Bulls can keep their glory, not that they were ever in danger of losing it

It has been some 20 years since that season when the Chicago Bulls managed to set a record 72 victories in the regular season – a record that finally fell this year with the Golden State Warriors (that’s the Oakland, Calif.-area) managing to win 73 games.

 

Fell one win short of ultimate goal

Is it possible that these Warriors are better than the high-and-mighty Bulls teams that we had back in the 1990s – the one time that Chicago sports got to experience a taste of the kind of athletic glamour that New York Yankees fans expect routinely?

NAH!!!

It certainly isn’t going to be remembered as big as those teams led by the duo of Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, and also had characters like Dennis Rodman (what color would he wear his hair on any given night?) playing regularly.

The Warriors led by Stephen Curry (I have to confess, when I hear the name “Curry” it brings to my mind Eddy, the high school sensation from Thornwood High in South Holland who didn’t quite become the next Bulls superstar) may be able to claim to have won one more game than did those 1995-96 Bulls.

But those Bulls went on to be National Basketball Association champions for that season – and five others within that 1990s decade.

IN THE END, the Warriors fell Sunday night to the Cleveland Cavaliers. History will record these 73-win Warriors as merely a second-best team and NOT champions like the Cavaliers – led by LeBron James, the other high school sensation who turned out to be the elite player that sports fans thought Eddy Curry would be for the Bulls.

 

Still on top of the ultimate champion category

I don’t doubt that Golden State fans feel something special about this season that is now finished. Although I doubt anyone else will get all worked up over it.

For all I know, they will be quickly forgotten while basketball fans will debate for decades to come whether those 1990s Bulls were THE elite team of professional basketball.

That, and they’ll remember how Jordan himself was a Saturday Night Live guest (remember the sight of him in a grass skirt doing the hula dance with the Superfans cheering on his merits (Jordan was almost as sensational as Mike Ditka himself, to listen to those old comedy sketches).

 

Nobody would confuse him with Stephen

ALL OF THIS has come to a wrap-up, and I have to admit to feeling glad – in part because I think the professional basketball season stretches on far too long. It’s even more ridiculous playing NBA Finals games in late June than it is playing the World Series in the days leading up to Halloween.

We can now relegate the Curry Warriors vs. the Jordan Bulls debates to semi-drunken bar quarrels, and wonder how many times in the future the issue will lead to an outburst sensational enough that the cops will have to come in and break things up.

Because it just wasn’t a quarrel I cared to have all that often, and not just because I’m not much of a basketball fan.

Of course, the Chicagoan in me is going to find it difficult to ever have anyone challenge the significance of the Bulls back in that era.

SIX CHAMPIONSHIPS IN an eight-year time span is historic no matter what the sport.

 

One of Chicago's true sports characters

Although others will go on and on about the historic significance of Cleveland managing to come from as far behind as they were in the final round of the NBA Finals to actually win the whole thing.

Some will cry about Stephen Curry’s dream season falling one game short. While those people who think LeBron James is some snotty, arrogant punk will be upset to see him on yet another championship team.

And those of us with a Chicago rooting interest will wind up crying the loudest – wondering why the Bulls stink so much and when it will be their turn to win yet again.

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Why should we care if Rose does not care? He is not the Bulls’ savior!

We are of a society that places so much value on the abilities of its top athletes that it’s no wonder more don’t turn out to be like Derrick Rose.

He’s the point guard for the Chicago Bulls who once again has turned up injured. It’s a knee problem, and he had surgery last month.

BUT AS THE Chicago Sun-Times reported, the ball player whom many believe the key to whether or not the Bulls will ever be a significant basketball team in coming seasons doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to recover.

While team officials say they’d like to think he will be healed in just over a month, Rose said he’s not about to rush himself to play again this season. “Whenever I feel well, that’s when I’ll step back on the court,” he told the newspaper.

On the one hand, I have no doubt that Rose thinks he’s being particularly honest in assessing his recovery. He’ll play when he plays, and not a moment sooner. Maybe he thinks he’s saving himself for future glory to be performed on the basketball court.

Maybe he envisions this as an isolated incident that will be long forgotten by that future date many years from now when he is inducted into the professional basketball Hall of Fame.

BESIDES, HE’S AN athlete, someone who is used to being coddled because he’s special. He’s Derrick Rose. His knee is more important than any body part of a mere mortal.

