Attribution: Ryan Dickey from Evanston, IL / Chicago, United States, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, watched as the keeper decided not to go to one of the upcoming World Series games in Milwaukee after noting single game tickets were priced at more than $5,000, and one for standing-room-only would cost over $2,000.
Ah, the sports fans!The keeper stands by the assessment he made in a 1993 Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine cover story with paragraphs that described sports fans as “losers,” “unhealthy,” “social liabilities,” and “crazy!”
The piece got attention in a “Sports story of the year” competition and generated a cascade of letters from readers, sports fan readers of course.
The keeper’s marginal identity as a baseball fan began with the 1953 Allstar game in Cincinnati when he and an Army buddy had that unbelievable day of personal contact down on Crosley Field with the likes of Satchel Page and Ted Williams and a host of other big timers. 19
The documentation for that baseball fan identity is in the game program signed twice by Satchell Page after a news photographer shouted, “One more, Satch!” while “Satch” was signing the keeper’s program.
That program, signed by a dozen other Allstars, still exists and the Satch signing can be viewed on a video available at “MLB 1953 Allstar game (1953 All-Star Game).”
The keeper will be telling Phyllis about that amazing long-ago day, though she has doubtless heard about it before. He might even mention that a sports fan who pays thousands of dollars to stand and watch “pampered young strangers play a game” is, of course, “crazy”!
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