Chicago Sun-Times: All posts by Rick Telander

Bears predictions: Week 15 at Browns

2023-12-14T11:09:53.621-06:00

Bears defensive tackle Justin Jones celebrates during a preseason game against the Browns last year.

Photo by Jason Miller/Getty Images

The Sun-Times’ experts offer their picks for the Bears’ game Sunday in Cleveland:

Rick Morrissey

Bears, 20-17: If the Bears can make Jared Goff look like an interception-throwing statue, surely they can do the same with 38-year-old Joe Flacco, who leaves the pocket only for bingo and bathroom breaks. A huge question is whether Justin Fields can survive the Browns’ defense. Season: 9-4.

Rick Telander

Bears, 28-24: Wherever you go, whatever you do, no matter how bad it gets, the Browns are worse. Tim Couch, Kellen Winslow Jr, “Johnny Football” Manziel, Deshaun Watson ($230 million guaranteed), etc. Season: 9-4.

Scoop Jackson

Bears, 19-16: Stefanski vs. Eberflus. This will not be a matchup against teams as much as it will be about Matt’s future. Going against an 8-5 team that has the most wins in the NFL against teams with winning records — with their own polarized coach — this will be the “gauge game” the Bears use to confirm who Eberflus is and what he’s capable (or incapable) of becoming. Season: 9-4.

Patrick Finley

Browns, 23-20 (OT): Winning on the road is hard. Since going 5-3 away from Soldier Field in 2020, the Bears have won just six times in 24 road games. Only one team the Bears have played on the road this year, the Lions, have a better record than the Browns right now. Season: 10-3.

Jason Lieser

Browns, 19-17: While the spike in scoring with 28 points against the Lions was nice, the Bears are two games removed from managing just four field goals against the Vikings. And Cleveland has one of the NFL’s best defenses. Season: 6-7.

Mark Potash

Browns, 20-19: The Bears are heading in the right direction under Eberflus, with three victories in their last four games, and are in position for a third consecutive upset. This should go down the last play. Season: 7-6.

Make room for 43 bowls — college bowls, that is

2023-12-11T22:55:19.063-06:00

Georgia coach Kirby Smart kisses the championship trophy after the Bulldogs won the College Football Playoff title game against TCU in January.

Ashley Landis/AP

There’s 43 of ’em, and they start in four days, so let’s get going. (We’re talking bowl games, of course. They’re everywhere, like warts on a toad.)

First off, we got the ones that fellows will be embarrassed to tell their grandkids they played in.

This starts with one I already consider to have entered Hall of Fame Name territory anchored by the former Poulan Weed-Eater Bowl (often referred to as the Weedwhacker Bowl), the Salad Bowl (held in Phoenix from 1948 to 1952), the Beef ‘O’ Brady’s Bowl (sponsored by a pub chain called ‘‘Beef’s’’ by regulars) and the lovely Meineke Car Care Bowl.

The special one is the Pop-Tarts Bowl. It’s played in Orlando on Dec. 28 and features 9-3 North Carolina State and 8-4 Kansas State. Both starting quarterbacks are in the transfer portal and won’t be playing, but no matter. Think of the dialogue between Grandpa and little Johnny on his knee years hence:

Little Johnny: “Papa, what’s a Pop-Tart?’’

Grandpa: “It was a delicious toaster pastry containing corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, dextrose, soybean and palm oil sugar, and bleached wheat flour.’’

Little Johnny: “Did you eat them?’’

Grandpa: “No, Johnny, never. But they lasted decades on the pantry shelf.’’

Then there’s the Guaranteed Rate Bowl, the Famous Toastery Bowl (“All Day Breakfast!”), the Quick Lane Bowl (wiper blades, oil change, wheel alignment), the Duke’s Mayo Bowl (“It’s Got Twang!’’) and the ReliaQuest Bowl (“Trust ReliaQuest to operationalize security’’).

There are more like the above, but these bowls basically are ads for companies, and the players are mini-billboards.

Someday a player may be sort of proud to have played in the Ventures Bowl (South Alabama vs. Eastern Michigan, both 6-6), but it’s got to be tougher to tell folks your postseason contest was sponsored by a construction company out of Daphne, Alabama, and not the famed guitar group who made ‘‘Walk, Don’t Run’’ a killer tune.

Did I mention the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl? Nothing wrong with spuds. Not a thing. A world without Ruffles potato chips and French fries is a world not worth living in. Idaho’s cool, too. Got Yellowstone National Park up there at the top.

But with 6-6 Georgia State playing 6-6 Utah State, the game is the definition of mediocre. And a potato on your gift watch isn’t as cool as a rose or an orange.

An obvious point here is that many of these so-called bowls aren’t bowls at all. They’re just late, extra games for almost everybody in D-I football except the really bad teams.

Even some of the losers get in, such as in the aforementioned Quick Lane Bowl, where 5-7 Minnesota plays 7-5 Bowling Green. Kudos to Gophers coach P.J. Fleck for somehow getting his boys into a bowl despite finishing last in the seven-team Big Ten West.

One could reasonably ask what the purpose of these bowl games really is except to entertain the lazy, food-gorged holiday TV crowd.

Coaches, of course, love the extra game. And they get paid for it, too. The guy everybody loves so much, Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh, got $500,000 just for beating Ohio State in the regular season — and he wasn’t even there. So who knows how much he’ll get if Michigan beats Alabama in the Rose Bowl and moves on to the National Championship Game and wins that against Texas or Washington.

