Mr. Mack and Mr. LaRussa

To this point in time, Connie Mack is the only person to manage in the major leagues after having been elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame as a manager. (Others have served as managers after being elected to the Hall as players.) 

    

CONNIE MACK

Mack was elected to the Hall in 1937, when he was assumed to be in the home stretch of a career that had already gone on for 40 years with the Pittsburgh Pirates (1894-1896) and Philadelphia Athletics (since 1901). But Mack was able to manage the A’s for as long as he liked, because he owned the franchise. He continued on for another 13 years without adding to his total of nine American League pennants and five world championships, finally retiring after the 1950 season at the age of 87.

     Tony LaRussa, 76, will become the second member of Mack’s exclusive club when the White Sox play their first game of the 2021 season. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2014 when seemingly retired after 33 seasons with the White Sox (1979-1986), Oakland Athletics (1986-1995), and St. Louis Cardinals (1996-2011). 

     LaRussa was fired during the 1986 season by Sox general manager Ken “Hawk” Harrelson, who had come from and soon returned to the broadcast booth. “Over the years, every time the subject of the 1986 season surfaced, I have been crucified in Chicago,” Harrelson wrote in his autobiography. “It’s as if I am the guy who traded Babe Ruth or caused the Black Sox scandal or lit the first match to ignite the Chicago Fire of 1871.”  

    

TONY LaRUSSA

LaRussa’s departure was a pill that seemed to grow more bitter for chairman Jerry Reinsdorf with each passing year. And now it has been flushed away. No doubt Reinsdorf is overjoyed (and he is the boss, after all), but many White Sox fans are dismayed, and there is good reason to wonder whether general manager Rick Hahn is on board with the hire and whether he even had anything to do with it. 

     “This is an opportunity for us as an organization,” Hahn said when Rick Renteria was let go less than three weeks ago. “We’ve obviously been somewhat insular in terms of our managerial hirings over the last several years.  This is an opportunity for us to speak to individuals with other organizations that have had success and learn from them and get their sort of outsider objective perspective on our organization.” All that went out the window when it turned out that LaRussa was interested in the job. 

     No one knows yet whether LaRussa’s homecoming on the South Side will produce the ending that Reinsdorf is hoping for--but given the current state of the White Sox’ roster, it seems that LaRussa has at least a fighting chance to add to his current cache of six pennants and three world championships before he hangs it up for keeps. 

 

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The Early Jordan

     The first NBA game that Michael Jordan saw in person, he played in. It was at Chicago Stadium on Friday, October 26, 1984. Early in the second quarter, Jordan was soaring to the hoop for a dunk when the Washington Bullets’ bruising center Jeff Ruland leveled him. Welcome to the NBA. Jordan landed on his neck and lay motionless while the crowd of 13,913 fell silent (as was typical for Bulls games in those days, there were plenty of empty seats). 

     Teammate Orlando Woolridge took off after Ruland, but Jordan himself later said that Ruland had only been trying to block the shot and had no evil intent. Jordan got back to his feet, stayed in the game, and finished with 16 points, seven assists, six rebounds, and four blocked shots. 

     The star of the game was guard Quintin Dailey, who scored 25 points (including 12 in the fourth quarter) to lead the Bulls to a 109-93 win, but when it was over the media people were all clustered around Jordan. “I’ve got a sore neck and a big headache,” he said. “I’m going to bed.” Then he added, “This was a good start for my career.” No one would know for several more years that it was the start of one of the greatest careers in the history of professional sports.

 

MICHAEL JORDAN AS A ROOKIE.

Jordan first came to the attention of basketball fans nationwide as a 19-year-old freshman at the University of North Carolina. In the final game of the 1982 NCAA tournament, the Tarheels—led by James Worthy and Sam Perkins—faced the Georgetown Hoyas and their intimidating seven-foot center Patrick Ewing. The game more than lived up to its advance billing.

North Carolina trailed 32-31 at halftime and 62-61 with less than a minute remaining. Tarheels coach Dean Smith called a timeout with 32 seconds left, and most in the Louisiana Superdome crowd of 61,612 (not to mention the television audience of tens of millions) believed that he would draw up a play for Worthy, an All-American who had three years of pressure games under his belt. Instead, Smith turned to Jordan and said, “Knock it down, Michael.”

