Can I Play, Too?

Whenever I secure a media interview for a spokesperson or am reading the "At Play" section in the Chicago Tribune, or any one of my usual reading materials (Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, National Geographic Traveler, etc.), I tend to feel like a little kid on the other side of the playground fence, watching a game of stickball I wasn't playing. That's because I wish I was writing and getting published the way other people are.

I think Paul Sullivan, Phil Rogers, and Rick Morrissey of the Chicago Tribune's "Sports" team feel the same way. They have a headstart -- they are baseball reporters and a columnist for one of the largest metropolitan newspapers in the US. But to have to always write about someone else's baseball team in October, always listening to the sound of someone else's Thunderstick, interviewing names like Craig Monroe and Barry Zito who won't appear on a Cubs roster until they're past their peaks, has got to be sad, demoralising, and a drag. (Morrissey and Rogers have it a little better, since Rick can actually write about other Chicago teams and sports and Rogers can write about anything he wants in baseball.)

But Sully -- with his 1970s dorkmeister centre-parted floppy hair, big round glasses, and toothy smile, like the kid who was always left on the bench during P.E. (as opposed to Rogers' metrosexualised salt-and-pepper sideburns and Caesar cut and Morrissey's ex-football-hunk-aged-nicely look) -- spent most of this season writing funny headlines and noshed on team gossip. Karma is forgiving, I suppose, because he can now at least report on the Cubs' un-Dombrowski-like search for a new manager, which is intriguing and soap operatic. However, he might want to be careful that he doesn't commit the cardinal sin of journalism -- plagiarism. That's a huge risk, considering every Cubs managerial era works out the same way -- one good year, one anti-climatic September stumble year, two shithole years.

One final setback -- as Rogers and Mark Gonzales (Sox writer) are in Oakland enjoying the Californian weather and covering the American League Championship Series, Sully is probably somewhere in the catacombs under the Michigan Avenue bridge, hoping that the weather holds long enough between working on his Cheezborgers at the Billy Goat and running back upstairs into the Tribune Building.