I’ll start by making a huge assumption, probably wrong. But in case Mike Royko hasn’t heard the news up there yet, his beloved Cubs not only scored 14 runs Tuesday, they won.
Otherwise, Tuesday was a terrible day for Chicago, because this great city lost its eyes and ears and conscience. This country lost its best pure journalist. This business lost the standard by which all the rest of us typists are measured, and fall woefully short.
They can teach spelling in school and how to diagram a sentence and the routine of who, what, when and where. But they can’t teach passion and instinct and courage, and those are only a few areas where Mike Royko led our league, year after year after year.
Pardon the athletic jargon there. Even Mike would, I think, albeit with that look on his face. He tweaked sportswriters, not only because we covered games people play for a living, but because we deserved it on occasion.
“It’s supposed to be fun, you know,” he reminded a long time ago. “Your work is everybody else’s fun.”
Indeed, for all the important subjects Mike tackled–and I do mean tackled–he loved sports. He had softball in his blood and golf on his mind and would have been put to the supreme test had the Cubs accepted his kind offer to dump the column and become their general manager.
Now, I didn’t see Mike often and I certainly can’t say I ever saw Mike completely happy, because that just wasn’t his thing. But the closest he came to letting down whatever hair was left occurred at Wrigley Field in October of 1989.
The Cubs had finished first, believe it or not, and they opened their National League playoff series against San Francisco. Mike had a seat at a makeshift press table outdoors, I dropped by to say hello and did he ever look utterly content, smoking a cigarette and watching his Cubs.
I wanted to dust him for impersonating one of us sportswriter mopes but thought better about it. Which was just as well for my health. The Cubs lost 11-3 and Mike wound up with that look by the fourth inning.
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Ah, you can’t win them all, but Mike had an unreal batting average. The best of us wish for maybe one good column every two weeks. He never missed. I remember marveling about Royko’s genius one time, and the sports editor, realizing my limited capacity, summed it up in terms I might comprehend.
“Royko,” he said, “hits a home run every day.”
We tend to regard Mike as ours, but he was, of course, a national icon. Pick up a newspaper in Florida and his syndicated column on a corrupt Chicago alderman not only fit like a local glove, it was the best thing you’d read all day. He was that good, that universal, and you didn’t read it twice because you had to consult the dictionary.
Mike was as basic as the issues and people he surrounded, sometimes with compassion, sometimes with scalpel. He wrote from his heart to yours, with no gimmicks in between. He appealed to all, from intellects to Mike Ditka. When Da Coach was fired by the Bears, Royko sandblasted team President Michael McCaskey from here to Yale. Ditka clipped that masterpiece, and I suspect it’s still in his wallet.
That was Mike Royko, afraid of no one, except the next Cubs pitcher coming in from the bullpen. But your team won Tuesday, Mike. Tell Slats Grobnik and Dr. I.M. Kookie, if you haven’t already.
Otherwise, Mike, Tuesday was awful. You dwarfed us with your talent, yet you inspired us. Chicago won’t be the same without you, and that morning coffee won’t taste right without that look staring out from Page 3. God bless.