"I am a fan," declares Scott Simon, a native Midwesterner and weekend host for National Public Radio. And fans of professional sports "don't get much respect," he goes on to observe. You remind yourself that these are just games you're watching, nothing all that serious - not like the global conflicts Simon has covered for NPR, for instance. But then, he writes, the action begins, the passion kicks in, and suddenly you're a fan again, whereupon nothing else matters.
Fandom and its side effects, good and bad, occupy the heart of Simon's new memoir, an entertaining read that sometimes suffers from too much play-by-play commentary and too little color analysis. At its best, the book paints a beguiling portrait of the author as a young bleacher bum, a baby boomer Chicagoan who wanted to be White Sox hurler Billy Pierce when he was Little League age and who grew up worshiping the Cubs, Bears, and, later, the Bulls (though not the NHL's Blackhawks). Relocated to Cleveland briefly, Simon even dressed up as Indians slugger Rocky Colavito one Halloween. No Superman costume for this kid. Simon's sketches of legendary sports personalities such as Bill Veeck, the colorful White Sox owner; Frank Lane, the despicable Indians general manager dubbed Trader Lane by his detractors; and Leo Durocher, the irascible Cubs manager (Simon writes that while he has interviewed war criminals and other scoundrels, Durocher was the only person he ever wanted to say "[expletive]" to) are terrific, reminding us that some of the most compelling figures in sports are not necessarily the ones toeing the pitching rubber or foul line.
Many more pages are devoted to Chicago sports stars such as Dick Butkus and Gale Sayers of Da Bears, Cubs stalwarts Ernie Banks and Fergie Jenkins, and Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen of the Bulls. Jordan, whom Simon likens to such Windy City icons as Frank Lloyd Wright, Saul Bellow, and Louis Armstrong, dominates the last third of the book. Simon tends to misfire when he reaches too high and hard for the sports historian's lofty perspective. If you're not a Bulls fan, or at least a semi-serious sports nut, you're likely to find his lengthy recitation of clutch games and winning shots to be, well, a bit windy. If you're a Celtics fan, moreover, you may rightfully quibble with Simon's description of Larry Bird as a "fading, old star" when he faced Jordan in the 1986 NBA playoffs. MJ may have been a rising superstar back then, but Bird was at the height of his incomparable powers, not fading or old.
Far more compelling than the box-score rehashings are the ways in which Simon interweaves a fan's sensibility with larger global and generational issues. Simon's father and stepfather were both capital-F fans, too, and their influence is captured by the author without undue sentimentality. Simon's dad, an itinerant comedian, counted among his close pals baseball announcer Jack Brickhouse; former Cubs manager Charlie Grimm married another family friend. Together they provided Simon and his father with the sort of access most young fans only dream about.
Moved from Chicago to San Francisco to Cleveland, where his father battled alcoholism and his parents' marriage ultimately broke up, Simon saw his team loyalties tested but never his basic love for the games themselves. Simon's parents divorced 10 years before his father's death in 1968: a cataclysmic year during which personal tragedy overlapped with societal upheaval. A chapter on the Cubs 1969 season balances events like the death of Ho Chi Minh with the team's fortunes in a thrilling pennant race with the Mets. Simon's mother remarried in 1972. Ralph Newman was a bookseller and Lincoln scholar who once played minor league baseball. Simon grew particularly close to his stepfather, who was later embroiled in a tax-evasion scheme involving Richard Nixon's vice presidential papers. But politics and sports often make strange bedfellows (just ask Nixon). "Even in the days when I was striving to be a political radical," writes Simon, "I was still a traditionalist about baseball." SDS si, DH no.
In 1984, with his beloved Cubs in the playoffs, Simon traveled to Grenada to cover that country's elections. Naturally the snakebitten Cubbies lost - to the San Diego Padres, of all teams. A solicitous boss at NPR offered Simon "compassionate leave" to get over his heartache. On assignment in trouble spots like El Salvador and Bosnia, Simon was the kind of foreign correspondent who looked at snow falling in war-torn Sarajevo and called it "Bear weather," a fantasist (emphasis on fan) who reenacted Bulls playoff games in his mind to lull himself to sleep while in the field during the Gulf War.
Newman's death and Jordan's retirement from basketball provide the denouement to Simon's story. In the end, he even gets to meet one of his childhood heroes, Billy Pierce. Now in his 70s, Pierce quips that he's prepared to spend the next 20 years being Scott Simon. Boys and girls, as the beer commercial says: It doesn't get any better than that.