Jordan worked himself free to the left of the lane, received a pass from Jimmy Black, and, with 17 seconds on the clock, took a jump shot from 16 feet out. It was perfect. “I was all kinds of nervous,” he said after the game, “but I didn’t have time to think about doubts. I had a feeling it was going to go in.”

The victory was sealed when Georgetown’s Fred Brown, looking out of the corner of his eye, mistook Worthy for a teammate and threw him the ball with five seconds left. North Carolina’s 63-62 win gave Smith his first national championship after several near misses.

 

By 1984, his third year at North Carolina, Jordan was the best college basketball player in the nation. He declared himself eligible for the NBA draft. Bulls general manager Rod Thorn loved him, but whether the Bulls could get him or not would depend on a coin flip. They had lost a coin flip with the Los Angeles Lakers for Magic Johnson five years before and had been in the doldrums ever since. This time the Bulls held the third pick, while the Houston Rockets and Portland Trail Blazers were to flip for the top pick.

The key to the equation for the Bulls was that Portland was committed to the idea of drafting a big man. By consensus, Hakeem Olajuwon of the University of Houston was the top center available. If the Blazers won the flip, they would select Olajuwon, and the Rockets would probably take Jordan. But if the Rockets won the flip, they would select Olajuwon and the Blazers would take the next-best big man, Sam Bowie of Kentucky.

How different the history of basketball would have been if Portland had won that coin flip! For one thing, the Bulls would have six fewer world championships to their credit. But Houston won the flip and drafted Olajuwon, and Portland chose the injury-plagued Bowie, leaving Jordan for the Bulls. “Nobody, including me, knew Jordan was going to turn out to be what he is,” Thorn said later. “We didn’t work him out before the draft, but we interviewed him. He was confident. He felt he was gonna be good. It was obvious that Michael believed in himself, but even he had no idea just how good he was going to be.”

 

Before joining the Bulls, Jordan played for the United States in the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Among his teammates were Sam Perkins and Patrick Ewing, who had played with and against him, respectively, in the NCAA championship game of 1982. Although coach Bobby Knight ran a highly structured offense that limited his opportunities to improvise, Jordan nonetheless made an impression with his gravity-defying athleticism. “Sometimes the players get into the habit of just watching Michael,” said Steve Alford, “because he’s usually going to do something you don’t want to miss.” With the Soviet Union and its satellites boycotting the Games, Jordan and the U.S. team easily won the gold medal.

The Olympics made Jordan a household name. When he appeared at the Bulls’ training camp afterwards, head coach Kevin Loughery said to assistant Bill Blair, “Let’s have a scrimmage and see if Michael’s as good as we think he is.”

“Michael took the ball off the rim at one end,” Blair remembered, “and went to the other end. From the top of the key he soared in and dunked it, and Kevin says, ‘We don’t have to scrimmage anymore.’”

“We saw his skills,” said Loughery, “but you’ve got to be around him every day to see the competitiveness of the guy. He was gonna try to take over every situation that was difficult. He was gonna put himself on the line. He enjoyed it.”

 

The Bulls’ veteran center Caldwell Jones became a believer after Jordan had played only a few games. “Michael Jordan is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” said Jones.

 As Jordan’s rookie year unfolded, his growing fame rubbed some people the wrong way. In the All-Star Game, Detroit’s Isiah Thomas decided to freeze Jordan out of the Eastern Conference’s offense by simply refusing to pass the ball to him. In 22 minutes in the game, Jordan managed only nine shots. 

The Bulls and Pistons were scheduled to meet in the first game after the break, and by this time the All-Star snub had become a cause celebre. Jordan scored 49 points and pulled down 15 rebounds in leading the Bulls to an overtime victory. Thomas and the Pistons learned a bitter lesson that would be reinforced time and again over the years: it doesn’t pay to make Michael mad.

