A DAY IN THE LIFE (of Chicago): Ought to be much about nothing

The fact that 33^rd Ward Alderman Deborah Mell is getting divorced ought to be the ultimate ho-hum attempt at a news story; something that comes across as cheap and petty even for an Independence Day holiday weekend.

 

But Mell’s recent announcement, which she made via her Twitter account, that her marriage of three years has come to an end is gaining attention. To the point where I’m wondering how many petty people are going to try to draw this out into something it’s not.

 

WHAT CAPTURES ATTENTION about this marriage was the fact that Mell’s wife was Christin Baker. The couple became engaged in 2010 (with Mell, then a state representative, making a pronouncement on the floor of the Illinois House of Representatives).

 

Then, because they couldn’t wait for Illinois to get its act together on the issue of legitimate marriage for gay couples, they went to Iowa to be married.

 

If they had held out for an Illinois wedding, it wouldn’t have occurred until earlier this year – perhaps during the past month.

 

But then, it would have been too late. For the couple seems to have irreconcilable differences. News accounts indicate Baker has taken a new job in Birmingham, Ala. They have split.

 

I’M SURE SOME people are going to rant and rage against gay marriage and claim this ought to be evidence that such unions are somehow unnatural and unlasting.

 

Which is nonsense, of course. Just look at the number of so-called straight couples who can’t make it past a couple of years of marriage. Was their time together any less legitimate? If it was, perhaps we ought to be abolishing the concept of marriage altogether.

 

Not that anybody with sense is calling for that. If anything, all this means is that partnerships and pairings are fragile and filled with potential for problems. The last thing those couples need are harassment from those with such ideological hang-ups that they need to get a hobby. Perhaps they can rush out to Hobby Lobby to find something to do from people inclined to share their hang-ups about life?

 

What else is notable about life following Independence Day on the shores of Lake Michigan?

 

COP BUDDIES STICKING TOGETHER?: The Illinois Supreme Court issued a ruling this week that upholds the ability of one-time Pullman Area Violent Crimes Commander Jon Burge to keep his pension – even though he’s the cop who led the far South Side unit that reportedly was beating confessions out of criminal suspects on a regular basis.

 

Burge, 66, and retired for more than two decades, is now in a federal correctional center in North Carolina. But for the act of perjury in a lawsuit related to his actions; not for the actions themselves.

 

The state’s high court ruled that a Cook County judge was correct to prevent the Illinois attorney general’s office from intervening in the case when a police pension board upheld Burge’s retirement payments.

 

It seems the board members who were former police officers favored Burge, saying his criminal act came after he left the police. They out-voted the non-former police officer members who would have revoked retirement benefits.

 

DON’T YOU DARE CUT RETIREE PENSIONS: It’s going to be interesting to see just how officials are capable of reforming the way public pension programs are funded.

 

For the state Supreme Court also ruled this week that retirees can’t be forced to pay for the retirement benefits previously promised.

 

State Attorney General Lisa Madigan is claiming that’s a narrow legal issue, but others see it as broader and a move in the direction of saying that there’s going to have to be some other form of reform. Either that, or the retirees literally will bankrupt Illinois government into oblivion.

 

As if Friday night fireworks didn’t give you enough of a headache.

 

BAD ATTITUDES IN BRIDGEVIEW?: The Chicago Fire professional soccer team felt compelled to issue a statement this week, telling their fans to watch their mouths.

 

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that Spanish-speaking fans have taken to using slurs for homosexuals to taunt opposing players. Before you start attacking Latinos, keep in mind that some peoples’ extent of the Spanish language are the slurs and obscenities.

 

Which bothers the team because they want people to make the trek out to their suburban Bridgeview stadium to watch games – particularly in the weeks following the World Cup.

 

Perhaps hoping that some newly-converted types will want to see live matches and will want to spend money, much money, while at Toyota Park.

 

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Aon has to go way out of town to find sports franchise worthy of corporate name

Am I the only one who thinks it odd that when Chicago-based Aon, a leading provider of insurance and risk management services, decides to get into the business of corporate sponsorship of athletics, they turn to another nation for an appropriate sports franchise?

