Want to read Chicago native John Cusack’s ramble on sports in the Windy City? Head over to the Huffington Post, where you can feast your eyes on this adoring line:
Every visit to Wrigley Field adds six months back onto one’s life expectancy—doctors have proven this many times.
The Chicago edition of HuffPo went live yesterday, an attempt, according to Arianna Huffington, to be “part local news source, part resource guide, and part virtual soap box.” The content is pretty standard opening fare in that mushy reflective essay kind of way—lots of testimonials about Chicago from Chicago folks, famous and not—with, of course, lots about Wrigley Field. Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, for one, waxed poetic:
I learned half of what I know about life from the Bleacher Bums, the motley collection of night-shift workers, drunks, layabouts, geezers and lesbians who frequented Wrigley in those years.
Harkening back to a different stadium, Sam Panayotovich reminded us that in the late 1960s,
Chicago was a hockey town and everyone lived and died with the Blackhawks…After long days at work, men would get together at the local watering holes to have a few boilermakers and watch Tony Esposito tend goal.
Who needs a sweet shop, with such nostalgic rhapsody? Sharing space with the euphoria, Lynn Sweet’s earnest piece, reposted from the Chicago Sun-Times, about the odds-and-ends jobs the Obamas have held down, pales in comparison. Michelle Obama worked at a Chicago book bindery in high school? Oh, how…um…go Wrigley!
Jane Kim is a writer in New York.