Attitude Adjustment
Attitude, the sine qua non of the greatest sportswriters, galloped into Chicago as the ribbon on the lance of Jay Mariotti. Today, according to the recent ad campaign trumpeting Sun-Times sports, it is flaunted by the entire staff.
But they didn’t hire any of them. Frankly, Rosenbloom wouldn’t have minded the job himself. But he didn’t fit his own idea of who should fill it. And as he told us, “I didn’t think I had the portfolio. I thought ultimately I could do the job, but you need a certain amount of empirical evidence to prove it.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But an odd thing happened. The Blackhawks found themselves in the Stanley Cup finals. Eager to expand his hockey coverage but stretched thin by the Bulls, sports editor Rick Jaffe asked Rosenbloom to contribute a column. “Life doesn’t get any better than that,” says Rosenbloom, who hit the saddle at the gallop. The finals lasted four games. Rosenbloom turned in a last piece that argued Mike Keenan should stay on as coach, and he figured his fun was over. But Jaffe called him. “He said, what do you think about being our second columnist? I said, that’s a great idea.”
Rosenbloom isn’t sure how his column’s supposed to balance Mariotti’s. “I guess I write like I talk, and maybe they like the way that I talk, that way of communicating with people–maybe that provides the balance they were looking for. I honestly don’t know. Maybe they perceive me as someone who writes as though he’s talking to someone over a beer in a bar, which is certainly different from Jay’s style. Maybe that’s what it came down to. But there are times when you don’t ask why–you say yes and thank you.”
“Maybe we’ve stepped up the form,” Rosenbloom further reflected. “maybe you can be a jackhammer on the psychological side.”
No, we said, we’re talking about the whole last ten years. For long stretches it never came at all. For other stretches it did come, no telling why. There were even periods when we’d find two at a time tossed up on our porch. We also saw the Booster for sale at Osco, but why would we pay for something we sometimes got for nothing and didn’t miss profoundly when we didn’t?
The publisher of the Southtown Economist, Thomas Jackson, is Pulitzer’s man on the scene supervising these changes, and he wishes the old ownership had made them back in the 70s, when the papers were healthier. Actually, if that had happened, Pulitzer might never have bought the chain.