The serious bowls generally start in the week after Christmas and onto New Year’s Day. The Citrus Bowl, Peach Bowl, Cotton Bowl, Orange Bowl and Rose Bowl fall into that category. With an undefeated team like Florida State (13-0) playing 12-1 Georgia in the Orange Bowl, you’ve a vengeance game of grand proportions.

Georgia was ranked No. 1 at times during the season before losing in the SEC Championship game to Alabama on a controversial play and thus was tossed from the final-four championship derby. So, too, Florida State simply got screwed out of the tourney because its starting quarterback got hurt. You’re undefeated? Sorry. Furious at somebody — likely the selection committee — describes the mood of this game best.

And don’t forget a lot of star players are opting out of the games entirely. You want to see top NFL draft prospect Caleb Williams in the Holiday Bowl, where his team, USC, plays Louisville? Sorry, he’s chillin’ for the draft.

Why get hurt for nothing?

And all the players, in or out, can be happy they’re not playing in the once-upon-a-time Gallery Furniture.Com Bowl.

Bears predictions: Week 14 vs. Lions

2023-12-07T08:22:10.017-06:00

Brothers Amon-Ra and Equanimeous St. Brown chat after the Lions-Bears game last month.

Photo by Mike Mulholland/Getty Images

The Sun-Times’ experts offer their picks for the Bears’ game against the Lions on Sunday at Soldier Field:

Rick Morrissey

Lions, 28-20: The Lions have not been playing well. We know this because they eked out a victory over the lowly Bears on Nov. 19. Detroit’s Jared Goff threw three interceptions in that game. Hard to picture it happening again. Season: 9-3.

Rick Telander

Bears, 21-20: Jared Goff has that tall, skinny retro QB look to him, and he throws like the No. 1 overall draft pick he once was. But someday the Bears have to beat somebody as good as him and pals. Don’t they? Season: 8-4.

Scoop Jackson

Bears, 27-21: The Bears had the Lions’ offense on lock for 55 of the 60 minutes in their loss to them three weeks ago. Expect the new-feel, post-bye-week team to do the same without giving the game away at the end. Season: 8-4.

Patrick Finley

Bears, 24-19: The Lions have given up the third-most points in the NFL since Week 7. During that same half-season span, only seven teams have given up fewer than the Bears and their resurgent defense. Season: 9-3.

Jason Lieser

Lions, 20-16: The Lions, winners of four of their last five, supposedly are in a rut. The last time the Bears were that good in a five-game stretch was early in 2020. These teams are in very different places. Season: 6-6.

Mark Potash

Bears, 24-20: The Bears are healthy, at home, refreshed off a bye and motivated to finish what they started at Ford Field. The Lions have been shaky in their last three games, and losing defensive tackle Alim McNeill doesn’t help a leaky defense. Season: 6-6.

Artificial Intelligence is good for many things, but it doesn’t work so well in journalism

2023-12-04T21:30:29.749-06:00

This is the cover of the upcoming Dec. 21, 1998 issue of Sports Illustrated featuring the 1998 Sports Illustrated Sportsmen of the Year Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.

We found out recently that Sports Illustrated had been using artificial intelligence to create ‘‘content,’’ as journalism often is called nowadays.

After the initial disgust — the use of fake names and fake photos of fake ‘‘writers’’ (Hi, Drew Ortiz!) were the kickers — things have settled down. SI brass apologized, said it was all a big misunderstanding, it came from ‘‘an external, third-party provider,’’ there was no intent to deceive, blah, blah, blah.

The fact is, AI is here to stay, it’s everywhere and its use only is going to increase. SI’s mistake was going too far, too fast with absolutely zero consideration of ethics, integrity or even a certain thing called quality.

It was all about money, of course. No surprise there. You create somebody from the ether, a ‘‘journalist’’ named Sora Tanaka, who, according to SI’s bio, is ‘‘a fitness guru, and loves to try different foods and drinks,’’ and then have ‘‘her’’ write reviews for your magazine? Her salary? Zero. Fabulous!

For me, a former SI senior writer, seeing the descent of words into commodities no different from wheat or pork bellies, particularly in a once-lustrous magazine that cherished good writing beyond all, is just plain sad.

But I knew it was coming. It has been a slow train for years, now speeding up. The day Craigslist appeared, for instance, newspaper ads were dead. The day any schmo could blast out sports stories and photos to the world, no matter how crappy, contrived or phony, SI was dead.

The internet has made everybody an author, a critic, an expert, a ‘‘journalist.’’ Thus, the revenue model for authentic, professional-quality print journalism — ads and subscriptions — is a skeleton.

To the rescue? Hedge funds and private-equity firms, joints such as The Arena Group, which owns SI and other once-proud journals.

The Arena Group says it is ‘‘an innovative technology platform and media company with a proven cutting-edge playbook that transforms media brands.’’ Whatever the hell that means.

They could have cut through the nonsense and just said they’re in it for money.

‘‘They’re not really in the print business,’’ retired SI editor Rob Fleder said when I spoke with him.

Credit a living journalist named Maggie Harrison from Futurism for bringing the SI/AI fraudulence into the open. But the truth is, AI is used by all kinds of journalism sites in many ways, just not with fake names and stories. You use it constantly yourself. Spell-check? Word? PowerPoint? Grammarly? Google Maps? All AI-generated.

Deep fakes, which are the evil spawn of AI, are now so convincing that, starting Jan. 1, California schools will be required to teach media literacy to all children as part of English, science, math and history lessons so they can recognize fake news. The first question they will be taught to ask: ‘‘Who created this?’’