 

 

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The White Sox Bring It Home

Fifteen years ago, on October 23, 2005, the White Sox came from behind to beat the Houston Astros and take a two-games-to-none lead in the World Series. Spoiler alert: the South Siders were headed for a sweep. Here is a brief recounting of that series.   

After the 2005 White Sox won the American League pennant, chairman Jerry Reinsdorf wanted more. “No matter what happens,” he said, “when you win the pennant, you’ve had one wonderful year. But then you get greedy, and you want to get four more [wins]. It’s only been since 1917, so I think it’s time, and hopefully these guys can get the job done.”

The South Siders’ opponents in their first World Series since 1959 were the Houston Astros, who had come into being in 1962 and were appearing in their first Fall Classic ever.

 

Game 1 was played in Chicago on October 22. Roger Clemens started for Houston and was not effective, leaving with a sore hamstring after two innings and three White Sox runs. Joe Crede made the difference for the Sox with both bat and glove; his fourth-inning home run snapped a 3-3 tie, and he made diving stops at third base in the sixth (with a runner on third and one out) and the seventh (with two on and two out). The Sox added a run in the eighth on Scott Podsednik’s triple with A.J. Pierzynski aboard. Closer Bobby Jenks struck out three of the four batters he faced to preserve the 5-3 win for starter Jose Contreras.

PAUL KONERKO WATCHES HIS GRAND SLAM IN FLIGHT.

Game 2 was one of the most entertaining games ever played in Chicago—or anywhere else, for that matter. The cold, wet weather did not dampen the enthusiasm of the 41,432 who turned out. Old reliable Mark Buehrle pitched seven innings for the White Sox, allowing four runs on seven hits. His counterpart, Andy Pettitte, left after six innings with a 4-2 lead. Dan Wheeler started the seventh for Houston and retired Crede on a foul pop-up. Then Juan Uribe stroked a double to center. Podsednik struck out. Tadahito Iguchi coaxed a walk. Jermaine Dye was up next; he worked the count to 3-and-2 before the next offering hit his bat—but was ruled to have hit his arm. Now the bases were loaded, and the crowd was in an uproar.

Chad Qualls replaced Wheeler on the mound. Sox first baseman Paul Konerko stepped up to the plate. He swung at Qualls’s first pitch and drilled it over the wall for a grand slam. It was one of the most electrifying moments in Chicago’s long baseball history. Konerko circled the bases and then took a curtain call to acknowledge the tremendous ovation from the rain-soaked crowd. After the game, Konerko maintained that he’d been focused on getting a hit to tie the score and that the idea of hitting a home run hadn’t occurred to him. “That’s usually when you get them,” he said, “when you’re not trying to.”

 

Cliff Politte retired the Astros in order in the eighth, and Jenks came on in the ninth with the Sox still ahead 6-4. With two outs and runners on second and third, pinch hitter Jose Vizcaino lined a single to left, and the game was tied. Neal Cotts replaced Jenks and got the third out with no further damage.

 

Houston manager Phil Garner handed the ball to all-star closer Brad Lidge for the bottom of the ninth. Lidge retired Uribe for the first out, but then the unlikely Podsednik belted a home run to right-center field, and the White Sox were 7-6 winners. After hitting no homers during the regular season, Podsednik had now hit his second of the postseason. Few home runs, even by the most illustrious sluggers, have been more impactful. It was only the 14th “walk-off” homer in World Series history, and it gave the Sox a commanding lead in the Series. “Clearly, everything they’re doing now is right,” Garner said. “They can’t do anything wrong.”

 

Game 3, the first World Series game ever played in Texas, was a classic. It looked bleak for the White Sox early, as the Astros built up a 4-0 lead for their ace righthander Roy Oswalt in the first four innings. Crede started the top of the fifth with a home run and ended the inning standing on first base after being hit by a pitch. In the meantime, RBI singles by Iguchi and Dye and a two-run double by Pierzynski had given the Sox a 5-4 edge.

 

Sox righty Jon Garland settled down and retired nine of the last 10 batters he faced. He left after seven innings with the Sox still ahead 5-4. In the bottom of the eighth, with two on and two out, Houston’s Jason Lane doubled off Dustin Hermanson to tie the score. Then, with the go-ahead run on third and a potential insurance run (Lane) on second, Hermanson caught Brad Ausmus looking to end the inning.