It was this week that Aon officials announced their four-year deal with Manchester United, one of the premier sports franchises of the world (I don’t want to hear from fans of the Dallas Cowboys). It will now be the Aon logo that gets stretched across the front of the jerseys Man U players will wear – which essentially turns every football match the team plays worldwide into a billboard for Aon.

MEANWHILE, WE HERE in Chicago have our own professional football franchise (real football, not that silly game the Chicago Bears play) in the form of the Chicago Fire. Who do we Chicago soccer fans have to see on our team’s jerseys when they take the field – none other than Minnesota-based Best Buy.

An international conglomerate, versus a chain of stores that people go to in order to buy cheap appliances and other electronics.

That has to say something about the status of soccer in this country – perhaps we in the United States will know that our country’s professional league (the awkwardly-named Major League Soccer) has finally reached a significant level (instead of being a training ground for U.S. citizens who later get sold to European or Latin American teams) when Aon decides it would rather have a future sports sponsorship with its hometown team, or a home country franchise, rather than reach out to England for an advertising deal.

For the record, the deal between Manchester United and Aon took effect June 1. But officials waited until the team was in the Chicago-area as part of their summer U.S./Canada tour – during which they’re playing exhibitions against U.S. teams (they’re playing the Major League Soccer all-stars July 28 in Houston, among other matches).

IT IS A coup for Aon to be able to have their name across the front of the Manchester United jerseys. About the only comparable U.S. deal they could have negotiated would have been some sort of sponsorship deal with the New York Yankees (who themselves have had their own marketing partnerships throughout the years with Manchester United).

Still, a part of me can’t help but perceive this as a snub of sorts.

Not that it is necessary for corporations that decide to get into the “fun” of sports through sponsorships to be from the home cities of their respective teams. Heck, even team ownership doesn’t have to be, strictly speaking, a hometown deal.

Take the late George Steinbrenner, whom just about everybody thinks of as an honorary New Yorker, even though he preferred to live in Tampa, Fla., was a Cleveland native, and actually had more personal ties to a place like East Chicago, Ind., than he did to New York proper.

PERHAPS THAT IS the same thing that could happen with Aon being connected in image to Manchester United. It definitely will give Aon a more international reputation. But it could also wind up having the effect of making Manchester United a more prominent part of our own local sporting scene.

Take Thursday, which corporate types declared to be Aon United Global Day, and celebrated with events at Millenium Park. They were part of events held 120 countries meant to promote fundraising and volunteer work. Locally, theyw ere meant to promote youth programs in the Chicago Park District and Special Olympics Chicago.

Which means that these kind of corporate sponsorship deals go beyond the activity on the football pitch.

To the degree that such a connection would increase local interest in soccer, that could be a good thing. Insofar as competition for attention for the Chicago Fire, I honestly believe that a little competition for attention could be what motivates U.S. soccer franchises to improve their overall quality of play.

A BETTER MATCH on the pitch is what it will take to get people here to reduce the amount of time they spend following the professional leagues of nations such as England or Italy, or any of the Latin American leagues whose matches are readily available on Spanish-language television.

Now I know some people who are determined to think of soccer as something perpetually “too foreign” to fit into our society are going to complain about the advertising on the jersey – which hasn’t been too common in U.S. sports culture. Our sports teams traditionally have plastered advertising signage all over their stadiums so that broadcasts of the ballgames turn into virtual advertising for Coca-Cola, or whatever product is up for grabs.

We’re going to hear arguments that wearing more logos is tacky. Yet I honestly don’t think its any more annoying than some of the incredibly awkward names that sports stadiums now carry (Reliant Park in Houston, Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia). It has come to the point where the once-offensive U.S. Cellular Field is one of the better sounding stadium names in existence.

If anything, the Aon logo is too simple to be tacky.

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Will it feel like old days cramming soccer pitch into so-called Beautiful Confines?

It seems to be the fad – everybody wants to stage an event in the building that for the past 95 years has occupied the northeast corner of Clark and Addison streets (a.k.a., the humble abode of one Elwood J. Blues).

We got the Chicago Blackhawks holding a match in a specially-built outdoor rink that did a serious number on the Wrigley Field turf (causing great expense to restore it for baseball), and the Big Ten wants to play foot ball there – Illinois vs. Northwestern.

