WHAT IF I CAME BACK TO CHICAGO AND SCRUTINIZED THE WORST TEAMS ON EARTH?

Who knows if they’d have me — or if I’d want them — but this would be a hypnotizing time to break down the ugliest city in American sports, where the Bears should sell and the White Sox should move?

Should I return to Chicago? A prime executive of a media company emailed me this month. The person knew the Bears are football’s shoddiest team and the White Sox are baseball’s worst team — and though Al Michaels wouldn’t say it, he thinks the armpits of 8.9 million people were stinky Thursday night.

Are we serious about a meeting? Yes, I was told.

Or maybe I’ll wait until the Bears win a game.

The sparkling skyline wowed me again. I looked, then I wanted to pounce as it leaked more red ink and the usual corruption. My mind always has been inspired by the wallop of buildings, realizing they stop life and shine grimy eyeballs when crime and real estate are collapsing. It’s a reminder of where I wrote columns and called home for 17 years, before time in Los Angeles let me watch four championships in the last five years and time in San Francisco allowed one championship. All while the Bears, Cubs and Sox have needed 280 collective years to win … THREE CHAMPIONSHIPS.

Do the math. I’ve seen winners. Chicago sees losers.

That would change. I’d shred the owners, their partners, their general managers, their media fanboys and everyone else in a sports-sinful city. I’d demand Jerry Reinsdorf and the McCaskeys sell their franchises as cockroaches form. Then I’d ask Stevenson High School, alma mater of my daughters, to change its name and elude Tyrique Stevenson as the Hail Scary causer while adopting a Jalen Brunson theme.

Stare at the panorama and understand Chicago’s perceived power, a wondrous display of identification in a world that won’t forget triumphs. Any trip overseas brings Obama mentions and another No. 23 jersey, with no intention of upsetting Scottie Pippen except wondering how his ex-wife dated Marcus Jordan. The place is still known for the Bulls of three decades ago, which I also covered as a Sun-Times columnist before appearing as a daily panelist for eight years of “Around The Horn,” the ESPN program.

You remember?

Peering at the sky, who doesn’t detect massive clouds that darken? On sunny days, wretched executives still sit atop teams. Never mind the pathetic politicos. Chicago is known as America’s Worst Sports Town thanks to people in power. What they now know: When they suck, folks stand and shriek, “Sell the team!”

The global sports business is worth about a trillion dollars. As a monstrous beast, it has overtaken entertainment in America, with the NFL crushing whatever has comprised the Oscars and Grammys and managing to engulf social media. Owners should be held more accountable because they demand too much of your money and time, as do accompanying gamblers. They need to win in the third-largest market, where folks genuinely care when they aren’t diving belly-first into seasons. And yet, all teams do is lose and lose and lose. That can be said for more than eight years, since the Cubs extended a new losing streak after finally ending 108 failed seasons. It can be said, in some cases, perpetually. All the while, Chicago is in decline, when community spirits crave pride from teams.

I live in southern California. This is where Mark Walter, who still runs Guggenheim Properties on West Monroe Street, has overtaken baseball with the Shohei Ohtani era of the Dodgers when he could have bought a team in Chicago. Why would two owners sell when they’re content with winning two titles since the early 1900s? Your basketball team has turned the marketing gift of Michael Jordan into a new century of trash. The Bears have won only one Super Bowl in 59 years and have exhausted 13 years without winning a playoff game while Caleb Williams checks the end of his contract. As a journalist, I’ve noticed fanboys in local and national media. A smooch cares too much about access to players, which matters in this space but not nearly as much as the truth. What I’m after, above all, is veracity to be conveyed among diehard consumers.

Why did the Bears allow more last-minute chaos in a wretched 6-3 loss to Seattle? Why did Williams let 28 seconds lapse before running his next play with 37 seconds left? “I got hit in the throat,” he said. “Yeah. I got hit in the throat. … I don’t know if the coaches saw me, even though I got hit in the throat.”

True? False? Where was Thomas Brown? Doesn’t matter — he’ll be in his final game as head coach, if Williams doesn’t retire. Why did Brown opt for punter Tory Taylor with 2:14 left, which was crazy, before sticking with the offense? “It wasn't confusion at all I just changed my mind. I think being able to use Tory as a weapon, and we still had I think it was 2:16 on the clock, still had our three timeouts, plus the two-minute warning,” he said. “The way our defense had been playing all day, possibly have a chance to go flip the field and force the three-and-out, get a shorter field and have, like, a last end-of-the-game drive — that was my thought process. Over the course of that, I changed my mind and said, ‘Let's go for it now,’ and sent the offense back on the grass.”

Who made Brown the interim coach? Kevin Warren and Ryan Poles.

Recall when I drilled owners for repeatedly flopping? Recall when Ozzie Guillen called me a “f—ing fag” and allowed editors of a newspaper to cover for him? Remember how many times Reinsdorf tried to get me fired? He had nothing to do with my mood when I sent a letter to a publisher and quit with three years left on my contract, out of concern about our digital dysfunction and my self-preservation and frostbite.