But let’s be honest.

Sports fans are willing to mollycoddle the athletes who on a certain level perform. In the case of Rose, this is the third time in seven seasons playing in the National Basketball Association that he has suffered a severe injury that disrupted his playing time significantly.

Learning that he doesn’t care enough to want to return to play makes him come across like some sort of wimp. I can’t help but wonder if the Rose legacy is now set in Chicago as some sort of flake who wasn’t tough enough to endure on the court.

IF THAT’S THE case, then the biggest joke in this commentary was that line five paragraphs ago that hinted Rose will become a basketball Hall of Famer. He could wind up as the most disappointing athlete to ever wear the jersey of a Chicago professional sports team.

He definitely has surpassed Eddy Curry as the most disappointing hometown boy who was drafted Number 1 and expected to lead the Chicago Bulls to championship success for years to come.

Perhaps Rose still mentally thinks he’s the Simeon Career Academy athlete who will be coddled because, in his mind, “I’m Derrick Rose.” The guy who once faced allegations that he had someone else take his SAT college entrance exams and had his high school boost his grades to keep him academically eligible to play ball.

Sadly for him, Rose probably won’t realize how much his attitude stinks until he has washed out with the Bulls. He may wind up latching on to another NBA team, like the one-time Thornwood High School star Curry did. He may even be better off away from the pressure of playing in Chicago.

BECAUSE THE EXPECTATIONS here are turning out to be something that Rose doesn’t seem capable of living up to. Unfortunately, the Bulls’ roster these days seems based around the idea that Derrick is the team leader.

Without him, there is little chance of the Bulls accomplishing much of anything resembling success. While those years of athletic glory in the 1990s drift further and further into our city’s memory.

To the point where the Luv-a-Bulls’ routines could wind up being the only thing worth checking out at the United Center these days.

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LeBron can take his 2nd title and stuff it; he’ll never top the Jordan image

Personally, I find the whole Michael Jordan vs. LeBron James argument to be silly.

Anybody who seriously follows professional athletics (not those who paint themselves all kinds of funky colors to try to get themselves on television) knows there is no definitive way to compare ballplayers of different eras.

IN FACT, ONLY a fool would try to make such an argument seriously. Then again, we have a lot of fools amongst us.

So I’m sure we’re going to hear many people claim that LeBron (whose Miami Heat team won its second-straight NBA title this week, beating the San Antonio Spurs 4 games to 3 in the championship series) is the greatest. We can forget about anything “MJ” accomplished.

We’ll even get those people who will start screaming “six” over and over until they keel over dead from a heart attack. As in the fact that Chicago Bulls teams with Jordan managed to win 6 NBA titles.

Does this mean that if James-led Miami teams manage to come up with five more titles before the kid hangs up his sneakers, he will be the undisputed greatest dribbler ever??!?

IT’S A BATCH of nonsense to think either way. Because there’s nothing James could ever do to detract from the overall image that Jordan created – which went well beyond anything he ever did on the basketball court.

LeBron James is an athlete. Jordan took his skills into creating an image that for many will forever define professional basketball – often taking it to extremes where it seems like we couldn’t escape his image.

His restaurants. His shoes. His cologne. It was everywhere.

The closest one can find to Jordan in terms of celebrity professional athletes is baseball’s Babe Ruth. It doesn’t matter what “numbers” James puts up – his image doesn’t come close. Shaquille O'Neal was more of a celebrity than LeBron. Anybody who tries to get worked up is being ridiculous.

I BRING THIS issue up because I’m trying to anticipate many verbal brawls that could get way too physical (leave it to sports fans to think that their favorite team creates “life or death” issues).

I’m not arguing here that Jordan is better. Although if Jordan were just a ballplayer, I doubt Bulls fans would remember him any more fondly than Bob Love or Horace Grant, or basketball fans remembering Wilt Chamberlain or Kareem Abdul Jabbar!

They certainly wouldn’t have felt compelled to let him have his own NBA franchise – one that shows any skills he has about basketball are limited purely to what he once could do on the court. Nobody expects the Charlotte Hornets to match the Bulls anytime soon. One wonders if the Hornets will ever be as good as the Charlotte Knights -- the underachieving Chicago White Sox minor league affiliate?

