Ricketts turns from die-hard fan into owner
I see Tom Ricketts, his new "World Champion Cubs" hat dripping champagne onto a smiling face already damp from tears. He stands near Wrigley Field's home plate on a chilly fall night, accepting the World Series trophy on behalf of all of us long-suffering Cubs fans. The point man for the Ricketts family, new owners of baseball's most anguished franchise, will be wearing a dark, expensive wool topcoat, a gray suit, crisp blue shirt and red power tie. But he won't be another of those empty corporate suits stepping out of committee meetings to be the face of the Cubs.
He will be one of us. A fan.
"We are real fans, and we have been for a long time," Ricketts says of his family. No, make that "Tom says." When we fans spot him at games and want to say hello, Tom prefers that we call him Tom.
A Nebraska kid, Tom already was a Cubs fan when he moved to Chicago in 1983 to attend the University of Chicago. He arrived just in time for that magical season of 1984, and the first Cubs team to make the postseason since World War II. He says that team "pulled" him "into Cubdom."
"It was a great team," says Tom, 44, carefully plucking out the good memories the way we Cubs fans do. "I always thought Keith Moreland was a little underrated. He was pretty consistent and did a great job. And who didn't love Jody Davis? Of course, Ryne Sandberg had like 54 steals-and Ron Cey, obviously."
Actually, it was 1985 when Sandberg stole 54 bases, but Tom passes any "street cred" litmus test to be a real Cubs fan.
For Tom and his older brother, Pete, that meant graduating from college, getting jobs and renting an apartment in 1988 above the Sports Corner bar on the corner of Addison and Sheffield, across from Wrigley Field.
"The only thing I didn't like about living there was that on weekend games the peanut vendor would show up so early he'd wake me up," Tom says. "Gosh, I must have been sleeping pretty late if that was the case, but I was 25 at time. We used to go to the bleachers every weekend game."
They had a routine.
"We didn't get up early enough to get those front-row seats in right or left," Tom says of the coveted spots where you might catch a homer, and throw it back if it was deposited there by someone from the opposing team. Tom staked out seats in the first row of the center-field bleachers.
"The strategy behind that was we could sit right over where the beer vendor was, and you could actually hand beers up to the front row back in the day," Tom says. "There was no two-beer limit back then. It was an efficient place to be."
The bleachers were good for Tom. He grew to appreciate the hard work, skill and class of right-fielder Andre Dawson, and he made another good connection.
"I met my wife in the bleachers," Tom says, recalling a Cubs game in 1991. "She was with a group of friends. and I was with a group of friends and family."
They hit it off and met up later at the Taste of Lincoln Avenue. Then marriage, kids, the usual.
"Until I had three kids, I almost always sat in the bleachers," says Tom, who now has five kids. "There's nothing unusual about my fanness."
Talking his dad, J. Joseph Ricketts, founder of TD Ameritrade, into committing $845 million to buy the Cubs required a family visit to Wrigley, or at least to a rooftop across the street.
"Just looking out over the whole scene, he was like, 'Yeah, I think I got it.' He never understood the Cub vibe until that game," Tom says. It wasn't long after that day the elder Ricketts said, "OK. Knock yourself out."
The Ricketts family is as diverse as the Cubs nation. Pete, 45, ran for the U.S. Senate in Nebraska in 2006 as a conservative Republican. He spent $11 million of his own money and got President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to campaign for him before losing badly to the Democrat. Laura, 41, is a University of Michigan law grad who co-founded Ecotravel, an environmentally conscious travel company, with her younger brother, Todd, 39. She is a lesbian who donated money to the Barack Obama campaign, and serves on the board of Lambda Legal, the gay rights organization that fights for same-sex marriage.
"Our family has some different political views but we're very close. I don't know another family that's closer than we are," Tom says. "That kind of makes us stronger."
Since Tom is the guy talking the talk, it's good to know he has walked the walk and then some. He even knows the warmest spot in Wrigley on the coldest spring day is in the men's room, where he says he's seen the steam "rising from the trough."
He says he wants to make those bathrooms better, the food options tastier, the ramps and corridors easier to maneuver, and "tidy up" the entire ballpark. But he's not going to install a new level of corporate suites with a view of some Jumbotron atop the new Ricketts Field.
