HAMMOND IS MAKING CHICAGO PHYSICALLY ILL — UNLESS THE BEARS LOOK AT RATE FIELD
A move to Indiana might be necessary, as taxpayers finance a stadium on a slag heap, but if McCaskey makes one last call, he’ll try the owner of the White Sox's park about a dome and a refurbishment
When does The City That Works become The Worst City? Try today, when we deal with the basic truths of life, such as building a stadium for a football team that last won a Super Bowl 40 years ago and might wait 40 more years to find a home.
Are the Bears better off atop a massive slag heap in Indiana? The fight song would have to change — “Bear Down, Michael Jackson” — but maybe that’s best for a directionless franchise with a strange chairman who umpires Batavia-Kaneland baseball games and can’t cut a simple political deal with anyone who matters. A mortified fan base prefers to blame ratballs in Springfield, but if we know anything about a downcast city, the people who thrive need airtight connections who produce when it matters.
George McCaskey, like other McCaskeys, has waited too long for someone to approve Arlington Heights or someone to save Chicago or someone to force him to Hammond and the Whiting Refinery. It could be the Skyway route is best for an organization that couldn’t find a serious quarterback, then found one in Caleb Williams, but might not be able to pay him the NFL’s biggest contract and trade him to the Los Angeles Rams — who just acquired Myles Garrett and might not be done in the late 2020s. If the grandson of George Halas struggled to deposit the Bears into Arlington Heights, where they own land close to Papa Bear’s heart, what is the point of having McCaskey as a controlling owner?
The commissioner, Roger Goodell, has demanded an answer from McCaskey and team president/CEO Kevin Warren, who continues to produce strings of zeroes in the stadium hunt. Sometime soon, the NFL might realize the Bears are hopeless and should remain at Soldier Field until it erodes. Chicago was tired of this endless process back when I wrote at the Sun-Times, when the lakefront rebuild reminded me of a Disney cruise ship colliding with the columns of the Parthenon. Amazing how only the Cubs, thanks to dilly-dallying by Tom Ricketts in Wrigleyville, have the sweetest sports landscape. The White Sox play in Obsoleteville and don’t have a lease in 2029. The United Center is headed toward its 35th birthday, ranking as the fifth-oldest arena in the NBA and sixth-oldest in the NHL — but not even the Jordan statue provides a real mystique.
Imagine playing in a place that looks beautiful on TV, beside the skyline and the lake, and drives ticket holders bonkers. Assuming they won’t ditch tickets — they should, at last — they should be flabbergasted that a minority owner just finished building a world-class stadium in Evanston. Pat Ryan, who controls 10 percent of the Bears, should have been involved in the construction business when McCaskey is clueless. He and his son, Pat Jr., have invested $1 billion for a 35,000-seat palace at Northwestern University. It’s beyond belief that the Ryans are established on Central Street when the Bears have nowhere to play. Did it occur to McCaskey to huddle with Ryan and Evanston officials and turn a larger stadium into a Bears solution?
Never.
We hear of Stan Kroenke driving around Los Angeles, seeing what was left of Hollywood Park and realizing SoFi Stadium should be privately financed on that site. Illinois is run by a governor who protects taxpayers, as he should. In Washington, the Commanders are paying $2.7 billion for a new stadium while the city invests $1.1 billion. In Nashville, taxpayers are lifting heavy weights for an indoor stadium hosting the 2030 Super Bowl. If McCaskey is better off with a taxpayer-financed proposal in Indiana, bring in John Mellencamp for the anthem. The Chiefs went to Kansas, but that is part of the Kansas City metropolitan area.
Hammond, as a dateline, makes me physically ill. Warren will compare Wolf Lake to MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., which is 9.2 miles from Times Square and near turnpikes and trains. Northwest Indiana is 20 miles southeast of Wacker Drive and nowhere near people living north of Chicago. That includes Bears players and coaches, who would be looking at 17 road games a season from the team facility in Lake Forest.
“We will finalize our evaluation of both Arlington Heights and Hammond, and remain on the late spring/early summer timeline that we have previously communicated,” the Bears said Monday. “We will provide an update when we have a decision to share.”
No one has time to wait for house speaker Chris Welch, who said, “There’s a lot of work still ahead of us. We’ll continue discussions on a number of issues, including our approach to the Bears stadium question this summer.”
A team valued at $8.2 billion should be positioned to pay property taxes deep into the future. This is where McCaskey shouldn’t be running an NFL operation. Pick Arlington Heights and pay up. Choose Hammond and deal with the sickening smoke. One way or the other, do not make any of us wait any longer.
Personally, I would reconfigure Rate Field if Justin Ishbia succeeds in buying Amtrak’s 14th Street yard. Might McCaskey meet with the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority — with Ishbia and, God help us, Jerry Reinsdorf while considering the 2030s as a possibility? It’s sensible — a handful of home games a season, beside a train, not far from Soldier Field. If baseball dies, great. The Bears have a home with a dome and a radical refurbishment.
Just ask me. I get it. I left Chicago when I was stuck in China, by the Great Wall, and my idiotic newspaper couldn’t post our Olympics stories on the website. Imagine realizing what is right — and knowing the city always will get it wrong.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host.