NOW, WE HAVE the Chicago Fire saying they’re negotiating with the Chicago Cubs to see about staging soccer on the field where no Cubs team has ever managed to win a World Series. The gimmicky nature of the event would ensure a capacity crowd – and Wrigley Field has a seating capacity nearly double that of the southwest suburban stadium where the city’s professional soccer team usually plays its matches.

The Chicago Tribune used its website to report Friday that nothing is definite. This is something under negotiation, which means no one should be thinking in terms of rushing out to buy their tickets for this match – which likely would be one of the exhibition games the team periodically plays against elite teams from around the world.

In this particular case, reports indicate it likely would be a match against Club America – one of the most popular teams of the Liga Mexicana de Futbol.

That match, when it takes place, would have the potential to draw heavily from the Chicago area’s heavy Latino population – which is roughly 80 percent of Mexican ethnic origin (about 1.5 million Mexican nationals and Mexican-Americans scattered throughout the six-county metropolitan area).

WHICH MEANS WE also have the opportunity to see a crowd that will overwhelmingly be supportive of Club America and won’t be the least bit upset if the Chicago Fire loses. It’s the quirk of soccer in the U.S. No matter how much officials here have tried appealing to an Anglo suburban audience, its biggest fans are the people whose ethnic awareness is still strong – which means that rooting for the old country’s national team or professional teams is a way of keeping in touch with “back home.”

Which is also why if one scurries around the Internet, it won’t be the least bit difficult to find nitwits who want to rant and rage that this event is “too foreign” to be worthy of being held at Wrigley Field. There also are those who will complain about the playing field and the cost to restore it after a soccer match – ignoring the fact that many of these same people thought it was “so cool” to see a hockey rink erected in mid-winter that caused the entire playing field to need to be replaced.

Perhaps it is because I am old enough to remember that the Chicago Sting of the now-defunct North American Soccer League used to play some of their matches at Wrigley Field – and nobody seriously thought anything unusual about it, other than having to check the schedule closely to make sure one showed up at the right stadium on Game Day.

Not that I ever went to any of those Lakeview-based games. Call it a quirk, but of all the times I saw the Chicago Sting during their existence from 1975 to 1984 as an outdoor team, it was once at Soldier Field, and all the rest at Comiskey Park.

I CAN REMEMBER the sight of soccer being played on what is now the pavement where a select few people park their cars whenever they attend Chicago White Sox games. As far as I’m concerned, the spirit of Karl-Heinz Granitza is scoring goals in that parking lot, trying to avoid crashing into Joe Jackson’s ghost that is chasing down fly balls (with Pat Summerall of the old Chicago Cardinals NFL team threatening to tackle them both, if they don't get out of his way).

So there’s a part of me that is reluctant to go to Wrigley Field now to see soccer, when I was never willing to see the building used for that purpose in the past (when the Sting actually had teams that won the only sports championships for Chicago that occurred during my childhood).

We’re going to get the sight of a football pitch that technically is too small being squeezed onto the Wrigley Field playing field. Will the field run from third base to right field the way it used to when the Chicago Sting played, or will they try to honor the first base to left field configuration that the Chicago Bears used (and which Illinois/Northwestern are expected to use) when U.S. football is played there?

Or maybe it is possible that negotiations will falter, in part because someone will realize how gimmicky the whole idea is of playing “real” football on the same field where such immortals as Walt Moryn and Carmen Fanzone used to play, and where Sammy Sosa used to act like a payaso – to the delight of Chicago Cubs fans.

IF SOCCER OFFICIALS in this city were serious about wanting to give a Chicago Fire/Club America “friendly” match a jolt of enthusiasm that can never be achieved out in suburban Bridgeview, it’s too bad they couldn’t consider holding it at Soldier Field.

With a significant seating capacity that dwarfs both of the stadiums in the city that host Major League Baseball, you could get the size of a crowd that would generate the kind of atmosphere that would mimick the enthusiasm that can be seen on those various cable television channels that give us International soccer – or that we’re going to have a chance to see in coming weeks from South Africa with the staging of the World Cup.

That would be a spectacle worth watching.

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Does Chicago soccer have the power to give new life to athletic squads?