SI’s fraud was a shallow fake, I suppose. But already-giant Microsoft has built a fleet of what it calls ‘‘office copilots,’’ AI ‘‘assistants’’ using OpenAI’s technology that a writer can talk to and use like, well, a co-writer.

Would SI’s sins have been so egregious — or possibly forgiven — if the site had said, ‘‘This article was written by artificial intelligence, and the accompanying name and photo are ones we dreamed up’’?

Someday, machine and man will merge. It’s inevitable. Might we not have co-bylines from an author and his robotic pal, for example? Right now, AI gives us ChatGPT and Bard, among others, and those programs write without nuance, touch or awareness of themselves. They replicate, predict and synthesize. They’re not sentient creatures — yet.

Complaining about SI is almost like complaining about gas lawn mowers. They’re loud and smelly, and what about the old quiet days of hands-on, push mowers? But would you ever go back?

Does it bother us that the car map we use for directions knows our whereabouts? That our cellular phones can track us to the square foot? Privacy? Ha. We traded it long ago for convenience.

Much of AI is wonderful. In medicine, travel, genetics, design, energy savings, it leads on. Consider that new AI-assisted science has created a drug for ‘‘canine life extension’’ — that is, a virtual doggy fountain of youth. It might be ready by 2026. Imagine, Fido at age 70!

So the SI debacle seems to me chump change in an AI-dominated world. Let’s pray it’s just a stupid sporting sputter en route to a brighter future.

Some college football coaches are sitting on the edge of their hot seats

2023-11-26T22:07:52.055-06:00

Head coach Ryan Day of the Ohio State Buckeyes looks on against the Michigan Wolverines during the first half in the game at Michigan Stadium on November 25, 2023 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Gregory Shamus/Getty Images

It’s almost laughable that in his six years at Ohio State, coach Ryan Day is 1-3 against Michigan and 38-0 against the rest of the Big Ten.

The Big Ten now has what, a thousand teams in it? And they all exist as chum for Ohio State leading up to the regular season-ending meat-fest against Michigan.

For fellow shark Michigan, it’s the same. No other Big Ten game matters. Yes, there are occasional nips from Penn State and Michigan State through the years. But do the Buckeyes or Wolverines fear Indiana, Purdue, Minnesota, Rutgers, Nebraska, Maryland and so on?

No, they do not.

Yet even though 11-1 Ohio State beat the other Big Ten teams this year by the average score of 26-7, all that matters is Michigan. And the 30-24 loss Saturday in Ann Arbor has Buckeye fans grumbling that Day can’t win the big ones, that he’s overmatched, that he doesn’t understand the despicable nature of the blue-and-maize up north.

Up there resides the man the Buckeye Nation despises most, coach Jim Harbaugh. Whether Harbaugh’s a genius, a charlatan, a brilliant tactician, a cheater, a great recruiter, a wonderful but misunderstood human being, depends on your perspective.

And for Ohio State there’s only one view — he’s an impediment to glory.

The Buckeyes may yet make the 2023 College Football Playoff. But the loss to Michigan hurts. In the Power Five, there are four undefeated teams and four one-loss teams heading into conference-title games. Weird stuff could happen.

For instance, if 10-2 Iowa were to somehow upset 12-0 Michigan (almost impossible but it could happen), Ohio State wouldn’t be so special anymore.

GREENBERG: Illinois finished at the bottom of a worse-than-ever Big Ten West — now that’s saying something

An aside here. I was with new Ohio State coach John Cooper some years ago — he’d been hired to replace “9-3 Earle Bruce” — and I jokingly told him I saw a wolverine in the wooded lot where Cooper was going to build his house. “A wolverine?’’ he said in alarm, looking around.

It was a groundhog. A cheap gag, true. Cooper chuckled about it later.

But the fact is in Bruce’s nine years at Ohio State he won 81 games, the best record in the Big Ten during that time. Then he was fired. Cooper himself would be fired after 13 years. He still has the second-most wins in Ohio State history, after only Woody Hayes, but he went 2-10-1 against Michigan.

So Ryan Day knows what he’s up against, great record or not.

At Michigan, Harbaugh has gone 26-1 in the Big Ten his last three seasons. The pressure on him now is to win the national championship. And not have his team put on probation for whatever the alleged sign-stealing scandal finally reveals. And the pressure is on Michigan to keep him. Keep him, if he’s clean, that is.

Rumors, naturally, have Harbaugh becoming the Bears’ next coach, after Matt Eberflus is fired.

Maybe. Who knows? The world of coaching is a carousel run by speed freaks.

Which leads us to Northwestern and its startlingly successful, accidental coach, David Braun. Starting the year as the Wildcats’ new defensive coordinator, straight from lower-echelon North Dakota State, Braun, 38, suddenly became the de facto head coach after Pat Fitzgerald was fired before the first game over his alleged knowledge of team hazing.

Northwestern is now 7-5, ready to play in a bowl game, and who would have thought it?

In Fitzgerald’s last two seasons the Wildcats went 4-20, with one Big Ten win each year. And yet, Fitzgerald was in no danger of getting fired — until the hazing accusations.

Northwestern doesn’t have any do-or-die conditions for its coaches like Ohio State or Michigan, no hated rival that must be slain. Illinois? That’s a giggle. Two teams that putter along?

Nobody ever mentions competing for the national championship at Northwestern. Just be relevant and scandal-free.

