The Golden Jet is Out of Fuel

 The Chicago Blackhawks recently decided to drop 83 year old former star Bobby Hull as an “ambassador” to the club under the pretext that they were re-evaluating the ambassador role after the recent deaths of Blackhawk legends Stan Mikita and Tony Esposito, and claiming the departure was mutual. 

In 2008, John McDonough brought Hull, Mikita, Esposito, Chris Chelios and Denis Savard back to promote the team after “Dollar” Bill Wirtz had served up a mediocre product for years and wrecked the team’s image.   By the time Wirtz died, and son Rocky took over, the city was largely indifferent to the team.  It reached a nadir in 2004 when the team honored Keith Magnuson after his tragic death in a car accident.  I was at that game, and it was sad to see Magnuson’s family introduced at the United Center which was only about 1/3 full.

McDonough wisely understood that there was a latent residual attachment to it left over from the early 1970’s.  Along with signing some top talent to make the team competitive again, he brought back these players to rekindle that fan base.  And it worked.  The Blackhawks were able to recharge the team, fill the United Center and win three Stanley Cups.  Even better, the team upgraded its fan base from a bunch of rowdy drunks to families, business people and young guys taking their girlfriends out on dates.

But Blackhawks’s fortunes have changed in recent years as they have sunk back to mediocrity.  The team aged out and the Hawks fired Joel Quenneville, the coach that took them to their cup victories.  Worse, the Hawks were plagued by the scandal of player Kyle Beach, who was sexually assaulted by a staff member, and the assault was covered up by the organization, who apparently gave Brad Aldrich a favorable send off, where he purportedly assaulted another player at Miami of Ohio.

Jettisoning the Golden Jet comes shortly after Rocky Wirtz’s horrendous press conference in which he aggressively and brusquely shut down questions about what the Blackhawks were doing to ensure that another Kyle Beach situation would not occur.

After the termination of Hull, several sports commentators jumped on board, saying that Hull was a “terrible person” and that the Blackhawks were right in severing their relationship with him, citing his assault on a police officer that tried to intervene in the domestic abuse at his home.  Hull apparently was a repeat abuser and some of the reported incidents were ghastly. He also is quoted as saying that “Hitler had some good ideas” and that the “black population in the U.S. was growing too fast.”

Now, I hardly wish to defend Hull for these things, or excuse it.  Domestic abuse is a very serious thing.  And, if true, those quotes were abhorrent.  No doubt about that.

But I find it a bit disingenuous of the Wirtz family to suddenly decide that Hull presents an image problem for them.   These were facts that were known to them AT THE TIME THEY ENGAGED HULL as an ambassador back in 2008.  None of this was new or recently discovered.

Hull was adored by Chicago fans. Wirtz was more than happy to overlook these flaws when the franchise was intent on rebuilding its brand and reviving a moribund team.  Now that the Blackhawks are on a steady downward slope, Hull is no longer useful to them.

I find it ironic that it is exactly 50 years ago that the Blackhawks organizing turned its back on Hull.  In 1972, Hull received a competing offer to play in the competing WHA.  Hull later said he would have accepted less money to stay in Chicago but old man Arthur Wirtz didn’t bother to speak to him or make a counteroffer of any sort.   To the shock and dismay of Chicago fans, he up and left the city that loved him.

Fifty years later, the Wirtz family abruptly does it to Hull again. 

Since the mid 80’s, there have been no reports of bad behavior on the part of Hull, so perhaps he  has changed his ways.

The Wirtz family, however, has not changed theirs.

Babbitt

 Of my many quirks and idiosyncrasies, I like to read books that coincide with anniversaries.  I read Willa Cather’s My Antonia and Karel Capek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) on the 100^th anniversary of their publication and Laura Dassa Walls’s biography of Thoreau on the 200^th anniversary of his birth.  2022 is the 100^th anniversary of the publication of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, the satirical novel of middle class life in America. While 2022 is also the 100^th anniversary of James Joyce’s Ulysses, I thought Babbitt might be more digestible.

A 100th or 200^th year span is enough to give you a broad, sweeping perspective on things.  I am fascinated to see what things have changed and what things have not and what challenges and issues the characters wrestle with.

Babbitt centers on the life of a middle aged real estate broker, George Babbitt, an average guy trying to carve out a reasonably successful life in the fictional growing Midwestern city of Zenith. He has a dull marriage to a nondescript woman, Zilla.  Babbitt is torn between becoming a pillar of the community and accepted and welcomed into the upper echelons of the town, and becoming somewhat of a rebel, an outsider, a rulebreaker.

Struggling to find meaning in his desultory life, George Babbitt eventually breaks down and has what has come to be known as a mid-life crisis, has an affair, starts hanging out with a racier crowd and rejects the more staid, conforming upstanding society.  He eventually returns to his wife, and, after initially rejecting membership to the country club, back to the community after veering off course.

Like Capek’s R.U.R. (presciently dealing with artificial intelligence and robots), I find Babbitt’s continued relevance most interesting.  Today, there are millions of Babbitts earning a living in transactional businesses in a modern, interlinked economy in sales, law and a myriad of professions, whose existence is merely to facilitate transactions and these people try to find some meaning in their work.  The velocity and technology may have changed but the emptiness and the need to fill that emptiness has not.

