YOU WANT THE REAL STORY ON MICHAEL MINER? HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN IGNORED

I’m a sports critic and sometimes other critics don’t like me, but Miner was a man who had ties with Jerry Reinsdorf’s people and somehow gained media latitude in Chicago, where I shut him down

Michael Miner once called me at 10 p.m. An emergency? Why was he bothering me on a Saturday night when I was dining with my family? There was no good reason for the call, other than he wanted to bug me before he tore into me in his Chicago Reader media column — which had ties with Howard Pizer, Jerry Reinsdorf’s right-hand man — because corruption was part of the ballgame.

I’m a critic of sports. Miner was a critic of newspapers.

I am honest with readers. He was honest with Howard Pizer.

He also had ties with creeps at my paper and didn’t like me because the Sun-Times put up billboards of me when I arrived in town. When he spoke to me, with a deep voice, he sounded dastardly. Was I supposed to fear the guy? I ignored him and his column and decided to say something when he died.

Miner passed last week of natural causes at 81. Too many reporters cared what he wrote. Who was he? Didn’t he once work at the Sun-Times? Why care? He sought people who didn’t like us and waged war in print — and in my case, there were many haters in a town of old-school team owners. “I don’t think he ever realized that he had that kind of power, to tell you the truth,” his wife, Betsy Nore, told the Sun-Times. “He didn’t see that, feel like that at all.”

Then why did he call at 10 p.m. when I asked if we could talk the next day about a lot of nothing. I lasted 17 years when he wanted me gone in a month.

In recent weeks, I’ve asked why the Sun-Times and the Tribune have yet to publish a big story written elsewhere — Justin and Mat Ishbia, owners of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns, have reportedly bought 35 percent of the Chicago White Sox, a substantial purchase in the den of Reinsdorf. A real critic would ask why the story is conveniently disregarded. Michael Miner would have blamed me.

When I left the Sun-Times and gave back a million guaranteed dollars — worth much more today — he never called. How about getting both sides of the story, Mike? No one replaced him as a media writer at the Reader, and what a damned shame. In a town of media losers, both papers are desperate for meaningful help.

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