Gary Burns grew up selling souvenirs at Comiskey Park and moved on to first-base season tickets and postgame beers at Shinnick’s.
So when the lifelong Southwest Sider moved to South Africa in 1990 to start a food packaging sales business, leaving the Sox behind wasn’t easy.
“I was bored with my job, bored with my girlfriend, and I always had a hankering to live in another country,” he said. And South Africa, which he had first visited as a Chicago Lions club rugby player in the 1980s, had plenty of attractions, among them “cold beer, warm weather and Charlize Theron,” he joked.
But Burns never gave up on baseball and the White Sox. He tuned in games via the Internet. He pestered ESPN and the Major League Baseball International office in London for details on when the Sox might occasionally make South African satellite television broadcasts. He joined a local team–baseball has been a minor sport in South Africa since the 1880s when California gold miners came to seek their fortune–and started coaching young players.
A couple of years ago, he bought an old bar and pool hall with some buddies and hung his prize neon Comiskey Park sign and his Sox vanity license plate near the bar. Today you can listen to Elvis on the jukebox, but songs by folk music great Steve Goodman–a Cubs fanatic–are banned.
“He’s the most die-hard fan I have ever met, for anything,” says Angus Gibb, one of Burns’ South African baseball proteges and a regular at the pub. “He’s crazy. I keep waking up to SMS messages saying `Sox Win!!!!!!!!!!!!'”
So when the Sox began closing in on the pennant last week, Burns crossed his fingers and bought a ticket for the 20-hour plane flight home. And when his team clinched the final game, before an unlikely mob of screaming South Africans, gathered in the middle of the night before a big-screen television at Burns’ bar, the ebullient 42-year-old turned frantic.
“My God!” he thought. “I don’t have tickets!”
Burns, however, is a self-described “shameless self-promoter.” He enjoys free season South African Springboks rugby tickets only because he sells the organization cups for their beer and because he had the chutzpah to ask for them through contacts at SA Breweries.
So he e-mailed the White Sox.
Surely, he told them, they wanted their most far-flung lifelong fan at the games. Yes, he knew seats had sold out in 18 minutes and were going for $11,000 from scalpers. But how could they leave such a desperate and jet-lagged fan at the gates?
Charmed, pestered and eventually worn down, the organization folded. They sold him tickets. For both Saturday and Sunday’s games. At face value.
Now Burns plans to be at O’Hare airport on Friday morning “and by 2:30 I’ll be drinking martinis at Gibson’s with my buddies,” he promised.
He has faith the Sox will win. But their greatest achievement, he says, is simply “getting there before the Cubs.”
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