Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel tried to get Little League officials to overturn their decision to strip the Jackie Robinson West team of the national championship it won last summer.
Of course he did, cheating is an industry in Chicago, one that flourished long before the stockyards made the city bustle, and one that remains decades after the last hog was slaughtered.
The saga of an upstart team from Chicago’s South Side flourishing in national competition against all odds became a feel-good yarn that united the often-divided city and played well on the national stage. That the team was named for an American hero made the story line even sweeter. The young champions even got to meet with another South Sider who did well, Da President.
But, it turns out it was a big lie, one molded and shaped by scheming adults who played with boundaries to create an illegal All Star team.
Now, the unifying narrative has devolved into racial accusations and questions about cheating in sports, against a backdrop of youthful crushed dreams.
As a native South Sider, I know the stage where this drama is playing out. I grew up in the Beverly/Morgan Park neighborhood, an Irish enclave on the edge of the city, where the white flight from other South Side neighborhoods alighted.
The Jackie Robinson West league is located one neighborhood over. It’s the one across the tracks (literally), the community we didn’t dare wander into without expecting a fight. I will note that it was also the other way around when it came to them walking into our neighborhood. And it was Us and Them, as simple as black and white.
Politics, too, in Chicago has long been us and them, black and white. You think politics gets mean here in Atlanta? It’s nothing by comparison. The saying “politics ain’t beanbag” originated there. An alderman once famously summed it up for posterity: “Chicago ain’t ready for reform,” he said.
A few years back, I asked my uncle, Dick Torpy, a go-getter precinct captain, how things were going. He chuckled, responding, “Whenever I talk with someone, I figure they’re wearing a wire.”
So, with all that in the civic DNA, the adults running the show at Jackie Robinson West no doubt thought, “What’s the harm? We’ll cut a corner here, stretch a boundary there, keep people quiet and build a winner everyone gets behind.”
You know, Little League ain’t bean bag.
And now the team that united Chicago is pulling the city apart. Those involved in this current passion play are a crew out of Chicago’s central casting:
There’s Chris Janes, the whistle-blower, a coach from Evergreen Park, a blue-collar, mostly white suburb who saw one of his teams demolished 43-2 last year by JRW and then investigated indications that all was not what it seemed.
There’s Father Mike Pfleger, the crusading Catholic priest from a nearby black parish (he’s white), who is bashing the whistle-blower and the team’s harsh punishment, claiming race is at the bottom of this.
There’s Mark Konkol, a tough reporter who won the Pulitzer Prize for writing about a murderous weekend in Chicago, who kept pushing Little League officials, showing them that something smelled on the South Side.
And, of course, there’s Jesse Jackson, because there’s a flock of television cameras.
Konkol, a White Sox fan, heard whispers of cheating and cover-ups last fall, not long after the city lauded the young heroes with a massive rally. It was a tough story to write, he said, because he knew the truth might puncture a dream. “I knew it was sensitive. I kept to the facts and it played out this way,” he said. “There’s been such a dust-up. There’s racial allegations, and now people are being threatened.”
His Twitter account carried nasty diatribes and a heckler calling him “Snitch.”
He found that ironic, because while covering crime in Chicago, Konkol wrote about the “no snitch rule” that hampers police solving many of the killings. He said police are guarding the whistle-blower coach.
Now the truth is out, the kids’ title is gone, and adults are talking angrily and pointing fingers at each other. Unfortunately, it’s just like old times.
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