Consider: Northwestern has won two of its last 32 games against Ohio State. One was in overtime in 2004, the other a 1971 nail-biter in which Greg Strunk returned a kickoff 93 yards for a touchdown, leading Woody Hayes to kick one of his players in rage

I guess if there’s a point here, it’s know where you are, coaches.

Gary Barnett could have stayed at Northwestern as long as he wanted. So could have Randy Walker, who died suddenly in 2006. Fitzgerald could have coached until retirement.

But Barnett wanted more and tripped off to Colorado. Fitzgerald simply forgot to mind the store. Walker, R.I.P.

David high-flying Braun?

Be careful, friend.

Bears predictions: Week 12 at Vikings

2023-11-24T11:28:41.687-06:00

Vikings running back Alexander Mattison runs against the Bears last month.

Photo by Quinn Harris/Getty Images

The Sun-Times’ experts offer their picks for the Bears’ game Monday night in Minneapolis:

Rick Morrissey

Vikings, 23-20: The Bears are coming off a tough road loss in which they outplayed the Lions most of the game. Now they’re at the hot, but not-that-mighty Vikes. A case could be made for an uplifting victory. By why potentially spoil a good thing — the No. 1 pick in next year’s draft? Season: 9-2.

Rick Telander

Bears, 27-24: It seems there have been endless make-or-break, must-win games for the Bears this season. Kirk Cousins is gone, Justin Fields is healthy, so we really mean it this time. Silence that damn Viking horn! Season: 7-4.

Scoop Jackson

Bears, 24-20: Winning one more game than they did last season begins right now for the Bears. Not to save anyone’s job or position, but to at least say going into next season, “At least we showed growth.” Whatever that means. Season: 7-4.

Patrick Finley

Bears, 23-21: If Fields plays as well as he did last week, the Bears should score enough to win. Their defense needs to answer the bell after gagging away the win in Detroit. Season: 8-3.

Jason Lieser

Vikings, 25-23: This is an intriguing matchup of defensive play callers between Bears coach Matt Eberflus and Vikings coordinator Brian Flores. Flores won that battle decisively last time they played. Season: 6-5.

Mark Potash

Vikings, 24-23: The Bears are a better team than they were in Week 6 when they lost to the Vikings 19-13 at Soldier Field. But so are the Vikings, who have won two of three without Cousins and receiver Justin Jefferson. Season: 6-5.

There’s no gray area about the importance of truth in journalism

2023-11-20T21:29:17.322-06:00

Fox Sports and Prime Video host Charissa Thompson ignited a media firestorm with her admission she made up sideline reports on NFL games.

Grant Halverson/Getty Images

Maybe I shouldn’t care as much as I do about former NFL sideline reporter Charissa Thompson and her admission to making up phony reports some 15 years ago.

But I do.

All journalists should, too. I don’t mean just sports journalists; I mean all journalists everywhere. And so should the public, if it still wants to believe in anything it hears, reads or even sees.

Thompson said on a recent podcast that she made up live game reports ‘‘sometimes because, A, the coach wouldn’t come out at halftime, or it was too late and I didn’t want to screw up the report. So I was like, ‘I’m just gonna make this up.’ ’’

Her logic was that ‘‘no coach is gonna get mad’’ if she just spews words and claims they came from the coach’s mouth because it likely would have been what the coach would have said had she actually spoken with him.

And in an admission in an earlier podcast, she was joined by veteran NFL personality Erin Andrews, who admitted, ‘‘I’ve done that, too.’’

And why did Andrews make up her stuff? Out of purported kindness.

‘‘For a coach that I didn’t wanna throw under the bus because he was telling me all the wrong stuff!’’ is how she put it.

What we have here is journalism as entertainment and, sadly, as genuine fake news. It doesn’t matter what someone would have said; it matters what they did say. If it was nothing, fine. If it was really dumb, fine. It’s OK. We get it.

Journalism is based in fact. And sometimes facts aren’t what we want. So be it.

The networks that employ NFL sideline reporters, almost all women, often seem to have put them there not for information-gathering but for the attraction they will create for the majority-male audience that watches the games.

Phyllis George was among the first female NFL talkers when CBS hired her in 1975 to be the only woman on ‘‘The NFL Today.’’ A former Miss America, George never could get past the perception that she was hired only for her beauty and not for any sports acumen. Yet she was an inspiration for young women who recognized her as a pioneer in the macho sports world.

TV is a visual medium. What you look like is important. I know this well, having been a panelist on ‘‘The Sportswriters on TV,’’ with critics saying we four buzzards had ‘‘faces made for radio.’’

But it seems Thompson, who now works for Fox Sports and Prime Video, didn’t care much about journalism as a profession. Rather, she saw it as a way to be a star.

Lisa Salters of ESPN and Lauren Shehadi of MLB Network are two female reporters who, in my opinion, take their jobs seriously. Being a journalist comes with that responsibility.

It always has troubled me that there is no licensing needed to be a journalist. You need a license to be a doctor, lawyer, electrician, nurse, cosmetologist, therapist, teacher and land surveyor and, of course, to drive a car, open a restaurant, get married and be a makeup artist or a pest-control worker.

But to be a journalist? Nothing.

If they had such a test, I’d be first in line to take it. If I failed, I’d study and go back again and again until I passed. There would be something akin to the Hippocratic Oath involved: Tell the truth as best you can.

I am disturbed by those admissions not because they’re women but because they brought shame on our profession.

In 2020, former President Donald Trump raged to ‘‘60 Minutes’’ interviewer Lesley Stahl: ‘‘I never knew how dishonest the media was. And I really mean it!’’

