Enough of the capital chatter about passage of the chemical weapons treaty and concessions the Republicans got from Bill Clinton in exchange for their votes.
Tell me, instead, what Mike Royko’s take is on Tiger Woods, the golf phenom who declared that he’s not black but “Cablinasian”–his own reference to his being Caucasian, black, Indian and Asian.
The response might be politically incorrect. “Hey, am I Ukapol?” he might say, referring to his Ukrainian and Polish background.
I can’t know for sure because Mike is ill, leaving readers and his chums crossing our fingers and sentimental.
I got to Chicago in 1977 with the Sun-Times. Like most, I feared this icon. A year later, the Daily News closed and we were colleagues.
We didn’t have much in common. He was the working-class ethnic. I was the graduate of a fancy New York private school and Eastern college. I tried to break an uneasy silence in our newsroom his first week there, nervously entering his office to welcome him.
He growled. I exited, feeling 8 inches shorter.
Years later, over a beer somewhere, he apologized. By then I knew how Salvatore “Sammy The Bull” Gravano must have felt when John Gotti allowed him into the club: I was part of Mike’s despite huge failings–not knowing the starting lineup of the 1947 Cubs, any scene in “Shane” (the best Western, he argues) or most John Wayne flicks (there were evenings I had to sit through “The Quiet Man” twice, with him one line ahead of the on-screen dialogue).
Over time, I realized how much more complicated he is than the ornery, tough-guy caricature. He’s smarter than any of my Ivy League friends with big degrees. He can smell bootlickers a mile away.
Of course, entry into the inner circle carries certain burdens and, as with the mob, its own codes of silence. But, like Gravano, I will turn informer and announce that once, after Mike had finished a six-hour lunch with Studs Terkel, he attempted to strangle me with my own necktie in the Tribune parking lot.
“Commie, thin-wristed, preppie wimp!” he declared, tugging away. It was one of his apparent terms of endearment for me, albeit bestowed this night under odd circumstances.
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And there was the time when, during a winter golfing expedition, I rescued him from wide-brimmed law enforcers and nettlesome, no-neck patrons of a small-town North Carolina tavern at 2 a.m. He had challenged several locals’ assessment of John Belushi’s portrayal of him in “Continental Divide.”
And the time when, like Roy Hobbs in “The Natural,” he cracked a bottom-of-the-ninth homer to win a 16-inch Grant Park softball game for the Sun-Times. He was the oldest guy on a wind-swept field and reminded us of same for hours that night at the Billy Goat.
We exchanged mostly unprintable e-mail messages, about colleagues, competitors, movies, golf, current events, golf, race relations, Bill Clinton and golf.
Once, I mentioned a dumb made-for-TV movie in which a hospital patient was murdered. He responded with an 800-word treatise on the murder attempt on a hospitalized Don Corleone in “The Godfather,” a film he knew virtually word for word.
“That’s about it for that scene,” he wrote after recounting how Michael Corleone saved his dad. He continued:
“As you surely remember, Michael got even for that slap in the face when he killed the Turk with one shot to the head, and then turned and blasted the Irish cop, who died with a piece of the best veal in New York in his throat, using a gun that had been stashed by Corleone agents behind the toilet water tank before they arrived at the restaurant.”
“Anything else?” he concluded.
No. He tends to have the last word.
As I cross my fingers, I suggest we all consider the words.
The column-writing business has a brutal democracy to it. Especially as editors and publishers cut costs.
To survive, you have to be good or enjoy TV celebrity. Mike has no TV exposure, yet he is in something like 800 newspapers, which is astonishing. To be in 100 or 200 is darn good. And for 30 years he did five columns a week, whereas most struggle to do two.
The editor of a tiny California paper once told me how they were so backward technologically, they had to type Mike’s column into their computer system.
As a secretary did that, colleagues routinely huddled around her. They wanted to be the first to read the latest Royko.
On Friday, I called some towns and hamlets.
“He’s like the people who live here,” said Jack Moseley, editor of the Southwest Times Record, a 43,000-circulation daily in Ft. Smith, Ark. “He gets hacked off at stupidity. He has a temper and seems to care about the little guy who gets screwed.
“It doesn’t matter where Mike lives. He just ignites a fuse that explodes within people when they see injustice and bureaucratic stupidity. He’s got an ability to touch the heart and trigger strong emotions, which I think is the true power of journalism.”
Janet McMillan, the editor of the 17,500-circulation Daily Journal in Vineland, N.J., arrived at the paper a year ago. Her predecessor had stopped running Mike.
“As soon as I got here, I started getting all these unsolicited calls. People wanted him back. They had a feeling he was speaking for the average guy. You have all these fancy writers and great political analysts out there, but just one Royko. That’s why I got him back a few months ago.
“He costs us $10 a week, but even that is important for us. So I decided to find the money and make a choice between Mike Royko and someone else. I chose him. We’re in a large farming community with working-class communities nearby. People just like this gritty guy who speaks his mind.
“And funny, boy, he’s funny,” she reminded me. “I cried once because he wrote something so funny about Aretha Franklin possibly popping out of one of those gowns of hers. He had read my mind.”
Ken Melton, editor of the 25,000-circulation Citrus County Chronicle of Crystal River, Fla., which is 45 miles north of Tampa, said, “We’re very selective. We try to focus more on our community than on world and national news. It’s a big thing for him to be in our paper since we just don’t use many (out-of-town) columnists.
“But he writes things we all wish we could. He has style and voice that lets him do that. So many times you go, `Man, I wish I had written that!’ “
And then there was Stan Usinowicz, editor of Today’s News-Herald, a 10,500-circulation paper in Lake Havasu City, Ariz. I’d never heard of the place. But I’m glad I stumbled upon Usinowicz.
“The average person here can relate to Mike Royko and Slats. The characters he wrote about, the pickles people can get into, the frustration with bureaucracy that took a columnist to straighten out. I run into people on the street here who mention his column to me. That just doesn’t normally happen.
“I write a column myself once a week. If anybody ever said, `Your column was as good as Royko’s,’ that would be the ultimate compliment. Even the pieces they regurgitate when he’s on vacation, I enjoy them again.”
Usinowicz asked me how Mike was. I said that he’s been better.
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“If we were to never see the column again, I just don’t look forward to the day that I have to find a poor substitute,” he said. “There’s not a good enough column to replace him. Just isn’t.”
As we commie, thin-wristed preppy wimps say . . . Yup.