Casual
_Casual The Running of the Bulls Two years ago I had a call from Gene Siskel, who lives in Chicago, as I do. Siskel is a man others envy, possibly hate, for having what looks like one of the...
...The best I could come up with was that I would pay $325 to watch Enrico Caruso making love to Mae West, but only if he were singing while doing so and she, while all this was going on, emitted a continuous stream of brilliant off-color wisecracks...
...The actual seats are well-padded bridge chairs behind a vinyl counter with places for food and drink and a television set (so that you can simultaneously watch the real thing and the televised thing...
...A few years later, I would knock off from my scribbling and drive down to the Angel Garden Orphanage gym on Ridge Avenue near Devon and drop in on Bulls practice sessions...
...Did I neglect to mention that with these tickets, parking was free...
...I was born too late to travel to Pamplona to see the running of the bulls, but, I'm pleased to say, early enough to watch the Chicago Bulls practice before the great hype and hoopla of celebrity sports, with all its security and secrecy, had set in...
...He said he had some really wonderful tickets to the Bulls games, and perhaps we could go sometime...
...Toward the close of our conversation, he asked if I happened to be a sports fan...
...Siskel is a man others envy, possibly hate, for having what looks like one of the world's best and easiest jobs: sitting before a television camera, chatting about movies, for maybe— who knows?—a couple million a year...
...And, lo, Pippen did, every time...
...I courted my second (and final) wife with half-season's tickets in the early '70s...
...I cannot abide downward mobility...
...All answered yes, if playoffs were included...
...Ah, thought I, a woman who knows about being in the bonus—here is a woman I must marry...
...I shall never have a better seat, and consequently feel it pointless ever to return to the United Center...
...It proved not to be so...
...There were four of them, they cost $325 a shot, or $1,000 a game, and since the team plays forty-odd games at home . . . well, you do the math...
...He called to argue, which we did, rather civilly, neither side winning...
...The Bulls lost the game, blowing an 18-point lead to a lackluster Nets team...
...I saw the team play in the middle 1960s in the old Ampitheatre, near the stockyards...
...Nobody currently alive, I quickly concluded...
...I allowed as I was...
...Siskel decided to call up three wealthy friends to ask if they were interested in taking eleven games' worth of seats from him...
...When Scottie [Pippen] breathes through the mouth," he alerted me, "it means he's going for the hole...
...Joseph Epstein...
...Siskel had learned a thing or two from these seats...
...A waitress took our orders...
...Two-fifty tops...
...Very well, I asked myself, what would I pay $325 to see...
...In fact, I had been a Bulls fan from the basketball team's beginning in the city...
...It wasn't my money, but even so I felt letting someone else pay so much so that I could watch a mere game was, somehow, immoral...
...Driving home, I couldn't quite get the price of those seats out of my mind...
...Afew days after our conversation, Siskel called back to ask if I was free to join him in a week's time when the Bulls played the New Jersey Nets...
...We arranged to meet at his apartment...
...Late in the fourth quarter of a close game, after Chet Walker had been fouled, she turned to me, clutched my hand, and announced, "We're in the bonus...
...Nothing easier to get used to, I have always found, than prosperity...
...On the way to pick up the other two guys who were to go with us, Siskel explained that, when the Bulls moved from the old Chicago Stadium to the new United Center, he was offered these tickets, which, even though they were very expensive, he felt he couldn't refuse...
...So for one night in my life, I sat in the Jack Nicholson seats, albeit without the hair plugs, the four-day growth of beard, or the malicious grin, but up close and nicely distanced from my detestable fellow fans...
...The seats were in the first row, on the floor, directly across from the Bulls bench...
...He had heard that I thought the depiction of a character in the movie Quiz Show was anti-Semitic, and Siskel, who prides himself on his radar for anti-Semitism in the movies, thought I was wrong...
...When the game was over, I told Siskel that I assumed that, at these prices, one got to take home one's chair...
...At one point in the '70s, I had a press pass to the Bulls games because I had arranged to write a piece for the Chicago Tribune on Bob Love, who had perhaps the most delicately elegant jump shot I have ever seen...
...Well, maybe not $325...
...Sure," I said, "sounds swell to me...
Vol. 2 • November 1996 • No. 11