Belief in journalism is on its way out the door. Many people side with Trump. And the advent of AI, machine-writing, deep fakes and the like have made the profession endangered in many other ways.

Yet journalists around the world literally are dying for what they believe in. According to Statista.com, more than 200 journalists have been killed since 2019. According to a United Nations report, attacks on journalists have happened in at least 101 countries since 2015.

Yes, we’re just sports journalists. But we’re linked with all reporters, even those who cover corruption, revolution and war.

If we just make things up, can you blame people for thinking we’re a joke?

Poem is where the heart is for our Rick Telander

2023-11-18T07:00:00-06:00

The book cover of Rick Telander’s book of poetry, entitled ‘‘Sweet Dreams: Poems and Paintings for the Child Abed’’

Provided

The first thing you might think is, What? A sports writer wrote a book of poems for kids? A skeptical belly laugh might reasonably follow.

After that . . . well, let me explain. It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Really. There actually is thought and reason behind this project that now has taken me, let’s see, 31 years of my life to start, pause, struggle with, delay, renew, almost give up on, and at last finish in rough, unedited form. Then get it arranged with the illustrations I’d secured through the years — a different one by a different artist for each of the 42 poems. And then figure out what the cover should be, front and back. And then find somebody in the children’s literature biz to read the book and maybe offer a review. And then — dear God — to hopefully at long last find a publisher.

The book is titled ‘‘Sweet Dreams: Poems and Paintings for the Child Abed,’’ just out from Skyhorse Publishing, and if you have a few minutes and are interested, I’ll explain why and how the book came into being.

To start with, I was sick. Not just sick, but really in bad shape. I was in a hospital bed as nauseated as I ever hope to be. I had an intestinal infection that nobody seemed able to diagnose.

I was feverish, weak, headachy, with tubes everywhere, including down my throat and in my stomach, and I didn’t eat for 2½ weeks. But I had no desire to eat, because the nausea was that bad. It disoriented me so much that I couldn’t tolerate watching TV, reading a book, painting, looking at the wallpaper, or even smelling the nurses’ handwash or hearing the hospital intercom. Everything was an irritation, a pain that circled and grew.

I thought I might go nuts. I thought about others in bed like me. And I thought about kids going through stuff like this, maybe on their own, terrified, uncomprehending, sad. And I thought of the kid I once was, the little boy who needed comforting before bedtime, who never found it easy to make that strange transition from the waking world to what was poetically called the Land of Nod. Was there a monster in my closet? Would my nightmares return? I’m not really tired, Mom, can I play a little more? What if I never fall asleep? I’m afraid of the dark, will you read me a poem?

So it wasn’t just sick kids I began thinking about. I thought of ordinary kids who might be resting in bed, or taking a nap, or going to bed each night, or confined to bed for any reason. Illustrated poems in books had comforted me when I was little, whether healthy or sick. I wondered if they could still do that for kids in the era of technological wonders.

One of the books I loved at bedtime was ‘‘A Child’s Garden of Verses,’’ by Robert Louis Stevenson. It was an old book even then, but it had a magical resonance that helped me drift away, even when I was too young to read. My mother or even my older sister would take care of that. In particular I liked the poem, ‘‘The Land of Counterpane,’’ in which a little boy who is sick looks out over his bedspread — for that’s what a counterpane is — and surveys his tiny kingdom in pleasure. The last stanza was the best:

I was the giant great and still

That sits upon the pillow-hill,

And sees before him, dale and plain,

The pleasant land of counterpane.

That was such a different reality, so nice, because it posited that being sick and alone in bed could be, in its way, almost enjoyable. All you needed was imagination and a belief in the power of fantasy and words.

So as I lay in that hospital bed so long ago, wondering when I’d get back to covering the athletes and games I loved, I started writing poems in my head. It was my counterpane spread before me. It was all I could do. It was all I had. Indeed, I needed to ask a nurse to disconnect wires and tubes just so I could stagger down the hallway a few feet, dragging the IV pole along like a severed street sign. It pained me even to write poem words down after I’d memorized them. It makes me cringe to remember how miserable I felt.

Finally, I had exploratory surgery, the abscessed part in my abdomen was at last removed, and I slowly regained my health. I’ll never forget that when I came back to ‘‘The Sportswriters on TV’’ show set after a long absence, fellow panelist and show co-creator, Bill Gleason, silently rose from his seat and kissed me on the forehead.

Like those vows you make in moments of crisis, I felt a moral obligation to continue my poem book and its good intentions even though I was healed and no longer living alone in my head. To be honest, maybe this was a project I had always subconsciously wanted to undertake, a test of sorts. I had studied English Literature and poetry at Northwestern, after all, and even had written some poems for class back in the day. But above all there is this: If writing is your passion and your craft and your job, and printed words are what you believe in and have always believed in, you should be able to write about anything, in any form or style you truly put your mind to. So you only write about sports? Well, you’re writing about events and drama and principles and, above all, people. What else is there?

I also knew the main appeal of this book would be the illustrations. I talked to a couple of terrific artists in the Chicago area, and they agreed to illustrate a poem apiece for me. One of them was Mark McMahon, who turned me on to other artists such as John Rush and John Sandford. Tony Fitzpatrick told me about a Pittsburgh tattoo artist named Nick Bubash and also about album and book designer Al Brandtner. Al would become the most critical part of this entire venture. He stuck with me for three ridiculous decades, designing what I believe is truly a beautiful display of art.

