Way too Boomerish for me. Rick is like one of the people in The Big Chill. Definitely not my thing.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

I used to laugh at old fuddy duddy Gleason and his thoughts about sports radio but I have come to realize he was correct. Of course, print media is now just the unspoken form of sports radio so he would have railed against it as well

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

DAVID AAAANNNDERSON IS BIGGER THAN MICHAEL JORDAN!

I was a Lincicome guy but Holtzman is a great call too. I had forgotten there were sportswriters that I would seek out and read regardless of the topic.

Don't have that anymore.

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You know me like that.

Yeah a lot of it will depend on who their guys are that are covering the teams you care about. The Raiders coverage is brutal. The main guy (Tafur) had to apologize to the team for starting a rumor Mayock wasn't coming to Las Vegas and he was going to take a job with the Patriots. He's still there somehow but it doesn't seem anyone talks to him. The other guy is someone that was covering Florida State and somehow manged to get the Raiders beat. He's really bad. They shouldn't have had any trouble filling that position and they brought in a guy sub-Bleacher Report level. I think they have Kawakami running the Bay Area and Vegas so that's probably 99% of their problem. The Angels coverage is very good. They just brought in a new guy and he's really good. The national stuff I think is mostly good especially compared with what else is out there. The NFL and MLB draft coverage is excellent. Their NFL film review guy is also excellent.

Its still worth the subscription price for me its just too bad the Raiders coverage sucks so bad. They should of brought new guys in instead of bringing Tafur over...he's a clown.

Bernie was the best. Was disappointed when he moved on. Jaus and holtzman were also favorites during my youth of heavy sports page consumption.

It's crazy to think about it today with all of the "Greatest player ever" talk but the Bulls really seemed to regret the drafting of Jordan. Lincicome Jammed the hell out of them right after the draft for it.


https://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/c ... olumn.html


The Trib never were able to replace him.

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Irv Kupcinet should get a mention as being one of the first true sportswriters in Chicago, yeah?

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Not something that meant a whole lot to me. Bernie was probably the standout.

I recall Mac crediting Mariotti for being an incredibly gifted writer...despite his personality and his desire to pick fights. I was countered with....I don't care how well he commands the English language, content matters more and Marriotti was awful.

The writer I remember the most was Inrem. Not in a good way...he a strange writing style that was annoying.

Telander is from the The Big Chill....man, that's 100% accurate

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I'm a big fan of yours, GD, and I hope to meet you some day.

But Christ, man, Christ! Stop this.

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He was more of a gossip columnist who did local TV rather than a true sportswriter.

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Why are only 14 percent of black CPS 11th-graders proficient in English?

Hotlzman was good, but his non-baseball thoughts were nothing special.

John Husar was an excellent writer, too. His column got buried in the back, but it was always worth reading, even when I was a kid delivering the papers. The Trib really had it going on back then.

Worst: Rapoport.

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It was always funny to see Boers when he was on with the Sportswriters. He'd always be so serious on there because you could tell that he didn't want to embarass himself in front of all of his uncles.

Then he'd go on with Chet at some point during the week and kickback a little. That's when you'd see just how funny of a guy that he was.

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Did he have non baseball thoughts? I thought is entire column was baseball.

I hadn't realized Husar had passed away so young. Just read his obituary and somehow my memory of him is not of the huge man described in the article. I remember reading his column back in the day now that you mention him.

The only one that sticks out for me is Lincicome, and that's only because of his negativity. I remember being a junior high aged kid, getting stoked about the Bears, and then reading his column and learning that there was absolutely no reason to be stoked and everybody sucks.

Makes sense that he was a big dude. His nephew played at Mount Carmel and then started on the O-line for four years at Michigan. Biggest arms I ever saw.

Husar was an excellent writer--and nothing like Lincicome and the other guys who could be funny but also (as Warren Newsome said) really negative. Just a different type of column. Big fan of the state and a conservationist, too.

Holtzman talked about the Bulls sometimes but didn't really add anything new. He was basically Leila when it came to basketball.

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Said Husar played at Rita and Kansas and was friends with Wilt there. I know it's an obit and all but he really sounds like he was a heck of a guy. I remember his columns often being a story about something like Crappie fishing on some small lake somewhere that then would involve a bigger picture of conservation. Found a collection of his writtings online last night in book form. Im contemplating grabbing it.

I don't think anyone crafted words as well as Bob Verdi. I get the sense that many collected here really never read him in a daily paper. And even the notion of waking up in the morning, grabbing the sports section, reading it, and having that be where you'd get all your "info", is probably a strange one.

But I do believe Verdi was the very best in this town.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’ve been a Trib subscriber* since the mid-80s and I always found Verdi to be a bit dull. I didn’t dislike him but I never really looked forward to his column either. Same with Holzman (& later Haugh). I loved Bernie & hated Bayless. I always felt Mariotti was over-rated as a writer (bad word mash-ups as attempts to be clever) but at least he could be interesting. Both he and Cowley were too blatantly biased when it came to the Bulls and Sox however so those columns were easy to skip. In looking back I guess the guys I read the most were focused on specific sports - like Sam Smith, Don Pierson, etc.

*I called to cancel the Trib after the mass exodus and of course they made a counter-offer: Sunday delivery with full digital access for $1.39 per week. I kept it at that point since I still like to peruse the paper on Sunday morning and my wife and daughter enjoy the comics and puzzles. The digital access is good for when I am traveling too.

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“Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.”- JD Vance
“My god, what an !diot.”- JD Vance tweet on Trump
“I’m a ‘Never Trump’ guy”- JD Vance

Mariotti.

Hilarious. Even if I disagreed with him, I still loved reading his shit.

Sometimes I felt like he didnt really have a strong opinion on whatever he was yappin' about, he just made it sound like he did so that he can be funny.

Apparently, he's still doin' it.

Last week, he said that Stephen A Smith's middle initial stands for Asshole

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Jason Beck's been the Tigers beat writer forever. Beck does a good job balancing the need for a beat writer to have a working relationship with the team they're covering and telling it like it is. Possibly helped that he started as one of the first mlb.com beat writers and the Tigers org at the time didn't grok internet. Definitely helps that he's from Ohio. Usually being an Ohioan is a handicap in any endeavor but Beck's Ohioness puts him in natural opposition to the team/area he covers.

David Foster Wallace could've had a second act as a sports writer, going by the few samples we have from his non-fiction work.

Taylor Bell then Bill Gleason

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I'm going to bounce from the spot for awhile but I will be back at some point to argue with you about this hoops stuff again. Playoffs have been great this season. See ya up the road.

I'm out.

Was Bell the guy who wrote exclusively about HS sports?

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For the most part yes

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Don Sakamoto was great writing about high school as well. Taylor Bell was HOF level

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

The preps coverage was outstanding across the board.

I'm an acquaintance of Tony Baranek of the Southtown (now Tribune), who might be the last of the old timers covering Chicagoland preps. He's been covering the south suburban preps beat for something like 42 years, along with his other sports love in local auto racing. It is a hard grind and with less and less recognition every year.

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"When people want their version of the truth, they go find it, no matter how baseless their beliefs." -- Ken Rosenthal