 

Both teams were scoreless in the ninth inning. And the 10th. And the 11th, 12th, and 13th. A parade of pitchers, pinch hitters, and pinch runners cluttered the scorecard for both sides, and still the game remained tied. Dye led off the White Sox’ 14th with a single, a hopeful sign, but Konerko bounced into a double play on the very next pitch. Geoff Blum, a backup infielder who’d been acquired late in the season, came up to bat. After taking two balls from pitcher Ezequiel Astacio, Blum connected with a low fastball and sent it over the right-field fence. “I didn’t know if I got it high enough,” he said. “Somebody was watching out for me.” The home run was the first and last at-bat of the Series for Blum, a former Astro. The Sox added another run on two singles and two walks, taking a 7-5 edge into the bottom of the 14th.

 

Damaso Marte, the Sox’ eighth pitcher of the night, was on the hill for his second inning of work. With two outs and a man on first, an error by shortstop Uribe put the tying runs on and brought the winning run to the plate. Manager Ozzie Guillen called for Buehrle, who had concluded his seven-inning stint in Game 2 just 51 hours earlier. Buehrle got Adam Everett on a pop-up to Uribe, who had no mishap this time. The Sox won to take a 3-0 lead in the Series.

 

The Astros had managed just one hit after the fourth inning and had stranded 15 base runners in all. They’d left the potential winning run in scoring position in the ninth, 10th, and 11th. Houston skipper Garner did not offer any platitudes. “This is embarrassing,” he said, “the way it’s played out.” Garner saw what was obvious to anyone by now: that the White Sox would soon be world champions.

 

In Game 4 on October 26, Freddy Garcia and Astros righthander Brandon Backe each tossed seven shutout innings. Lidge came on in the eighth for Houston. Willie Harris, pinch hitting for Garcia, led off the inning with a single. Podsednik sacrificed him to second. Harris advanced to third on a groundout and scored on a clutch two-out single by Dye. “I just stayed with my game plan,” said Dye. “I didn’t try to do too much, just tried to hit it hard somewhere and found a hole up the middle.”

 

The lone run was enough. Politte and Cotts held the lead through the eighth, and Jenks closed the Astros out in the ninth. The game, the series, the season, and White Sox’ 88-year wait ended on a ground ball to Uribe, who tossed to Konerko for the final out. Konerko held onto the ball for a couple days, then presented it to Reinsdorf at the Sox’ victory celebration in Chicago. The latter was overcome with emotion at the gracious and surprising gesture.

 

“It was only fitting it ended up 1-0,” Pierzynski said of the final game. “That’s the way we started the year [on Opening Day], that’s the way we started the second half, and that’s the way it should have ended.”

 

The Series really should have ended, in a perfect world, on the South Side of Chicago. It was mildly disappointing that all four clinching games—for the division title, the first playoff series, the American League Championship Series, and the World Series—had been on the road. Thus the White Sox and their fans hadn’t had the chance to celebrate these victories together. Nonetheless, it had been a spectacular and satisfying run: 11-1 in the postseason and 19-3 overall since a nerve-wracking September slump. The White Sox had spent every day of the season in first place, beaten back all comers, and earned the mantle of world champions in every way.

 

“People are looking for big theories,” general manager Kenny Williams said. “We’ve just got 25 hard-working, grind-it-out guys. We asked them one thing—each and every one of them to leave it all out on the field. They did that more than any team I’ve ever seen.”

 

As White Sox fans basked in the glory of the achievement they had always imagined but never quite expected, they paused to recall other faithful fans who hadn’t lived long enough to see it. Although many of these parents, grandparents, siblings, spouses, and friends had been deceased for decades, they weren’t really gone—at least in the minds of their survivors. The Sox had won for them, too.

 

Check out our book Heydays: Great Stories in Chicago Sports on Amazon.  

 

Worth a Thousand Words: The Veecks

 

It has often been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. We try to prove that from time to time by presenting a compelling image and not beating it to death with too much verbiage. 