In fact, in my mind, the thing for which LeBron James will be most remembered is that he seemed to trigger the modern trend of top-notch high school athletes skipping out on college altogether to jump to the NBA.

IT WORKED OUT for him, although most of them wash out. Anybody remember Eddy Curry – the onetime star of suburban Thornwood High School who didn’t lead the Bulls to anything significant and – the last I heard – was playing professionally in China?

I’m willing to concede that Jordan was the top ballplayer of his era, and James the best of what we see now. Although it’s bound to happen that in a couple of decades there will be somebody on the basketball court whom everybody will want to believe is THE BEST!!! because that’s all they’ve seen in person.

And a whole generation of kids of the future will think of LeBron as some old fool, the way that kids of today are too eager to think of Jordan as just another old fogy.

Besides, those of us in Chicago know full well that the sports team that “matters” these days is the Blackhawks – who could on Saturday put themselves only one win away from a second Stanley Cup hockey championship in four seasons.

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Yet another year goes by without the World Series being played in Chicago

The World Series begins Wednesday, and those dreams some of us had of an all-Chicago affair deciding a U.S. professional baseball championship for 2008 are so dead they’re burned to a crisp.

It’s going to be the Tampa Bay Rays against the Philadelphia Phillies. While I can’t say I really care who wins the thing, I must admit to taking some interest in potential Chicago angles to this series.

IT IS THOSE Chicago angles that makes me think all of us in the Second City ought to be rooting for the Devil Rays (I don’t care if that name offends the locals, it’s a sea creature and it sounds better than just “Rays”).

In fact, this ought to be something that could potentially unite fans of the White Sox and a certain other ball club that had delusions of winning a pennant.

Take the Phillies, a ballclub that like the Cubs dates back to the 19th Century. And it is a team that quite possibly has an even more pathetic history than the Cubs (who were a respectable National League franchise for the first third of the 20th Century).

While the Cubs have only won two World Series in their history (1907 and 1908), the Phillies are a team that have only won the series once (1980) in their history.

JUST IMAGINE THE anguish Cubs fans would feel if the Phillies were to win the World Series, thereby giving them just as many overall victories as the Cubs? Ever since the Braves changed the losing character of their franchise history in Boston/Milwaukee/Atlanta by rattling off a dominant string of division titles and five league championships in the 1990s, it has been the Phillies and the Cubs as the historic doormats of the National League.

And if the Phillies were to win a World Series, it would create the perception in some minds that they too have dumped their losing ways, leaving the Cubs all alone (except for a few dumpy expansion teams) at the bottom of the baseball pool.

They went from being convinced this was THEIR year to potentially being left alone in the loser pool.

I don’t think I could handle the mass depression that the North Side and its sympathizers would sink into. In fact, I think such depression would make Cubs fans even more unbearable.

BUT THERE ARE a pair of other reasons for which I will admit to taking some interest in Tampa Bay winning a World Series title – even though they have only been in existence for 11 years (it took the Houston Astros 44 years of existence before they won their first National League pennant, and are still waiting for that first World Series title).

Those reasons are pitcher Chad Bradford and outfielder Cliff Floyd – both of whom found their baseball fortunes at a point this year where they wound up signing to play for Tampa Bay.

Floyd is a Chicago area native who played his high school ball in suburban South Holland (the same high school that produced one-time Chicago Bull Eddy Curry and former White Sox and Cubs pitcher Steve Trout). He’s also the guy who grew up a White Sox fan (claiming Harold Baines as his favorite ballplayer) who later went on to play for the Cubs (in 2007).

This could literally be the year that all Chicagoans can unite behind rooting for a hometown guy to have that BIG moment, thereby making him a local sports legend for the remainder of his life – even if his “local” moment came for another city.

CHICAGO SPORTS FANS have so little history of baseball heroes in October that we’ll settle for a local boy done well somewhere else – just like we don’t hold it against Bill Skowron (who learned how to hit while playing slow-pitch softball back in the 1940s) that he had his baseball heroics playing for the New York Yankees back in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Then, there is Bradford, a relief pitcher who I still remember from the beginning of his career when he was with the White Sox.

Bradford is not the BIG MAN who comes into a game to finish it off. He’s the guy who pitches to a hitter or two at a time in mid-game, to prevent a messy situation from becoming a complete disaster.

What makes him unique is that he’s a sub-mariner. He throws his pitches with a motion that’s not quite underhand. But it definitely isn’t a sidearm throw.