I found the other illustrators slowly, by looking at magazine covers, scouring advertising client books, taking recommendations, browsing art museums, and researching online sources. I looked for accomplished artists whose individual style and presentation would work for each poem — using different media, including oils, acrylics, watercolors, gouache, colored pencils, pen-and-ink, collage. Almost every artist I contacted said yes to the project. Some I cold-called the way some telemarketers like to call me.

Four different countries are represented by the artists in the book, and the Americans come from East to West. One person who helped me immensely and deserves a shout-out is professor Rich Kryszka, the chair of the American Academy of Art in Chicago. One of the early artists told me about Rich, and when I got in touch with him the good prof alerted me to former Academy students Samantha DeCarlo, Jill Thompson (who does Wonder Woman for Marvel Comics), and Doug Klauba.

You’ll recognize poem painters like Owen Smith and Anita Kunz from covers of The New Yorker magazine. If you travel to California you might recognize the work of Moses X. Ball from the murals he paints on walls in Los Angeles. Louise Popoff will be familiar to anyone who remembers the evocative Chinaberry Books catalog covers. And the legendary Chicago neo-surrealist and Andy Warhol protégé, Ed Paschke, who did a whimsical painting for the poem, ‘‘Fever,’’ about a kid enjoying a feverish hallucination with his room upside down and his Teddy bear floating through space, is world-renowned. He has a museum dedicated to his work in Jefferson Park.

One thing pains me deeply: Paschke, who was one of the nicest, most generous men I’ve ever met, died suddenly in 2004, a sad testament to the glacial pace of this book. Not only him, but Julian Allen (1998), Nick Bubash (2021), and Jozef Sumichrast (2023) — all great artists and good souls who illustrated a poem apiece — are gone. But, like boats against the current, we beat on.

So here are some thoughts about being a sports writer and taking a shot at poetry.

Above all, I wanted my stuff to be rather old-fashioned, with meter and beat and stanzas and rhyme and topics of universal interest and with some poems no deeper than nursery rhymes. There’s a poem, for instance, called ‘‘Pill,’’ illustrated by Nancy Drew, that goes like this:

A pill

Is a hill,

Two

Neat ones—

A plateau in between.

The thrill

Is the will

To eat one—

Thrice daily lima bean.

It’s silly, but it rhymes and whatnot, and who doesn’t know about pills? The theme comes back 50 pages later with ‘‘Pill Again,’’ with another little girl in bed surrounded by stuffed animals in a lovely watercolor by Ken Call:

I do know this about the pill—

You take it when you’re feeling ill.

And if you take it when you’re well—

Well, why do that, pray tell?

So here’s a friendly tip from me—

Please down your pill most carefully.

Here’s to your health and here’s to mine—

Mine? Why, I’m nearly fine!

Repeating the words ‘‘well’’ and ‘‘mine’’ in lines three and four of each stanza is just a fun embellishment. Hope kids dig it.

I varied the length of lines and the rhyme scheme and length of the poems themselves throughout to keep things from getting repetitious or dull. The poem ‘‘The Rooster,’’ for example, goes 8-6, 8-6, 8-6 in beats all the way through its 40 lines. It also rhymes a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, and so on throughout. Here’s the start:

The nights are warm in old Key West,

The trade wind blankets all.

One thing alone disturbs my rest:

The sidewalk rooster’s call.

“Morning Glory,’’ illustrated by Wende Caporale, is quite different, going 10-10-5-5-10 in beats in each of the three five-line stanzas. Its rhyme scheme is: a-a-b-b-a, c-c-d-d-c, e-e-f-f-e. Here’s the beginning:

Oh, little girl in the wakening dawn,

Do you see the jewels that sparkle the lawn?

Do you see it glow,

Do you see it grow,

Do you see the colors the angels have drawn?

Naturally, there are a couple of sports-themed poems. One is ‘‘The City Game,’’ about urban summertime basketball, illustrated by Mark McMahon. Another is ‘‘Boys of Summer,’’ illustrated by oil painter Bill Williams, whose work hangs in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. The poem describes a kid in bed playing a mock game with trading cards as he watches a real baseball game on TV:

Then out I’ll bring my wooden box

With Reds and Yankees, Cubs and Sox—

Pretty little paper sluggers,

Hurlers, twirlers, stealers, pluggers—

A card for every man afield,

An All-Star gang with bats to wield.

Since I did this book with no help from an agent (she died, too), editor, publisher, or PR department, everything is exactly as I wanted it, with Al Brandtner putting it all together. This also means I have no one to blame for anything that is bad! That’s a tough thing. Doing it alone meant years of delays, lots of handwringing, loads of rejection letters and the handling of certain duties most writers never will. For instance, I knew how I wanted the cover to look, so, yup, I painted it myself.

I’ve always loved luna moths — that’s a life-sized one I painted on the cover, modeled after a luna I caught and mounted many years ago and still have, faded almost to transparent white from its original lime green. The painted one is there in that purple, starry sky, chasing the moon, the Big Dipper to its right, representing an earlier time.

The thing about lunas, gentle nighttime creatures that they are, whose name literally means ‘‘moon,’’ is that you don’t see them much anymore. Nor do you see equally large cecropia and polyphemus moths, or so many butterflies that once were plentiful. I used to catch them all as a kid. This was something I thought about as I fished for topics for more poems. I did one called ‘‘Seasons,’’ brief, four beats per line, extolling the virtue of the unpredictable, but wonderful outdoors:

Summer is hot,

Winter is not.