I stumbled across a happening (trivial, to be sure) in the Chicago Sun-Times that makes me wonder if professional soccer in Chicago carries some sort of resuscitation power.

Can being connected to a Chicago soccer team enable one to have a life – even after one ought to be deceased in the athletic sense?

WHAT AM I babbling about, you may ask?

It was an item in the sports section that said the cheerleading squad of the Chicago Shamrox (a professional lacrosse team) would continue to exist, even though the Shamrox went out of business in December, and the National Lacrosse League is on the decline.

Now insofar as the Chicago sporting scene goes, the Shamrox weren’t exactly big players. They existed for two seasons, and many people who consider themselves sports fans may not have even known they existed (they played their matches at the Sears Centre arena in Hoffman Estates).

Most of the attention they received was because of their cheerleading squad (the Hot Rox Dancers). Many sports sections got their kicks from publishing photographs of women in fringes that pass as short skirts and low-cut halter tops who were willing to jiggle their hips a bit.

IN FACT, THAT was probably the biggest motivating factor in the Sun-Times publishing an item saying that another sports team has adopted the Hot Rox Dancers as their own cheerleaders.

That team? The Chicago Fire, our city’s entry in Major League Soccer.

The Hot Rox Dancers will now perform their routines at Fire soccer matches in their nice new stadium on the edge of Chicago (it’s located in the southwest suburb of Bridgeview) not far from Midway Airport. That’s in addition to the non-sports event performances they give in their own right as they travel around the world.

For the record, Cardinal Fitness (the chain of health clubs that is spreading throughout the Chicago area) will sponsor them at Fire soccer matches.

BUT THE IDEA that the Hot Rox Dancers will outlive the Shamrox themselves due to professional soccer struck me as ironic, because it reminded me of the fate of Chicago’s previous professional soccer team.

I would be referring to the Chicago Sting, which in their 14 years of existence won two championships in the now-defunct North American Soccer League. Their title in 1981 was the first championship for a Chicago-based team since the Bears won an NFL title in 1963, and their title of 1984 (won on the same day that Leon Durham let a ground ball go through his legs and the Cubs blew a shot at a National League pennant) was the final one ever awarded by the NASL.

But while the North American Soccer League (including the high and mighty New York Cosmos – the team of international stars such as Pele, Beckenbauer and Chinaglia) disappeared after that year, the Sting actually continued to have a life.

They had previously shifted into a dual existence, playing summers in the NASL and winters in the Major Indoor Soccer League (playing a goofy version of soccer that more closely resembled a life-sized pinball match).

BUT WHEN THE North American Soccer League ceased to exist, the Sting continued to play the indoor soccer game – continuing until that league ceased to exist following the 1987-88 season.

Now I realize there is a difference between an actual team continuing to exist by playing a variant of their sport, and a team’s cheerleaders continuing to perform.

Some people who just can’t handle any sense of irony will probably wish they were reading this commentary in a newspaper so they could wad up the page into a ball and fling it into a trash can, while shouting a choice obscenity or two.

But hearing that the Hot Rox Dancers will live on at soccer matches gave me a chuckle, while also making me remember the old days of the Sting (I still remember watching them roam the playing field of Comiskey Park in the early 1980s, when they were on top of the U.S. soccer world).

SO IF YOU happen to find a reason to show up at Toyota Park this summer to see the Fire, give a thought to the Shamrox when you see their dance squad shimmy and shake themselves in an attempt to get the crowd worked up into a frenzy.

After all, it likely will be the only attention most of you paid to the Shamrox themselves. I will be just as guilty of that sin of omission of thought as any of you. If one thinks the Hot Rox Dancers are too obscure a squad to have a continued life, I think it puts them on a certain unique platform in the history of Chicago sports.

I must admit that the factor of the first Chicago Bears game I ever went to (a pre-season game in 1979 at Soldier Field against the New York Jets) that I most remember was watching the Honey Bears parade around the sidelines.

Would anyone have thought less of the Honey Bears squad had another team adopted them after the Bears prudishly dropped them following the 1985 Super Bowl-bound season?

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The Stinking Onions? What are they thinking?

Perhaps this sports franchise is destined to fall into the same category of Chicago history as the Chicago Hustle, the Cougars, the Power or the original team known as the Chicago Fire.

