Hometown Team Loses an MVP
“Whatever the Tribune says is fine with me,” Bernie Lincicome told me. But it wasn’t. After 29 years with Tribune Company newspapers, the last 16 of them writing a sports column in Chicago, Lincicome resigned last month. News of his departure was buried in Jim Kirk’s media column, where sports editor John Cherwa said only this: “We’re sorry to see him go. He was a very important voice of this section for 16 years. But I understand the appeal of the Denver area.”
“We come and go. I’m flattered that anybody cares if I’m in Chicago or not. All I ever tried to do was put 750 words on a page and have somebody not regret having read it. I came from Fort Lauderdale, where I’d worked for the Tribune paper. The [Tribune] editor at the time was Jim Squires. He said, ‘Look at it this way, we’re bringing you up to the big leagues.’ I said, ‘Why? Do they have a different alphabet up here?’ I didn’t need the Tribune to validate what I’d done in my career, and I don’t need the Tribune to validate me now. They have an alphabet in Colorado. And Breckenridge.”
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Lincicome sounded more wistful than angry when we talked. There is a sardonicism to his language on the page that’s belied by its gentle wryness in the ear. I asked Lincicome if his problems at the Tribune predated Cherwa’s taking over as assistant managing editor for sports three years ago. “I think they’re coincidental,” he replied. “That’s a kind word, isn’t it–‘coincidental’?” The word suggests happenstance, but Lincicome knows its first meaning is simultaneous. “I’d say for 29 of these 32 years I could not have been happier. What you never want to do is become a middle-aged person left over from somebody else’s regime. I think this particular group of people–[editor] Howard Tyner, [managing editor] Ann Marie Lipinski, and John Cherwa–appreciated what I did. I think it mattered at the end that I was there in place before them.”
He went on, “Other times, assignments I assumed I should be getting didn’t come. Stuff like that. We [he and Cherwa] talked about it. I don’t know if ‘about’ is the right word.”
On its surface, Lincicome’s last column had as its subject Jim Parque, the White Sox pitcher who at the time was publishing an occasional column in the Sun-Times. This device allowed Lincicome to write that “sports columnists are sensitive souls, misunderstood, underappreciated, frequently sober. We come, we go, and occasionally one of us pitches for the White Sox.” It allowed him to tell a few stories from his own career for Parque’s benefit, and to conclude, in the guise of advice to Parque:
The other reason his superiors might not have recognized his last column for what it was, he told me, is that he’s not sure they even read it. “I’m trying to remember the last time,” he began, then recast the thought. “If we’re talking about the principal three people involved in this thing [Tyner, Lipinski, and Cherwa], I cannot remember the last time I received any kind of feedback that indicated they’d read anything. Which doesn’t mean they didn’t. And my ego was not so fragile I needed it. But it’s still nice. Compliments are still nice.”
Cherwa concedes, “We would go longer than we should without talking. But there are people I’ll go longer without talking to. Bernie is a self-starter–he didn’t need any hand-holding. He liked to come up with his own ideas. And he just never called.