I STILL REMEMBER the first time I ever saw him pitch (in 2000 in a late-season game against the Seattle Mariners). As it turned out, I had a seat that game in the lower deck straight behind home plate.

I got the same view of the pitcher that the catcher and umpire had, and I still remember the break on Bradford’s pitches as being absolutely freaky. He doesn’t throw overly hard, but I can’t hit him even in my dreams.

While I realize the White Sox shared the same doubts about Bradford (how can such a freakish throwing motion ever work long term?) that many conventional baseball people have, I must admit to being intrigued that he has lasted for so many ball clubs throughout this decade (the average major league baseball player’s career is only four seasons – he’s already lasted for nine).

If anything, I’ll watch Bradford come into ballgames and try to envision “What if?” As in, what if Bradford had been kept in Chicago? What could he have achieved on the South Side?

THEN, THERE’S THE biggest “What if?” What if we had lost the White Sox to St. Petersburg, Fla.?

Don’t forget that the monstrosity of a stadium that Florida officials built in the mid-1980s in hopes of luring a major league team to the Tampa Bay area nearly lured the White Sox (Thank God for political manipulation, Springfield-style, that kept the team in Chicago).

That World Series title in 2005, along with division titles in 1993 and 2000, and generally winning records throughout the 1990s and 2000s, could have easily been achieved by the “Florida White Sox.”

I’m willing to throw the fans of Tampa Bay a bone and let them finally have a winning season (including an American League pennant and a chance at a World Series title), particularly since it means those of us who are Sout’ Siders at heart got to keep our historic ball club.

SO GO RAYS! Beat the Phillies (even if our junior senator, Barack Obama, is being deluded enough by his campaign manager to root for Philadelphia).

And preferably, they’ll do it in less than six games. Because I’m really not in the mood for a Republican stink over the Obama infomercial on Oct. 29 delaying Game Six of the World Series. We have enough stupid issues in Campaign ’08. Here’s hoping baseball helps avoid another one from arising.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: All those people who placed pre-season bets on Tampa Bay to win the World Series this year (back when the odds were 200-1) have the potential to clean up (http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g8_fAf0_P0VnrmKibfTL7ywUv8ugD93UEN4G0) financially.

There are two Rays players (http://www.baseball-reference.com/f/floydcl01.shtml) with the potential (http://www.baseball-reference.com/b/bradfch01.shtml) to stir up Chicago interest.

How will David Letterman mock Tampa Bay baseball these days (http://lateshow.cbs.com/latenight/lateshow/top_ten/index/php/20020327.phtml)?

A history lesson (http://whitesoxinteractive.com/History&Glory/SaveOurSox.htm) about what could have been.

Bulls fans place faith in 19-year-old

Have we forgotten the Eddy Curry experience already?

Those of us Chicagoans who get excited over the Chicago Bulls and professional basketball (I prefer the college game myself) are once again willing to believe that a kid barely out of high school will be the Chosen One who leads this city to championship-level teams in the National Basketball Association.

WHY ELSE WOULD so many be so eager to celebrate the fact that the Bulls used the top draft pick in the nation Thursday to choose Derrick Rose, the one-time Simeon Career Academy star who played one year of college ball at Memphis – before deciding he’d rather be a part of the NBA than a university student.

Of course, that is one more year of college than Curry had when he decided to bypass DePaul University and go straight from Thornwood High School in suburban South Holland (where he nearly led a team to an Illinois state championship) to the Bulls, where he had a couple of non-descript seasons before being traded to the New York Knicks.

Curry became a better ballplayer once he no longer had the pressure of being the hometown hero who would lead the Bulls to the exalted levels that Michael Jordan took the franchise back in the 1990s. It would be a shame if Rose winds up regretting that he did not go to Miami.

Rose could easily turn out to be another guy who can’t possibly live up to the pressure that is going to be put on him by Chicago sports fans who seem to forget that the Jordan years were a historic aberration and that the Bulls throughout their existence have been a mediocre-to-terrible basketball franchise.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Derrick Rose gets to return to Chicago after one year of college (http://www.nba.com/draft2008/board.html) in Tennessee. Here’s a quickie summary of what Rose (http://www.highschoolelite.com/2007/rose.html) was worth when he played high school ball in the Chicago Public League.