But the franchise that is expected to represent the Second City when Women’s Professional Soccer kicks off its first season of existence next spring may wind up with one of the most unique monikers in the city’s athletic history.

THE AS-OF-yet-named Chicago team said this week it will allow its potential fans to choose a public identity for the first serious attempt at a women’s professional soccer team in this city.

For what it’s worth, fans can go to an Internet site and pick from among 10 nicknames, all of which are meant to feed off some offbeat aspect of Chicago’s history or character.

Hence, we could wind up with a ball club that carries the English translation of what the name Chicago originally meant, back in the days a couple of centuries ago when the Second City was just a strong-smelling swamp with onion plants growing wild on the banks of what is now known to be the spot where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan.

The “Stinking Onions.” It’s almost suitable, since any Chicago ball club is going to have to carry on the tradition of periods of time when they are god-awful at their respective sport. What other nickname would suit a Chicago team better?

THE “STINKING ONIONS” – we literally smell.

I could almost go for the nickname, since most of the other suggestions are just so god-awful dull, generic or sound so cutesy like they were proposed by some marketing geek who is already dreaming of a tacky mascot and maize-colored jerseys for sale at $100 a pop.

Hence, nicknames such as the “Blues,” “Progress,” “Towers,” “Massacres,” “Red Stars” and “Wind” are ridiculous, just as bad as the old Chicago Enforcers of the XFL, the attempt by pro wrestling marketers to put together an “in your face” football league.

Just imagine this future statement – “Hi, I play for the Chicago Wind.” Ugh!

IF THAT NICKNAME is chosen, we Chicago sports fans would have to stand for a lot of abuse because we would literally have a team with a more lame nickname than the current holder of that title – the Miami Heat of the National Basketball Association.

Now perhaps taking this contest and the team nickname seriously is a bit ridiculous.

After all, just about every attempt at a professional sports league gets around to having a Chicago franchise. Chicago sports are not just limited to the tales of the White Sox, the Bears or the Blackhawks.

I personally recall the existence and demise of all the sports teams I named at the top of this commentary. The Women’s Basketball League, the World Hockey Association, the American Indoor Soccer Association and the World Football League all came and went.

THE WORLD FOOTBALL League of the early 1970s was so forgettable that their Chicago team, the Fire, was literally able to have its nickname appropriated by Chicago’s pro soccer team in the U.S.-based Major League Soccer.

The “Stinking Onions,” if that nickname is adopted, could come and go so quick that most of us would never notice they were here.

Going through the list makes me realize how much the mentality of sports marketing has changed throughout the years.

Take the nickname “White Sox.”

IT HAS BECOME a part of Chicago culture (particularly to those of us to whom anywhere north of Roosevelt Road is “foreign” turf) and is known in baseball circles throughout the world to be representative of our beloved city.

Yet it is so early 20th Century in mentality. No self-respecting sports team would even dream of adopting that name today.

The 19th Century mentality (which is when baseball led the way in sports becoming professional enterprises with franchises becoming significant parts of their home cities’ culture) would have had teams known as “Stockings,” with the color in the team nickname set by the color of socks worn with the uniforms.

Cincinnati, which is usually credited with having the first professional baseball team in 1869, was known as the “Red Stockings,” while St. Louis once had a team known as the “Brown Stockings.” In a similar vein, the Detroit Tigers got that nickname because someone thought their orange and black striped socks resembled a tiger in appearance.

CHANGING “STOCKINGS” TO “Sox” was a 20th Century innovation, done in part because Charles Comiskey wanted to separate the identity of his American League version of white hosed athletes from the National League version that existed a couple of decades earlier (the team now known as the Chicago Cubs).

“Sox” with the “x” was short. It was punchy. It fit better into a headline.

Now, sports marketers would say the misspelling looks illiterate – something along the lines of people who spell the word “barbecue” as “bar-b-q.”

A new team would probably call itself White Sock. Singular, no “the.” Actually, they’d probably think the color white was too drab, and would prefer something more along the line of “Mauve Sock” – which would ensure that the franchise would go broke within a year.

NO SELF-RESPECTING Chicagoan is going to root for anything colored mauve.

It is someone working under that mentality who is probably rooting for the nickname, “the Towers” to win the competition.

