A little fun with Rogers Wrigley Field analogy:


Mike Royko was Wrigley Field's poet laureate
Chicago columnist specialized in pointing out Cubs' follies for more than three decades

April 04, 2014|Paul Sullivan


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Mike Royko in December 1974.
Mike Royko in December 1974. (Frank Hanes / Chicago Tribune)
We can only imagine how much fun it would've been had Mike Royko's fantasy of buying the Cubs come to fruition.

The late Chicago columnist, the conscience of Cubs fans from the 1960s through the '90s, met with former A's owner Charlie Finley in the Billy Goat Tavern in 1981, scheming to persuade former Sun-Times owner Marshall Field to put up 51 percent of the money to buy the club and let them run it.


Ultimately, Field procrastinated and owner William Wrigley wound up selling the Cubs and Wrigley Field to Tribune Co. for a relatively measly $20.5 million.

The rest, alas, is history.

Whether Royko could have ended the championship drought is anyone's guess. But as a former legman to Royko and a longtime Tribune employee, I feel confident in saying a Royko-run Cubs team would've been much more interesting than the one run by the suits in Tribune Tower, and he would not have let Greg Maddux leave. (And, yes, he would've installed lights, just as Tribune Co. did in 1988.)

Few loved the Cubs or Wrigley Field as much as Royko, whose memorial was held at the ballpark after his death in 1997. Many writers have poked fun at the Cubs over the years, but no one pointed out the absurdity of the franchise's follies like Royko did for more than three decades in the pages of the Chicago Daily News, Sun-Times and Tribune:

• While many Chicago sportswriters helped perpetuate the story of the Billy Goat Curse — in which tavern owner William Sianis put a hex on the team after his goat was denied entrance to a 1945 World Series game — it was Royko's widely syndicated column that transformed the curse from urban legend to nationally renowned piece of Chicago mythology.

• Royko's annual Cubs quiz traditionally kicked off the season, reminding us of the obscure yet transcendent moments in Cubs history, such as the pitcher (Bill Faul) who said he could hypnotize his arm and the adventures of outfielder Jose Cardenal, who once missed a game because his eyelids got stuck. Royko always referred to Cardenal as "the immortal Jose Cardenal" and admired his ability to come up with bizarre excuses to avoid playing. ("An inspiration to those of us who believe in sleeping late, walking slow and calling in sick at the office.")

• After another Cubs season ended in failure, Royko would crank up a column on the "Ex-Cubs Factor," which theorized no postseason team could win a World Series with three or more former Cubs on its roster. While he always credited freelance writer Ron Berler, Royko wrote about it so often, many believed it was his creation.

• Royko once wrote fired manager Don Zimmer "looked like an aging Munchkin," and his replacement, Jim Essian, "acts like the master of ceremonies in a strip joint." When the Tribune hired outfielder Dave Kingman to pen a column for its sports section, Royko skewered the slugger with a parody column in the Daily News by "Dave Ding-Dong."

• Royko even poked fun at popular announcer Harry Caray: "If some obscure player does something exceptional, Harry tells us: 'Well, they're dancing in the streets of his hometown of Cowsville.' But how does Caray know that? It is mere conjecture. For all we know, they are sprawled in the gutters of Cowsville."

• In some of his most memorable Cubs columns, during the 1984 National League Championship Series, Royko labeled Padres fans as sushi-eating wimps who didn't deserve a World Series. The Cubs promptly lost three straight in front of a frenzied crowd at Jack Murphy Stadium, and some Chicagoans blamed Royko for inciting the fan base.

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Before I became a sportswriter, I was a reporter/researcher for Royko from 1985 to '87, an apprentice to the master of column writing.

This was before night games at Wrigley, and I can attest Royko had his portable TV tuned to Cubs games every summer day in his office, turning down the volume only when he began writing his columns.

After the Cubs' near-miss in 1984, he bought season tickets in '85. But as the rotation went down and the team went south, part of my responsibility as legman was to unload Royko's tickets in the Tribune city room (and get as close to face value as possible).

During our frequent conversations about sports, Royko often bragged that on days he wrote columns on the Cubs, Bears or other local teams, he was the town's top sportswriter. It was hard to deny. There's no doubt he was the most important chronicler of the Cubs' foibles, the one who kept telling us the sky was falling on an otherwise perfect summer day.

"As a Cubs fan — and this could also apply to Sox, Bears and Hawks fans — you should have known better," Royko wrote in a Tribune column on Feb. 8, 1996. "But you became a true believer. You forgot the one hard rule of being a Chicago sports fan: If anything bad can happen, it figures that it will happen to us."

Some of my favorite assignments were Cubs-related.