Fall works both ways,

Spring rains for days.

I like them all,

Sun and snowfall,

Drizzle and sleet,

Hailstones and heat.

Why is it so?

How could I know?

Comfort take wing,

Change is the thing.

That poem is illustrated by Chicago artist Tim Anderson. Tim and I talked about novel ways to represent the seasons, and he came up with the idea of a bird, or birds, for each: a hummingbird in summer, crows in fall, an owl in winter and cardinals in spring. The painting is three times the size of the full page it takes up in the book, and when I look at it in my home office, I just smile. Maybe it’s just because of Anderson himself, a cheerful, gregarious man whose masterly work graces the walls of U.S. embassies in Moscow, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Zimbabwe.

I told him I was looking for an artist who was good at painting extinct animals, dinosaurs to be precise, and Anderson immediately suggested a friend of his, Peggy Macnamara.

‘‘Is she local?’’ I asked. ‘‘Yes, indeed’’ he replied. ‘‘At the Field Museum.’’

What a find, Peggy was. Not only is she the Field Museum’s artist-in-residence, a watercolor guru who agreed to illustrate my poem, ‘‘Dinosaur Time,’’ but she also took me on a second floor tour of the off-limits ‘‘Insect Room’’ there at the Field. It’s a place where thousands of bugs are laid out in drawers, scientists come and go, and the bones of exotic animals needed for research are placed in a huge, reeking terrarium behind double doors where multitudes of dermestid beetles strip the bones cleaner than boiling water ever could.

Maybe stuff like that is not for you. Understood. But Peggy’s T-Rex and velociraptors surely will be for you if you read the poem she illustrated, the action one that starts, ‘‘Dinosaurs roam through my room/They came again last night…’’

As I said, the artists I found everywhere. I snagged a magnificent one, Chris Dunn, when I happened upon a freshly illustrated edition of the classic English children’s book, ‘‘The Wind in the Willows.’’ Badger, Ratty, Mole, and Mr. Toad never looked more detailed, more authentically old-school British and fantastically humanesque than they did in those paintings. Yet they all somehow retained their pure animal essence. I searched and searched online until somehow I found an email address for this Chris Dunn fellow, a chap who lived somewhere, it seemed from what I could glean, in the country north of London.

Long story short, I actually talked to the young artist on the phone, emailed him a poem, then a rough sketch, and he agreed to do the painting of, as he envisioned it, a young blackbird asleep in a nest high in an oak tree in a forest. There would be the mother blackbird curled beside the chick, looking on in peace, with the father blackbird perched on the branch above, alert and watchful like a sentry. The name of the poem is ‘‘Tree Top Melody,’’ and Dunn actually traveled to England’s Lake Country to take photos to use for his modeling. In the background of his painting, far beyond the rugged oak trunk in the foreground is the 19th-century stone mansion that was the original model for Toad Hall.

I threw in some small literary allusions in a couple poems, just for kicks but also for the deeper resonance they might add. The poem ‘‘The Garden,’’ for instance, is a nod to Kafka’s ‘‘The Metamorphosis,’’ the tale in which Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find he apparently has turned into a giant insect (though Kafka is unclear about what kind of bug). Gross, no matter what. My poem envisions a young person waking up to find he or she has turned into an earthworm, ‘‘and through the muddy world must squirm.’’ Being a worm means looking out for hungry robins and having the goal of making it to the distant garden, ‘‘with furrows lovely, dark, and deep.’’ That’s for you and your ‘‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,’’ Mr. Frost.

My ‘‘Tiger and Lamb’’ is a direct steal from William Blake, and the last poem in the book, ‘‘The Land of Good Night,’’ echoes the bedtime campfire song my father used to sing to me, which ended, as my poem does, with the sleepy child rolling ‘‘on to the deep blue sea.’’

Lastly, there was a donor who enabled hundreds of ‘‘Sweet Dreams’’ to be printed independently a year ago for charity. With his check and then money from an increasing number of donors, nearly 1,500 books have now gone out to Ronald McDonald Houses and other children’s hospitals in Chicago, Peoria, Springfield, St. Louis, Washington, and soon New Orleans. Thank you for that, John Rogers, head of Ariel Investments. You donated when you weren’t even asked.

So that’s the story. Oh, there’s more I could tell, like how I discovered an unknown distant cousin, the artist Todd Telander, when I read an online account of how a careless driver had crashed through the Telander Art Gallery in Walla Walla, Washington, destroying the entire front of his building. I got Todd on the phone a short time later — just Googled the gallery — asked if it was him I was speaking to, said I was sorry about the wreckage, but in the meantime would he, my dear relative, like to illustrate a pastoral poem called, ‘‘Down in the Valley’’? ‘‘Sure, why not?,’’ that Telander said. Done.

I am just a sports writer. I fancy myself no more or less. I’m certainly no Emily Dickinson or Langston Hughes, or even Dr. Seuss. But I put everything I had into this poetry venture, and I find it interesting how a good thing can come from such a messy, painful start. I would never want to go through that hospital stay again, with that infection, but in a way — no, for sure —I’m glad it happened. I hope readers are, too.

Bears predictions: Week 11 at Lions

2023-11-16T12:38:37.736-06:00

Quarterbacks Justin Fields and Jared Goff embrace after last year’s Week 17 game.