After all, one could then include some artsy vision of the Sears Tower in the team logo. Perhaps they could even hit up the building’s owners to cough up some cash in exchange for advertising rights?

For those who want to bash soccer (real football, I call it), I don’t want to hear it. I enjoy the sport, even when women play it competitively at its highest levels. Watching the U.S. national women’s team compete in international events is entertaining, particularly since the women’s team is held in higher regard in its soccer class than the U.S. men’s team.

BESIDES, I STILL have fond memories of the old Chicago Sting, who brought two North American Soccer League championships to Chicago (1981 and 1984) and actually continued to live for a few more years as an indoor league team after their outdoor league went out of business. To me, the name “Karl Heinz Granitza” will always mean more than any of the modern-day athletes who play for the Chicago Fire.

Personally, I’m rooting for this new franchise to succeed on some level – and largely because this attempt at creating a professional soccer league in the United States had the sense to come to Chicago to begin with.

The previous league, the Women’s United Soccer Association, existed for a couple of seasons and never got around to having a Chicago team, instead preferring to have teams in places like “Carolina” and “Atlanta” to traditional sports markets like Chicago, St. Louis or Detroit.

Sports marketers ought to realize it is the traditional sports towns that are most likely to want to have and support a team in every league in existence.

A CHICAGO “STINKING Onions” is probably more important than a team in a place like Phoenix or Denver. Smaller, newer cities will sound just so minor league and give the new league a less-than-important image.

Nonetheless, when I cast my vote in this poll, I’m not going with “Stinking Onions,” even though a part of me thinks it has some unique appeal (it would put us up there with the Nippon Ham Fighters of Japan professional baseball as the most unusual sounding team nickname in pro sports).

I picked “Chicago 1871,” which means technically the team wouldn’t have a nickname Or is it that its nickname would match its official name? At the very least, it would be a counterpart team of sorts to the Chicago Fire men’s team.

That date, to those of us who have taken the tour of the Chicago Historical Society at some time during our lives and seen the charred dolls and other burnt remains, was when the Great Chicago Fire occurred – the seminal event that could have wiped this town off the face of the earth, but instead motivated it to rebuild itself into one of the pre-eminent cities of the world.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Cast (http://www.womensprosoccer.com/form_ektekfrm1940.aspx) your vote here for Chicago’s newest pro sports franchise.

Women will finally get their chance to add a few stories to the long story of professional soccer (http://www.sover.net/~spectrum/chicago.html) in the Second City.

The Great Chicago Fire (http://www.chicagohs.org/fire/) could become the inspiration of professional soccer in Chicago for both men and women.

This artist's depiction of the Great Fire could wind up being the symbolism used by both of Chicago's professional soccer teams. Illustration provided by Library of Congress collection.

Are Best Buys and Bimbos all a part of the future of sports?

Best Buy is a Minnesota-based company that runs big box stores selling electronics and appliances, while Grupo Bimbo is a Mexico-based food conglomerate whose namesake products are bread and other baked goods.

They may sound like radically different companies. Yet the two now have something in common, as Best Buy is hoping to follow the lead of Bimbo in boosting its public image among sports fans.

Best Buy is going to be a sponsor of a professional sports team – specifically the Chicago Fire, the Second City’s soccer team that plays in the awkwardly-named Major League Soccer.

Yes, it’s true. Best Buy’s logo, the innocuous yellow tag with the company name in black block letters, will now adorn the uniforms of the Fire, whose team colors are red and white with blue trim.

If the Fire are able to amount to anything in the world of real football (not the stupid little game the Chicago Bears played so badly this year), the sight of the Best Buy logo could become associated with Chicago, since many photographs are going to be disseminated of soccer players with the logo on the lower front part of their jerseys.

It will literally be the same as the Bimbo logo, which is the butt of many jokes from unknowing sports fans who see the word in the colorful script printed on the jerseys of many soccer teams in the Mexican Futbol League, and assume it is a sign that the players are sexually promiscuous.
Memo Ochoa of the Club America soccer team is one of just many Mexican League soccer players who promote the Bimbo brand name.