     The photograph below shows the Veeck family of Hinsdale in the late 1920s (the exact date is unknown). Grace DeForest Veeck (1878-1964) and her husband Bill Veeck Sr. (1876-1933) stand on either side of their son Bill Jr. (1914-1986).

 

THE VEECK FAMILY, LATE 1920s

 

Bill Veeck Sr. was a Chicago newspaperman whose frequent and pointed criticisms of the Cubs prompted the team's owner William Wrigley Jr. to challenge him to put his money where his mouth was. Veeck took him up on it, signing on as vice president in 1917. He was promoted to president and general manager in 1919, and served in that role until his untimely demise in 1933. Under Veeck's stewardship the Cubs won pennants in 1918, 1929, and 1932, and smashed all previous attendance records. Their figure of 1,485,166 in 1929 stood as the major-league record for 17 years.

 

Bill Veeck Jr. worked for the Cubs before his father's death and for several years thereafter. He was responsible for two iconic features of Wrigley Field: the towering center-field scoreboard and the ivy on the outfield walls. He served in the Marine Corps during World War II, losing a leg in the process, then undertook a career as a nomadic owner of baseball franchises, including the White Sox from 1959 to 1961 and 1976 to 1980. He introduced the famous exploding scoreboard at Comiskey Park and employed all sorts of stunts to stir up interest in his ballclubs. He was inducted (posthumously) into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1991.

 "The most beautiful thing in the world," Veeck Jr. said, "is a ballpark filled with people." No doubt his dad would have agreed.

 

 

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Mr. Blackhawk

Forty-eight years ago, on October 15, 1972, Blackhawks center Stan Mikita became the sixth player in National Hockey League history to reach 1,000 points (goals plus assists) in his career. Mikita assisted on Cliff Koroll's goal, the only one the Hawks scored in a 3-1 loss to the St. Louis Blues.

     Bobby Hull, Mikita’s teammate for 14 years, was not at Chicago Stadium that night to see Mikita join the exclusive club to which he (Hull) already belonged (the other members were Gordie Howe, Alex Delvecchio, Norm Ullman, and Jean Beliveau). Hull had jumped to the Winnipeg Jets of the fledgling World Hockey Association during the previous off-season.

     In later years, Denis Savard and Patrick Kane have also joined the Blackhawks' section of the 1,000-point club.   

 

STAN MIKITA

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1940, Mikita was sent at the age of eight to live with his aunt and uncle in Canada, escaping the Communist subjugation of his homeland. When he joined the Hawks ten years later, at five-foot-nine and 152 pounds, he made up his mind to hit rather than be hit. “Either they were going to kill me and carry me out in a box, or I was going to survive,” Mikita recalled. “Luckily, I survived.” 

     Mikita was among the most penalized players in the league early in his career, earning the nickname Le petit diable (“the little devil”) from French-speaking fans. Then, in 1966-67, he suddenly decided that he needed to spend more time on the ice and less in the penalty box.
     The new Mikita was a revelation. His high-powered Scooter Line, featuring Kenny Wharram on right wing and Doug Mohns on left wing, accounted for 91 goals and 222 points as the Blackhawks broke the NHL record for goals scored in a season. The Hawks won their first Prince of Wales Trophy as regular-season champions, and Mikita was rewarded with three trophies of his own: the Art Ross as the league’s top scorer, the Lady Byng as its most gentlemanly player, and the Hart as the player “adjudged to be most valuable to his team.” No player had ever swept the three coveted awards in one year before, and no one (not even Wayne Gretzky) has done it since 1968—when Mikita repeated the feat.

     “The guy has such tremendous reflexes and so much talent,” goalie Glenn Hall said of Mikita, “that he can change his mind in mid-stride when he’s skating or shooting. And believe me, a guy who can do that drives goalkeepers nuts.” 

     Mikita remained with the Blackhawks for almost a decade after Hull’s defection to the WHA, retiring in 1980 after 22 seasons. He remains the franchise leader in games played, assists, points, and plus/minus. 

     Mikita and Hull were reunited when both were inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1983.

 

 

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