Walter Payton reminded us last week that if sports don’t define Chicagoans they at least provide our exclamation points.
So much excellence has been produced here in so many areas of endeavor — by so many folks who live here or were from here — but no one group has had the impact athletes have had.
Some people were disappointed Saturday that Soldier Field wasn’t filled for the Payton memorial. Who else, though, would have filled as many seats for this type of ceremony?
Let me rephrase the question: Who from any walk of life could have prompted the sincere out-pouring of emotion that followed Payton’s death last Monday?
The current Mayor Daley, perhaps, but he might have difficulty transcending the city into the suburbs. Oprah Winfrey, per-haps, but as admired as she is by so many, her TV show doesn’t in-spire the local passion the Bears do. Studs Terkel is a tremendous writer and ambassador for the city, but a memorial in the down-town library wouldn’t draw nearly as many as Saturday’s did in Soldier Field. George Solti and Harold Washington certainly didn’t leave us with this sort of fanfare.
Heck, they didn’t leave with as much as Harry Caray had. Or as much as some day Mike Ditka, Dick Butkus, Bobby Hull and Gale Sayers will leave with. And certainly not as much as Ernie Banks and Michael Jordan will leave with when the time comes.
Sports figures are more be-loved here than all the Nobel Prize winners at the University of Chicago, all the Pulitzer Prize winners at local news shops and all the educators, philanthropists and medical researchers striving to make the world a better place.
None of them have the impact athletes do because they don’t have the stage athletes have. None of them work in front of 66,000 people on a Sunday after-noon in Soldier Field, 40,000 in one of the baseball parks or 20,000 in the United Center.
Not many perform as regularly on television, are asked as often to grant newspaper interviews, or are paid as large a sum of money for speaking engagements.
Prominence alone is enough to make athletes our most influen-tial citizens, whether they or we like it or not. They’re the people who touch the most people by virtue of having the most access to us and are most capable of uniting the community in a common effort.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that Chicagoans here and around the world responded as they did to the loss of Payton. So many felt they knew him even if they only knew of him. And we shouldn’t be surprised when it happens again involving other athletes with whom we want to be identified.
Payton’s productivity and work ethic symbolized what we prefer Chicago be known for. Around here he didn’t necessarily reflect a sports fan’s everyday existence during the 1970s and ’80s, but he did punctuate it.
Sandwiched around him were Banks from the ’50s and ’60s and Jordan from the ’80s and ’90s. I can’t think of any public Chicagoan from those eras whose loss will be as personal to people as theirs will be.
We have world-class opera, dance and theater here. Some outstanding actors were trained here before moving on. Musi-cians from Buddy Guy to the band Chicago to Koko Taylor to the Smashing Pumpkins belong to us first and foremost.
Only sports teams, though, link generation to generation. What other ongoing institution has been as public as the Bears have been, other than the Cubs and the White Sox?
Neighborhoods change, high schools close and people relo-cate, but Chicago’s sports fran-chises have been our constant.
Usually my instinct is to diminish sports because they have be-come too big, too celebrated, too important. I’d prefer people have their priorities in a little different order.
There isn’t much chance of that happening, though. Not with media coverage increasing as fast as fan interest.
Sports will remain Chicago’s passion, and athletes will remain our exclamation points.