"Obviously you don't want to change the character," says this guy who knows why fans love the ballpark. "We understand the feel. We understand the vibe- It is 100 percent the intention of me and the family to preserve and improve Wrigley Field- It's not our goal to make it a more corporate place."
As for a Jumbotron, "I'm not sure how you'd be able to work that in," Tom says dismissively.
Unless the Cubs relocate to a new stadium somewhere out in the suburbs.
"I don't think you'll see us move," Tom says firmly, "ever."
"I don't think you want to lose the name Wrigley," he adds. "There are certain things you don't want to sacrifice just to win a World Series."
Some convoluted "Wrigley Field at Corporate Sponsor Park" moniker or a few more ads on signs might be tolerated at some point, allows Tom, who has talked to other fans about the trade-offs of moves that might bring in more revenue.
"Would you care if it got you a World Series?" he asks them. "I think people would be like, 'I can get over it.'"
Speaking of that World Series-
"If we're the family that owns the team when that happens, which we fully expect that to happen, it will just be tremendous," Tom says. "It will be one of those things where people say, 'I was there. I know where I was when the Cubs won the World Series.' We're going to get there and it's going to be pretty momentous."
Of course, fans thought that would happen in 2003 or 2008 or 2009. Tom has a different focus.
"Stop thinking about the past. Look forward. Be consistent. Put teams on the field that get to the playoffs. And then hope you have the hot hand when that comes around," Tom says, adding, "I've been to three playoff games and none of them have been good."
He was at his home in Wilmette, watching the game on TV with his kids during that 2003 collapse that started the Bartman talk and rekindled interest in the goat curse.
"You've just gotta move on. There is no curse. The reason that there aren't more World Series trophies here is that we've had not-good teams; bad teams that performed as expected, and then good teams that had bad luck in the playoffs. There's nothing more to it than that," Tom says. "There's no curse. People have to give that up. That's crazy talk."
Suddenly, Tom makes conversations about the Cubs winning the World Series seem far from crazy.
"We all love the field. We all love the team," Tom says. "There's only one agenda - to win."
That's what Cubs fans want to hear from Tom, again and again.
And they've told him again and again that maybe a player or two on the current team shouldn't come back.
Tom says he spent this past season cheering "for the guy in the deepest slump." He never boos.
"Booing Derrek Lee in May gets you nothing," he says, shaking his head. "I don't want to be known as a place where the home team gets booed."
But he is a statistics guy (loves the Runs Created stat), who wants to talk baseball.
"There was a friend of mine who came up to me the other day and said, 'Do you ever get tired of talking about this?' I was like, 'Dude, if I ever get tired of talking about this, there's something wrong with me,'" Tom says. "This is exciting. It's fun."
Tom, if you think this Cubs business is fun now, just wait 'til next year.
<div class="infoBox"> <h1>More Coverage</h1> <div class="infoBoxContent"> <div class="infoArea"> <h2>Stories</h2> <ul class="links"> <li><a href="/story/?id=332928">Ricketts' one goal: 'Best franchise in baseball' <span class="date">[10/30/09]</span></a></li> <li><a href="/story/?id=332985">Excerpts from Tom Ricketts' interview with the Daily Herald <span class="date">[10/30/09]</span></a></li> <li><a href="/story/?id=332929">As owner, Ricketts looks to keep a fan's perspective <span class="date">[10/30/09]</span></a></li> <li><a href="/story/?id=332919"><B>Burt Constable:</B> Ricketts turns from die-hard fan into owner <span class="date">[10/30/09]</span></a></li> <li><a href="/story/?id=332930"><B>Mike Imrem:</B> Can Ricketts handle the challenge of Wrigley? <span class="date">[10/30/09]</span></a></li> </ul> <!-- Start of Brightcove Player --> <div style="display:none"> </div> <!-- By use of this code snippet, I agree to the Brightcove Publisher T and C found at http://corp.brightcove.com/legal/terms_publisher.cfm. --> <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="http://admin.brightcove.com/js/BrightcoveExperiences.js"></script> <object id="myExperience46550033001" class="BrightcoveExperience"> <param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" /> <param name="width" value="300" /> <param name="height" value="254" /> <param name="playerID" value="18011347001" /> <param name="publisherID" value="1659832549"/> <param name="isVid" value="true" /> <param name="@videoPlayer" value="46550033001" /> </object> <!-- End of Brightcove Player --> </div> </div> </div>