The wariness of “the other” is still with us and has not changed much over the past century.   Mores have changed.  Sinclair Lewis’s use of the “n” word and his disparagement of Jews (he uses the word “Jew” as a verb in dialogue) jolt the modern day reader, but many themes remain the same.  Babbitt says this about blacks:

“I don’t know what’s come over these n****s, nowadays.  They never give you a civil answer.”

“That’s a fact.  They’re getting so they don’t have a of respect for you.  The old-fashioned coon was a fine old cuss—he knew his place—but these young dinges don’t want to be porters or cotton-pickers.”

These quotes might be shocking to modern sensibilities, but the underlying tensions are still with us, especially as we wrestle with critical race theory in schools and in large corporations.

Babbitt also contains dialogue dealing with the right level of immigration, and how to assimilate those immigrants.

Similarly, in the post-WWII period, we took for granted that the path to middle class or upper middle class life necessarily went through college.   As we see the degradation of standards and degrees in universities, and the recognition that truck drivers and skilled electricians may have a bigger role to play in our day to day lives than middle managers in banks, and the out of control costs of college, conventional wisdom is being questioned once again.   As Babbitt observed a century ago:

I’m a college man—I know!  There is one objection you might make though.  I certainly do protest against any effort to get a lot of fellows out of barber shops and factories into the professions. They’re too crowded already, and what’ll we do for workmen if all those fellows go and get educated?”

Reading these century old works is a real treat.  Certainly, much has changed.  But in many ways, many of the issues are still here in American life.  Babbitt is an interesting lens through which to view America in 2022.

 

Death of Sports

 

Our society is being roiled and torn in more directions than at any time since the Great Depression and perhaps the Civil War.  Indeed, last week the New York Times Book Review reviewed two books that address a possible civil war in the U.S.

One of the cultural institutions that had always acted as an adhesive is sports and now that is being devoured by its own mismanagement and new devotion to Wokeness.

The N.F.L. began with allowing the kneeling of Colin Kaepernick and advanced to raising money to spring convicted felons from prison.  The same league that refused to allow the Dallas Cowboys to put the names of assassinated police officers on their helmets, now promote “social justice” slogans.  And now Wokeness is going to devour the N.F.L. because you can never be Woke enough.  Fired former Miami head coach Brian Flores is suing the NFL, alleging racial discrimination and that he had “sham” interviews in which a candidate had already been chosen.  Now, I don’t know if this suit will go anywhere, but it’s a bit of karma after the N.F.L. had John Gruden “canceled” after some arguably racist emails were made public.  The league that tolerates wife beating, disrespect for the flag, and subsidizes the release of criminals is getting a taste of its own medicine.  Now, Commissioner Goodell is turning to race baiter and grifter Al Sharpton to advise him on correcting the imbalance of black coaches in the NFL.   I’ve given up on this hopeless league that is consuming itself with Wokeness.

The Olympics this year are a grotesque extravaganza showcasing the Chinese Communist Party that continues to threaten Taiwan and run concentration camps for Uyghers.  Dubbed the “Genocide Olympics, not since Berlin 1936 has the world acquiesced to such evil.   This is a regime that either negligently or, perhaps even intentionally, unleashed a contagion two years ago that had the effect of dropping nuclear warheads on several cities, and then actively covered up its tracks.  We have gone from the US track team holding up its fists in protest in 1968 to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warning our athletes not to offend the CCP because “they are ruthless.”   I have not, and will not, watch a second of the Beijing Olympics.

Then there is the whole controversy over Lia Thomas, the transgender swimmer at Penn that is smashing all of the womens’ records, alienating teammates with “her” penis flopping around the locker room and setting back the progress of womens’ sports.  As Abigail Shrier put it, “she” is vandalizing womens’ swimming records.  Between the anti-patriotism of Megan Rapinoe and the intrusion of biological men into womens’ sports, Wokeness has shattered the interest of those of us that have supported womens’ sports over the years.

Finally, there are the Blackhawks.  After settling a lawsuit by Kyle Beach, who was sexually assaulted by a staff member of the organization, owner Rocky Wirtz angrily dismissed a logical question from the press, “What steps has the organization taken to ensure something like this will not happen again?”

It is a question that he should have been preparted for, but Wirtz snapped, “I’m going to answer that question.  I think the report speaks for itself.  The people that were involved are no longer here.  We’re not looking back to 2010.   We’re looking forward.  And we’re not going to talk about 2010.   We’re not going to talk about what happened.  We’re moving forward.  This is my answer!  And what’s your next question?”

[Son Danny tries to interject]

“No! That’s none of your business,” he continued angrily at the reporter.  “ That’s none of your business! That’s none of your business!  What we’re gonna do today is our business.  I don’t think it’s any of your business.  You don’t work for the company.  If someone in the company asks that question, we’ll answer it.  And I think you should get on to the next subject.”

It was 50 years ago exactly that grandpa Art Wirtz let star and fan favorite Bobby Hull slip away to the competing WHA without so much as a counteroffer.  The Wirtz family once again revealed itself with its disdain for Blackhawk fans.  I was dismayed then as I am now.  Rocky said, “We’re moving on.”  Yes, and so am I.

Sports used to be something that brought us together.  It was part of our shared culture and experiences.  From Babe Ruth to Babe Didrikson Zaharias. From Gordie Howe to Wayne Gretzky.  From Mark Spitz to Michael Phelps.   Sports and sports heroes have been part of the fabric of our society.  But Wokeness and corruption have so corroded sports that sports is tearing us apart and becoming unwatchable.