It’s really just an ad for a Mexican-made type of white bread that is similar in texture and taste to that staple of any All-American childhood, Wonder Bread. The brand’s logo also includes a cutesy blue and white bear that is about as un-sexual as one can get.

If this sounds strange to a U.S. sports mentality, one needs to keep in mind that many Latin American sports teams cover their uniforms with corporate logos galore.

A professional athlete in either the Mexican Leagues of baseball or soccer can easily shill for Bimbo bread, Mexicana Airlines and Carta Blanca beer simultaneously, making them walking billboards.

The cheesiest Mexican sports ad placement I have ever seen? It has to be for Cerveza Sol. The beer brewer likes to put its logo, which spells out in red and gold lettering the word “Sol” (Spanish for Sun) on the derriere of the short shorts that are a standard part of the uniform worn by Mexican soccer team cheerleaders.

The trend exists for athletic teams from throughout Latin America, and I also have seen such advertising on the uniforms of sports teams from Japan and other Asian nations.

The Japan national baseball team that won the World Baseball Classic tournament in 2006 wore logos for Asahi-brand soft drinks on their shoulders and Konami-brand video games on their batting helmets.

The United States seems to be the only place on Earth where athletic teams think they are holding on to something sacred by not selling uniform space for advertisers.

Until now, that is.

From the sound of it, the new Chicago Fire uniforms that are expected to be unveiled Tuesday at a Best Buy store in southwest suburban Burbank (the team itself plays in a new stadium in the neighboring town of Bridgeview) are going to be less cluttered than their Mexican counterparts.

For now, there will be one logo for Best Buy, although it will be on the lower part of the front of the jersey just under the team logo, which is meant to vaguely resemble a traditional firefighter’s shield.

If the Fire continue to play well (the team won a championship for Chicago in its first season of existence and usually puts together winning records and contending teams), Best Buy stands to get some great publicity in sports sections of newspapers and on sports-related web sites all across the United States.

Sports purists will shudder, claiming this is the decline of society as we know it.

Of course, part of the problem with our society today is that we allow the goofs who follow sports to a ridiculous extreme to think of themselves as the norm, rather than as a pack of guys in serious need of a life away from sports talk radio.

Perhaps it doesn’t bother me because I’ve gotten used to seeing the pictures of Mexican League baseball players and watching Mexican League soccer on WSNS and WGBO – the Telemundo and Univision affiliates for the Chicago television market.

The logos seem to vanish after a short time, as the activity on the playing field takes control. It will be Cuahtemoc Blanco scoring a goal, not the Best Buy mascot.

Besides, professional sports have always been willing to sell out in exchange for a few bucks.

How else to explain the mass of advertising billboards that existed on the outfield walls of old-time baseball stadiums. Many fans now claim those ads, for products ranging from Chesterfield cigarettes to Schaeffer beer, helped give the stadiums part of their character.

Current stadiums are inundated with advertising messages and jingles on virtually every part of their façade. Many even carry the name of a corporation as part of their very identity.

Sports fans in Chicago follow their professional athletic teams in buildings named for United Airlines, U.S. Cellular phone service, Wrigley-brand chewing gum and Japanese automaker Toyota. So don’t tell me about the purity of American sports. Teams are more than willing to take corporate cash whenever they can get it.

It was only a matter of time before the uniform space was sold as well.

In light of such an attitude, it would only be appropriate if Bimbo bread were to try to spread its influence in the United States (their products can be found in select grocery stores that specialize in importing Mexican brands). Perhaps they could become jersey sponsors for multiple sports teams in the United States.

American teams could go around wearing the word “Bimbo” on their jerseys. Then again, it would only be fitting if U.S. team owners wore the logo, for they are the ones who are willing to sell out – if the money’s right.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: The Fire’s willingness to take millions of dollars to shill for Best Buy is detailed here. http://chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?post_date=2008-01-14&id=27753

All teams in U.S. soccer’s professional league are expected to eventually have jersey sponsors, as detailed in this old report. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/25/sports/soccer/25soccer.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Bimbo wants to become a viable collection of food products in the United States, as explained here. http://www.bimbobakeriesusa.com/

And for those of you who thought the Chicago Fire was a long-defunct team in the 1970s-era World Football League, read here. http://chicago.fire.mlsnet.com/t100/index.jsp