In the past, some fans weren’t supportive. “Mariotti sucks!” they chanted on the South Side. “Who’s your daddy?” they yelled at Northwestern. My websites and voice mail were deadly. Today, I’m guessing you’d want me to destroy the owners. The sports stations are only drawing — I know ratings people — low numbers in average total listenership. TV? Mark Giangreco was unfairly run out. The Chicago Sports Network, as I’ve said about working for Jerry, is less healthy than living in a fentanyl-infested encampment.

Reinsdorf will turn 89 in a few weeks and always alerted my bosses — many were wimps — that I shouldn’t be writing at the Sun-Times or hosting shows. Some melted, such as Len Weiner at WMVP, who fired me though I hammered the Score because I ignored a document to go easy on the Sox/Bulls. Or there was GQ, which erred wickedly in saying I’d videotaped a wandering ESPN executive at a Beverly Hills restaurant and ran a retraction when I pondered suing the magazine. Once, Reinsdorf alerted attorneys that he thinks I’m anti-Semitic, a slur that didn’t stop me from visiting whatever he calls his ballpark in late September. I bought a seat by the visitors’ dugout in Row 121 as the Sox pursued their 121st loss, which made them the ugliest single-season team in U.S. history as the pain wasn’t matched by an 0-16 football team or the Washington Generals.

“One twenty one! One twenty one!” fans chanted near me.

“Sell the team!”

Why is a metropolis of this magnitude so smelly? Why do the Bears, worth $6.4 billion, keep hiring the wrong general managers, coaches and presidents for decades? Why aren’t the Cubs, worth $4.2 billion, giving long-term deals to big stars at profit-churning Wrigley Field? Why haven’t the Bulls, worth $5 billion, sniffed an NBA Finals stop in 26 years? Why have the Blackhawks, worth $2.6 billion, become a lapse despite Connor Bedard?

And why are the Sox, worth $2.05 billion, plunging into a horrid reason why baseball can fail in the big city? Why didn’t Reinsdorf sell the franchise 15 years earlier, after he wrecked the sport with labor failures and an obsolete ballpark at 35th and Shields? Why was he helping Bud Selig when the World Series was cancelled, as the NFL and Jordan took over sports? Why allow CHSN, with his son and Danny Wirtz, to fade into UHF vision with Flintstones re-runs unless you pay $30 a month for the Sox, Bulls and Hawks — teams that should pay you? With MLB stalling expansion plans after the roof collapse of Tropicana Field in Florida — which Reinsdorf once used as leverage — this is the best time to sell the Sox for a Nashville move.

Chicago is not a two-team city anymore. A phrase was fashioned — called the reboot — which doesn’t happen in Los Angeles. Walter was allowed to flee, just as I told Mark Cuban when he texted from an outfield seat at Wrigley, where he fantasized about owning the Cubs before Tom Ricketts entered. The Lakers sign LeBron James to a place atop a deep legacy of megastars. When teams win often in L.A., the fans rejoice. When they lose, they go to the beach.

In Chicago, they freeze.

I would make sure teams win and owners don’t dawdle. Without me, they were allowed to reek. Without me, Williams struggled when he should have raised hell about Matt Eberflus and Shane Waldron — and still struggles, hopefully without permanent damage. Without me, Bedard went into a long slump and saw his own coach fired. Without me, Dan Bernstein was torched by Barstool Sports when I once compared him to Bob Costas. A tender story: Root for my former radio partner, Ryne Sandberg, as he fights cancer.

“God is good,” he wrote this week.

With me, I’d remind Reinsdorf to sell and forget about public stadium money for “The 78” neighborhood. With me, I’d urge the McCaskeys to cash in. With me, Ricketts would be told he can’t win in a league with the billions-driven Dodgers and Mets — and even the Brewers — unless he shocks us and signs Kyle Tucker for $450 million. With me, I’d tell Wirtz to avoid all Reinsdorfs. With me, Michael will know he could become Jerry.

Why did I leave the Sun-Times? One day, I handed back guaranteed money because this paper had no Internet savvy or leadership. I was in Beijing, with two of us against Tribune people, when our Olympic coverage wasn’t posted online for hours or days. Three more years would have been 20. Enough, at the time. I dealt with Guillen, which became a nationwide story and forced me to tell Tucker Carlson about his history. I was thrown into a clubhouse pile of players. I was banged in the chest by an NFL coach. I was blasted on the shoulder by an editor-in-chief, who wanted to know if I was anti-Semitic — wonder why? — before he was fired. When I wrote about a male Sox fan who slapped Craig Biggio’s wife during the 2005 World Series, my column was eliminated by editors. When I wrote about Jordan’s gambling, another editor warned it might be my last column.

I kept writing. I’ll keep writing.

Maybe it’s still here. This is fun.

Maybe I work elsewhere.

###

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. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.