Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [70]
The Great Debates of 1960 will be remembered for a long time to come, however. To me, it seems highly fitting that the first of them occurred in Chicago, a city with a turbulent political past and what I feel confident will be a brilliant political future.
6. And in This Corner…
Mention Green Bay to any sports fan and the chances are that he will think of the Packers. Mention Milwaukee, and he will probably think of the Braves (or maybe of beer). It is the same with Cincinnati (the Redlegs) or Boston (the Red Sox), or Brooklyn (Los Angeles notwithstanding, the Dodgers). But mention Chicago to a fan, and his associations are likely to run away with him. Our Town’s appetite for sports knows almost no bounds. Others may be satisfied with one “dish.” We prefer a smorgasbord.
We don’t stop with supporting such obvious big-time enterprises as major-league baseball (the Cubs and the White Sox), professional ice hockey (the Black Hawks), thoroughbred racing (at Arlington, Washington, Hawthorne and Sportsman’s Parks), college and pro football, boxing, and championship golf. We are also devotees of the offbeat – including the peculiar brand of basketball perfected by the Harlem Globetrotters, harness racing, professional wrestling, and just about any other sporting activity that a State commission will grant a license for.
In fact, the Harlem Globetrotters originated in Chicago. It was thirty-four years ago when Abe Saperstein, who loved basketball but was too small to play, first organized the team with no assets but a basketball and a Model T Ford. Since then the Globetrotters have played in Quonset huts, canebrakes, drained swimming pools – any place where they could exchange their street clothes for uniforms and hang up a pair of baskets. They have had a player temporarily incapacitated by landing on a hot cast-iron stove after making a lay-up shot in a barn, and another who was bumped through a barn door and into a manure pile. There were times in the early days when the team was so broke that it was willing to work for coffee and sandwiches, and there have been recent years when it grossed as much as three million dollars. They have played before the Pope, the King of Greece, and an assortment of sultans, sheiks, and potentates. They have provided the sports world with some of its zaniest moments. They were also witnesses to one of the most moving scenes ever to unfold in a sports arena.
It happened in 1951. The place was Olympic Stadium in Berlin, where the Globetrotters were appearing. Their guest was Jesse Owens, whom Adolf Hitler had snubbed after his unforgettable triumphs in the 1936 Olympics. Ludwig Shreiber, West Berlin’s acting mayor, greeted the great track star.
“Jesse,” he said, “fifteen years ago this month Adolf Hitler refused to give you his hand. I’m proud to give you both of mine.”
Chicago is the capital of professional wrestling. Haystacks Calhoon, Buddy (“Nature Boy”) Rogers, Verne Gagne, Pat O’Connor, and other mimes of the mat operate out of Chicago, where they are booked from the office of a Lane Technical High School alumnus, Fred Kohler. An ex-wrestler who once took on a 450-pound bear, and won, Kohler is incontestably the sport’s number one coach, innovator, promoter, and casting director.
Mention the sporting event, and we’ll back it – from a peanut-pushing contest down State Street, starring a sports columnist who made a wrong guess, to an exploit that exhausts me even to think of – the thirty-four-mile swim across Lake Michigan made last year by a young Illinois Tech instructor. If we can’t find anything around to support, it doesn’t matter: We’ll originate something.
When the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition was in full swing, complete with Sally Rand and cablecar rides, to outsiders it looked like an overwhelming success. Not to Chicagoans. It lacked a feature sports event. The