Freddy Cavin could barely muster a breath to speak. “You seen him yet?” he gasped. “You seen him yet?”
Him was–who else?–Michael Jordan. And it wasn’t hero worship that made the skinny 6th grader breathless Tuesday. Bent at the waist and muddy, he and five cousins from Chicago’s South Side were sweating in a human pyramid at Grant Park, hoping to catch a glimpse of the man of their hoop dreams.
David Hobart, 8, teetered atop his grunting cousins, scanning the crowd of thousands of delirious Bulls fans who were celebrating Chicago’s fourth National Basketball Association championship.
Suddenly, David pumped one of his arms in triumph and yelped “I see him!”–albeit on a Jumbotron screen.
“Next!” Freddy croaked, grinning.
Such teamwork would have made Jordan proud.
It also highlighted the grit and gumption of a crowd of sports fans from all walks of Chicago life–notably those who often don’t get to see a live game–who braved muggy heat, mosquitoes and swampy grass to touch, however vicariously, the glamor of the best basketball team in the nation/world/history of the NBA (pick your superlative).
For the Bulls, who made brief statements of thanks from the Petrillo Music Shell, it was the climactic postscript to a hard-fought playoff series marked by injuries and frustrating back-to-back losses to the Seattle SuperSonics.
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For the acrobatic Cavin clan and nine other inner-city kids, it was an opportunity of a lifetime–a glimpse not only of their sports demigods but of a big, raucous world beyond the public-housing high-rises where many live. In some cases, the reaction was one of awe. For others, dreaming of actually meeting their heroes, there was some disappointment.
“Their expectations are high,” said Whitney Langford, who helped organize the outing through the Inner City Youth Foundation, a non-profit agency in the Grand Boulevard neighborhood that works with at-risk kids. “They didn’t realize how many folks there would be.”
Excited by the field trip, many of the kids had yanked their parents out of bed at dawn. They wolfed down breakfasts of puffed wheat or grilled cheese. An hour before the rally, they jammed into a foundation van in the rain-flooded parking lot of the Robert Taylor Homes, the largest public-housing high-rise complex in the city. And–growing quieter with distance from home–they landed in the middle of the biggest, loudest mob of humanity they had ever seen.
“They’ve followed most of the Bulls games and so have I. I had no choice,” quipped Rosalind Wilson, 31, a part-time secretary and mother of five Cavin boys, all residents of the Taylor complex. “With all my relatives and neighbors coming over to my apartment, I’d sometimes have 30 yelling people in the living room, so they should be used to this.”
Many of the boys and girls weren’t.
Not much can keep Chicagoans away from a good party, and city estimates–which often are wild guesses at best–put the crowd at 250,000. The especially loyal camped out overnight in the boggy park to get close to the Petrillo Music Shell.
Jordan told the masses that he foresees even more glory ahead for the four-time winners.
“One of the reasons I came back is that I always wanted the city of Chicago to be remembered as the best city in these United States,” he told whooping fans. “And I wanted it to be remembered as champions. Not once. Not twice. Not three times. Not even four times.”
Some brave souls climbed loudspeaker poles to get better views of the players. Besides the Bulls, the onstage lineup included the Superfans of “Saturday Night Live” fame and the Dancing Rodmans. The rally, scheduled to begin by 10:30 a.m., began 15 minutes late. Thousands of hoarse voices chanted “We want the Bulls! We want the Bulls!” And to cool tempers as well as body temperatures, firetrucks pumped streams of water onto the crowd.
Caught in a sweaty forest of grownup backs and far from the action at the music shell, the youth foundation group fidgeted in the dripping humidity. Growing distracted, the Cavins and their buddies ignored most of the Bulls’ speeches and began squirting water bottles onto each others’ heads. Until, that is, they hit on the human pyramid.
By the end of the rally, most of the Cavin boys had muddy sneaker prints stamped on their backs. But at least they clapped eyes on the stars they had been following on television.
“I wanna be Michael Jordan–he’s got the best turnaround shot,” said Freddy, echoing the boys who had scrambled on and off of his back. Only one I-want-to-be vote went to the Bulls’ second banana, Scottie Pippen.
Dennis Rodman bombed the popularity contest.
“He’s too weird,” said Cinque Cavin, 10.
Brothers George Jackson, 11, and Hassan Manning, 9, didn’t know what to expect Tuesday, so they dreamed up encounters with Jordan.
Both boys practiced at the concrete courts at Robert Taylor. On rainy days, they had tied a square milk carton with the bottom cut out onto the chain-link fences of the outer hallways and used that as their hoop.
“He might show us some of his moves,” Hassan said of Jordan, whose voice boomed over the park on loudspeakers. “He might tell us to stay in school, and if you want to play basketball, you have to practice.”
“He might give us a picture of him,” George said. “He might give us a jersey or a basketball.”
Back at Robert Taylor before the rally, their mother, Barbara Manning, 49, had a dream of her own.
An unemployed mother of eight, Manning had bought Hassan his first pair of Jordan’s special line of basketball shoes when the boy was 3. Maybe at the Tuesday blowout, she thought, one of Bulls would take notice of her kids and do something special for Robert Taylor. Pippen, she noted, had funded a playground.
“They really need that big-brother sort of thing,” she said. “We hope Jordan will put one (a playground) down here (too).”
There was little chance that Tuesday’s rally could live up to those expectations.
“They came here to see the Bulls,” shrugged Leonard Cavin, one of the adult chaperons. “They didn’t come to see them on TV. They have been watching them all year long on TV.”
But Mitchell Johnson, a organizer with the Inner City Youth program, was more hopeful. He said the kids, some of them tired, all of them muddy, would eventually cherish the experience.
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“They still get to feel the crowd, and there’s no experience like that,” said Johnson. “At least they can say they were down in Grant Park.”