After 23 years of waiting, the Chicago Bears` world championship last January was truly a heavenly moment for the city`s late mayor and the team`s late owner. When Super Bowl XX was over and the angels on the Chicago cloud
–Cloud Nine, of course–began to wag index fingers and chant, ”We`re Number 1,” Richard J. Daley smiled knowingly at his longtime friend George Halas.
”You see,” Daley said to Halas, ”you keep something in the family, good things happen. But you got to keep an eye on the heirs all the time. Why, just yesterday I heard a rumor that Ivy League smartypants grandson of yours had some idea about building a stadium in the Land Beyond O`Hare. You think he`s ready to change all the stationery to Schaumburg Bears?”
George Halas shrugged. He had heard this before.
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In 1975, not long after urging Daley to run for a sixth term, Halas had threatened to leave Soldier Field and sign a 30-year lease with Arlington Heights, which promised to build a stadium for the Bears. With almost the first words out of his mouth at his first press conference after being re-elected, Daley told Halas if he moved to the suburbs, he would go without the name, ”Chicago Bears.”
”You just don`t leave a great city behind,” Daley said, while mentioning a legal precedent of dubious existence. It obviously hasn`t applied to the New York Jets or Giants, who play in New Jersey, or the Los Angeles Rams, who play in Anaheim, or the Dallas Cowboys, who play in Irving.
Ten years after his death, Daley would be relieved to learn the Bears and his beloved White Sox presumably have abandoned their plans to build in the northwest suburbs, and the Bulls have so far not joined the Sting at the Rosemont Horizon.
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Of course, he would still have a few words for the Cubs` new owners, Tribune Co., whose threats to move unless Wrigley Field gets lights leave the North Side headed for the baseball dark ages.
To Daley, it mattered little that the Cubs and Sox and Bears–and Black Hawks and Bulls–rarely brought the city any thrill of victory; in his 21 1/2 years as mayor, the Bears won two conference titles and one league championship, the Sox one American League pennant, the Black Hawks one Stanley Cup, the Bulls nothing and the Cubs a lot of friends. What was important was each team wore Chicago on its uniform, as close to its heart as the late mayor did. He would have considered any plan to flee the city for greener–and whiter–pastures as a personal affront.
As long as the city`s name was trumpeted, Daley could forgive not only losing but ideological differences. He quietly assigned a Chicago policeman as a full-time bodyguard to former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, then a Chicago resident, and so what if Ali had told the draft board he wasn`t too keen on fighting them Viet Congs? Daley`s patriotic Chicago was the first U.S. city to invite a visit from Nadia Comaneci, that Commie gymnast, after she dazzled the world at the 1976 Olympics.
”Mayor Daley looked on sport in Chicago as just as important as its museums or other institutions,” says Andy McKenna, who has served as investor or advisor to the Sox, Cubs and Bears. ”He would have reacted the same way if it was the Art Institute or the Sox talking about leaving.”
But much of the potential for upheaval in the Chicago sports scene, a potential which still exists despite the apparent commitment to build a new home for the White Sox next to their current ballpark, is the result of Daley`s resistance to obligating the public to provide stomping grounds for private sporting enterprise.
”The mayor believed stadium-building wasn`t one of the things a city ought to be leaping into,” says Bill Daley, one of his sons. ”He thought if the owners and other people with money wanted stadiums, they ought to be paying for them.”
Mayor Daley never had the athletic edifice complex that psyched up major and minor American cities for a stadium building spree in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The only extant Chicago sports venue of considerable size built since Chicago Stadium in 1929, the 4-year-old University of Illinois-Chicago Pavilion, has had a very limited impact on the city`s sporting life.
Talk of a new stadium nevertheless came up often during Daley`s long tenure at City Hall. There was no shortage of ideas, including a 1975 proposal for a $200 million complex in Lake Michigan that he rejected outright because it usurped lakefront property. Another, for an 80,000-seat domed arena in a Bridgeport quarry, never got out of the ground, even if its would-be developer had proposed calling it The Richard J. Daley Sports Center.
It is significant that a stadium study committee Daley appointed late in his life excluded the owners of the White Sox and the Cubs. As an avid Sox fan, the mayor realized it was impossible to hope the two baseball teams would ever play in the same stadium, so he saw no sense involving them in the discussions.
”The two major-league teams each owned their own facility, and there was no compelling need for either team to do anything about a new stadium,”
McKenna says.
That left Soldier Field, then as now, to become a focal point for stadium plans. There were proposals to renovate and rebuild the lakefront arena, including one that called for a brand-new stadium on the same site. Everything died except renovations necessary for safety reasons. Canteen Corp. president Patrick O`Malley once said that Daley`s reluctance to tear down a military monument was a factor in the Soldier Field decision-making.
”My father thought what we had was more than adequate,” Bill Daley says. ”He enjoyed going to Sox games at Comiskey Park and Bears games at both Wrigley Field and Soldier Field.”
Daley was not just a ceremonial fan, like those who attend Opening Day and disappear until time to bet another mayor on the outcome of a big game between their two cities. He went to almost every Bears game and a couple dozen Sox games a year, often walking to the ballpark from his Bridgeport home. Daley and his family were among those who sat through a cold mist, which had turned many ticket-holders into no shows, for Bill Veeck Appreciation Night in 1976.
”Back then, franchises were like little corner-store businesses, and that homeyness appealed to the mayor,” McKenna says.
Daley was not naive to the changes that were making professional sport the province of corporations instead of families. Yet, at the time of his death, Chicago retained a link to the era when the men who ran the city`s sports, even real estate tycoon Arthur Wirtz, made the teams seem more than something listed under subsidiaries in the annual report.
For better or for worse, these owners, all of them now dead, had been larger than life–especially Wirtz, a giant of a man, who owned most of the Bulls and all of the Black Hawks, lock, stock and Chicago Stadium. There was Veeck, the maverick owner of the White Sox, for whom Daley found investors when the team had apparently packed its bags for Seattle. And Philip Wrigley, the reclusive owner of the Cubs, who clung like a Don Quixote to the impossible idea that baseball ought to be played in the afternoon. And Halas, who merely invented pro football.
They were, as Veeck once described himself, dinosaurs in an age when the forest primeval had been stripped bare. The changes in American sport had come late to Chicago, but they had come nevertheless, leaving the city to worry about its sporting legacy.
It seems odd that, stadium or not, Richard J. Daley`s legacy is not immortalized in the city`s sporting portrait. Oh, for a couple years the Chicago marathon was called the Mayor Daley Marathon, but that soon became the high-falutin` America`s Marathon/Chicago. The Daley family had requested the removal of their name from an event that had become so controversial by favoring corporate pomp over the circumstances that applied to the average citizens who ran the race.
Marathoning wasn`t Daley`s kind of sport, anyway. He preferred baseball, football and fishing, once keeping presidential candidate Jimmy Carter waiting while Daley attended to some Coho in Lake Michigan. He dreamed of the day when a person could spend lunch hour by the Chicago River with a beer, a sandwich and a fishing rod.
The river is now clean enough for a few salmon. The struggle since Daley`s death has been to keep the Chicago Fish from ever becoming the only game in town.