themselves.” In that latter gang is the estimable and erudite Bob Costas, who says Ofman operates a “podcast where depth, context and nuance are appreciated and encouraged.”
The guide’s introduction is by ESPN’s Mike Greenberg, as soon as and for a short while a fixture on the native sports activities scene and he’s right when he mentions the “intimacy” of Ofman’s work.
Don’t make the error to suppose that that is some form of “best of” from his podcast. It is rather more. Each of the quick chapters accommodates what are in essence profiles of assorted folks whom Ofman has interviewed and he brings to every his personal well-researched background, a fan’s affection and innate curiosity.
Some of his topics are well-known, however not all. It’s good to see so many ladies represented. You will study that sports activities journalist Peggy Kusinski is “bold, spirited, a foodie, and a wine geek,” and Cheryl Raye-Stout tells the story behind her getting one of many greatest scoops within the historical past of our — certainly, the nation’s — sports activities panorama. Hint: It concerned a personality named Jordan.
()
Source: www.bostonherald.com