What a perfect time for the end of the millennium or, if not that, the end of the century or, if not even that, then certainly the end of the 1900s and, ergo, the 90s. If there has ever been a time when Chicago sports fans wanted to reject the present and lose themselves in reverie over things past, it’s now, with every major professional team suffering through a losing year. What’s more, though even in losing eras Chicago has prided itself on its captivating players, its Bankses and Applings and Butkuses, with Frank Thomas on the outs the only captivating player now on the scene is Sammy Sosa. What a dearth there is of both quality and character! Thank the amateur sporting gods for Quentin Richardson and Cappie Pondexter.
(10) Jordan plays at Wrigley Field for the White Sox against the Cubs in a 1994 exhibition game. And drives in the tying runs too. The game would turn out to be the peak of his baseball career, which otherwise stalls at Double-A Birmingham. That is somehow appropriate; he was always at his best in the spotlight.
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(9) Jordan takes part in the Dream Team Olympics of 1992. It was a wonderful decade for sheer greatness in sports (see Bonnie Blair, Michael Johnson, and Tiger Woods below). Yet here Jordan is the greatest of the great, the greatest single player among the greatest collection of basketball talent yet seen.
(5) With the two-word release, “I’m back,” Jordan returns to basketball and the Bulls in 1995. Will any Chicagoan who experienced it ever forget the giddy mood in the streets in the rumor-filled days leading up to the formal announcement? More even than the public response to any of the Bulls’ championships–the riots and rallies–this moment displays the hold sports can have on a city.
Meaningless as the exercise is, it’s a pleasure to rank those moments. Permit a biased Chicago fan to insist that the top four or five and maybe the top six or seven would have to rank among the most memorable sports moments of the decade, and that’s even allowing that many of the decade’s sports memories were not bright but bitter. Putting away the anal lists and going on a ramble, there was Tonya Harding at the very least conspiring to cover up her husband’s involvement in a plot to injure her main competitor, Nancy Kerrigan, before the 1994 Winter Olympics–a competition eventually won by Oksana Baiul. There was Buster Douglas’s upset of Mike Tyson in their 1990 heavyweight title fight, a bout that sent Tyson and his sport on a downward spiral that continues to this day. Seen from the end of the decade, Tyson-Douglas looks like the beginning of the end of boxing as a big-time sport.
Personally, I don’t think Sammy Sosa belongs with those two as a great athlete. His 60 homers, even in back-to-back seasons, came against diluted competition and with the help of a juiced ball that diminished even Mark McGwire’s gargantuan 70 homers in 1998. Yet there was no denying Sosa’s 61st and 62nd homers that year as a great Chicago moment, in a game capped by Mark Grace’s homer in the tenth inning against the Milwaukee Brewers that sent the Cubs toward their one and only playoff appearance of the decade. Earlier that year, Kerry Wood announced his arrival by striking out 20 men in a game. Not all memorable moments were pleasant for the Cubs that season, however. There was Brant Brown’s muffed fly ball against those same Brewers, only days after Grace and Sosa’s heroics, that put the Cubs’ playoff appearance in jeopardy. After a mildly ecstatic win over the San Francisco Giants in the wild-card playoff game, the Cubs were exposed as pretenders by the Braves in a three-game sweep, and before the next season even began Wood was out with a career-threatening elbow injury. The Sox, however, fell even farther, if only because they were closer to the top. After Bo Jackson’s parabolic homer clinched a playoff spot for them in 1993, they lost to the eventual champions, the Toronto Blue Jays. The next year they were genuine World Series contenders, but the baseball strike turned owner Jerry Reinsdorf into a self-proclaimed hawk. The end of the season was canceled, disgruntled Sox players (especially pitchers) left for greener pastures at the first opportunity, and the Sox had lost their best chance at a championship. It took the signing of Albert Belle to end the labor dispute, and thus the Sox poisoned their clubhouse and their fan base in exchange for overall labor peace–a Pyrrhic victory.
