HOW I BEAT A TERRIBLE SPORTS OWNER AT A NEWSPAPER THAT SHOULD FADE AWAY
Baseball players do not want a salary cap, bringing back sick memories when Reinsdorf tried to run me out of Chicago — he failed — while the Sun-Times is so crippled that it forgets Brunson in Game 1
A daily newspaper that should not exist, the Chicago Sun-Times, did not include a website story at 8 a.m. today about the Knicks beating the Spurs. Game 1 of the NBA Finals featured Jalen Brunson, star of the night, who might be the greatest basketball player produced in Illinois. Nothing that appeared in the sports section, such as the discovery of tavern pizza by Caleb Williams, was worthier than Brunson.
If the Sun-Times is “the hardest-working paper in America,” someone mistakenly went to the bar at 11 p.m. Not only did the paper fail to cover a hugely important event, editors are apparently ignoring it, which will frustrate Brunson fans and those of us who want “the hardest-working paper” to earn its hokey self-aggrandizement.
What if the city blew up and crashed into the lake?
Sorry, the news won’t make the website.
The paper should have died 32 years ago, though I worked and suffered and made good money for 17 years. In late February once upon a time, I returned from the Winter Olympics in Norway and wondered how I successfully handled — by myself — several Tribune staffers in the frigid town of Lillehammer. I wrote as many stories as necessary, three or four or five a day. Late one night, trying to make deadline on a Tonya Harding piece, I slipped on the ice and stared at what appeared to be the Northern Lights. At the end, when appearing on my AM 1000 show, I used a private phone during the historic figure-skating competition and was nailed by Channel 2 cameraman Chuck Davidson, who reported me to CBS.
Was the toil worth it? Walking into the newsroom upon arriving home, I received a standing ovation from my colleagues, which doesn’t happen often in media. A few days later, the Sun-Times had a new owner — Hollinger Inc. The company was established by Conrad Black and David Radler, who had a good friend in Toronto named Paul Beeston — president of the Blue Jays and the future president of Major League Baseball — who happened to be a good friend of the owner of the Chicago White Sox.
Jerry Reinsdorf.
Aargh.
If you’ve seen my recent columns about baseball owners who don’t spend enough — such as Reinsdorf, who can’t spend $76 million for a free agent when the New York Mets spent $765 million on Juan Soto — my pieces that summer were about shoddy owners. The high-powered group held critical meetings in Chicago, where Reinsdorf was known to scream about me and spread the nasty word. One day, I was told by Sun-Times executive editor Mark Nadler — who had led those cheers in February — that my columns were being scrutinized. When he went home at night, a fax would be sent to him. If he didn’t like what I wrote, the columnist with the standing ovation might be fired. The paper was protecting Reinsdorf, which has galled me ever since.
Well, guess what happened in November, two months after acting commissioner Bud Selig and Reinsdorf canceled the 1994 World Series? On a Friday, I was called into the office by radio executive Larry Wert, who ran AM 1000. He fired me, saying it had “nothing to do with (my) performance.” Whatever, Larry baby. That weekend, I covered the Bears in Miami. The next day, I received a call from the Sun-Times.
I was fired again, which was sickening. No one gave me a reason. I hired a Chicago lawyer, who was helped by the Newspaper Guild. Quickly, I was reinstated by Radler, who invited me for dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel and ordered me to sit beside lead editor Dennis Britton at an event — featuring Margaret Thatcher — the day before he was fired.
From that point on, thanks to sports editor Bill Adee, the Sun-Times clobbered the Tribune and produced one of the best sections in America. Adee left for the Trib before the Sun-Times blew its future — the bosses had no understanding of the web. I went to China for the Beijing Olympics, with Greg Couch, and it took hours and even days before our pieces were posted. We were sitting in the media room near Yahoo Sports, which was run by Jimmy Pitaro, who now runs ESPN, and featured writers such as Dan Wetzel, Adrian Wojnarowski and Jeff Passan.
I went home and resigned from a terrible operation. I joined AOL Sports, which hired dozens of writers but wasn’t interested in the long haul. I worked in San Francisco as newspapers began to die. The failure of the Sun-Times — including Jalen Brunson, on Wednesday night and Thursday morning — should be a landmark movie.
I might write it.
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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.