Colletti shows where dreams can take you
LOS ANGELES - The winter lunches became a ritual for a while back in the 1980s.
We would meet at Murphy's Bleachers across from Wrigley Field and talk about all sorts of stuff, even baseball.
My recollection is that I bought. His probably is that he bought. Heck, considering my failing memory, each of us might have paid our own way.
We're both Chicago natives who began our professional lives as sports writers. We worked for different Gannett newspapers early in our careers, he in Danville and I in Rockford.
That's where the similarities end for one uncomplicated reason: Ned Colletti dared to do more.
All I ever wanted to be was a sports writer. It wasn't a dream but a destiny. I was a newspaperman, and there was no other end game.
Colletti might have started out that way and intended to stay that way, but circumstances changed and he changed with them. His destiny gave way to a dream.
That's why today I'm writing about Ned Colletti and he's being written about.
Instead of chronicling the current baseball playoffs, Colletti is the Los Angeles Dodgers' general manager in the middle of a National League division series against the Cubs - the team he pulled for as a kid.
Man, does that ever hit me like a Sandy Koufax fastball: Ned freakin' Colletti is the general freakin' manager of the Los Angeles freakin' Dodgers!
The same guy who used to service writers when he was in the Cubs' public-relations department within the last calendar year hired Joe Torre as manager, acquired Manny Ramirez before the trade deadline and is 5 victories from the World Series.
The same guy who arranged for us to have a free meal at the Lawry's out here during the 1988 postseason now generally manages a World Series contender.
The same guy I watched advance into an administrative role with the Cubs and then be let go runs his own front office.
Wow! That same guy is a victory away from beating the Cubs in a National League division series!
Seriously, folks, that doesn't happen to a man unless he's a dreamer with the talent and luck to translate his dream into his destiny.
After being dispatched by the Cubs, Colletti could have returned to newspapers. Instead he embarked on a rainbow ride toward tonight's Game 3 of the NLDS here against the Cubs.
Colletti took a job in the San Francisco Giants' front office, and that couldn't have been an easy decision. His family remained in the Chicago suburbs while he went to California and became a commuter husband and father.
Eventually Colletti moved up to assistant GM, learning more and more about baseball's ins and outs, biding his time, working the work, dreaming the dream.
Then one day he stood at the podium after being introduced as the Dodgers general manager. Now Ned Colletti is dreaming of awakening the echoes of this storied franchise and taking it back to the World Series.
How far would that be from sports writing, from those lunches in the dead of winter at Murphy's Bleachers, from his old office at Wrigley Field?
Not far.
Just take a left turn at this dream and a right turn at that dream, and suddenly you're living a dream.