Photo by Nic Antaya/Getty Images

The Sun-Times’ experts offer their picks for the Bears’ game Sunday in Detroit:

Rick Morrissey

Lions, 38-17: This could get really ugly really quickly. The Lions are the far better team, David Montgomery will be looking to send a message to his former team and the Bears don’t have a whole lot going for them, other than next year’s draft. Season: 8-2.

Rick Telander

Lions, 27-20: Remember when a Lions game was pretty much an easy W for the Bears? Remember when mortgage rates were 3%? Memories ... Season: 6-4.

Scoop Jackson

Lions, 42-28: The Lions have put up two “40-pieces” already this season. Adding a third against the No. 27 points allowed defense in the League doesn’t seem possible. And it’s a Montgomery “payback” game. Season: 6-4.

Patrick Finley

Lions, 31-28: The Lions have given up 90 points over the past three weeks. The problem for the Bears remains that the Lions can win a race to 30. Or 40. Season: 7-3.

Jason Lieser

Lions, 31-25: The Lions scored 72 points in two wins against the Bears last season. And they’ve improved. They might even take the North and never give it back. Season: 5-5.

Mark Potash

Lions, 27-17: The Bears have a lot of things going for them with the return of Fields and guard Nate Davis — and defensive end Montez Sweat in his third game. But Ford Field with a juiced crowd is a tough place for Fields to shake off the rust. Season: 5-5.

World taking notice of Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce romance

2023-11-13T22:40:51.612-06:00

Taylor Swift and Brittany Mahomes celebrate a touchdown during a game between the Chiefs and Chargers on Oct. 22 in Kansas City, Mo.

David Eulitt/Getty Images

When Taylor Swift kisses you, I’m guessing you end up with a fire-engine-red oval on your cheek. Or wherever.

I would never, ever in a thousand years be thinking about such a thing if I hadn’t read this panting headline in People magazine online: ‘‘TAYLOR SWIFT RUNS INTO TRAVIS KELCE’S ARMS, PLANTS KISS AFTER ARGENTINA SHOW.’’

Well. This is bodice-ripper, pulp-fiction stuff. Much to unpack.

First off, Argentina?

Yes, pop super-goddess Swift is on her South American tour, beginning with Argentina, where she sold 200,000 tickets to three shows, leaving a waiting list of 2.8 million. Argentina’s population is 46 million, so the 3 million who saw her or tried to is, yup, a lot.

A tidbit: According to the market research firm Morningstar, 53% of all American adults are Taylor Swift fans, including 48% of all men. Who knew?

Second, whom did she kiss?

That would be Kelce, the Chiefs’ 6-5, 250-pound All-Pro tight end who has won two Super Bowls and is having another great year with 57 receptions for 597 yards and four touchdowns. What was Kelce doing in Argentina on a Friday night? It was the Chiefs’ bye week, and Argentina is just an 11,000-mile round-trip flight from Kansas City.

And, you see, Kelce, 34, and Swift, 33, are in love.

Which means the player soon will be part of her recording catalog, maybe as a hero, maybe as yet another heartbreaking cad, just a ‘‘new notch in your belt.’’ (That’s from ‘‘I Knew You Were Trouble.’’)

Third, this whole topic is insane. But let me remind you that the world of sports has become increasingly deranged and money-mad.

For instance, ex-coach Jimbo Fisher will receive $76 million from Texas A&M just for going away. And while he receives that money, Fisher is free to make millions more if he gets hired by another school, which surely will happen.

Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh gets suspended by the Big Ten for sign-stealing. The school doesn’t agree with the punishment and files a request for a restraining order to get Harbaugh back on the sideline for — oh, right — the gigantic regular-season finale against Ohio State.

And that’s just college ‘‘amateur’’ football.

Kelce and Swift are pros all the way, and their romance is blending two massive, revenue-producing, global entertainment engines — the NFL and pop music — in a way that never has been done before. There have been plenty of football player-singer/actress romances before. And, of course, there was Tom Brady and Giselle Bundchen melding elite football and global modeling. (Who was prettier? A debate, perhaps.)

But we’re talking billions of fans when Kelce and Swift combine. She changed the lyrics to a song while on the stage in Argentina from ‘‘Karma is the guy on the screen, coming straight home to me,’’ to ‘‘Karma is the guy on the Chiefs, coming straight home to me,” and the place went wild. And Kelce, in attendance, covered his face with both hands in seeming sweetness, then danced along.

These two have power that politicians only wished they had. Swift has well over 500 million social-media followers. Kelce has 40 million followers on Instagram. The NFL now has started using Swift’s music in promos. The romance quickly added a half-million online followers to the Chiefs.

If the pair wanted to get a politician elected or a bill passed, their followers are a mighty force. And Swift has hinted at certain issues needing to be taken on and has urged her followers to vote.

If the Chiefs make it to the Super Bowl, the scrutiny during the lead-in week on Kelce and Swift, who has been to Chiefs games, would be over-the-top nutso. And the revenue from ads and viewership and the like would accrue massively.

That kiss. Symbolically, it was bigger than the heart sign Taylor and her Swifties make with their cupped hands. It was fantasy — and power — come true.

One envisions the cover of the accompanying bodice-ripper book featuring a Fabio-like model holding a swooning Swift lookalike, she with a microphone in one nearly limp hand and dressed in a sequined, one-piece bathing suit and silver boots, the dude with a big, red gob from a kiss on his face.

Yes, there is a best-selling book titled ‘‘Taylor Swift: And the Clothes She Wears’’ by Terry Newman — just $30 — so I’m not out of my mind. Yet.

But if I get in too deep, I’ll just try to, you know, shake it off.