Rooterville, U.S.A : Bulls Are First Team in the Second City, Where Fans Cheer the Team Bus, Tattooed T-Shirts Are Hot Items and There Is Even a Billboard of Jack Haley

Foreign journalist: “Are you of this earth?”

Michael Jordan: “Well, I live in Chicago.”

--Interview session, 1992 Olympics

Not anymore, he doesn’t. There is no Chicago anymore.

One of the nation’s great cities, known for its skyline, architecture, lake, parks, art, gangsters, political wars, colorful history and deep-dish pizza, now is reduced to a zonked-out cheering section for a basketball team.

A local resident who requests anonymity so he can go on living here renamed it Hooterville, after the Great Bus Ride to Milwaukee, the Great Tattooed T-Shirt Case and the Great Mural Controversy made it clear that civilization as it once was here had ended.

Let’s take them one at a time:

The Great Bus Ride to Milwaukee--This occurred on April 16, when the Bulls drove north on I-94 to Milwaukee for the game that would become their 70th victory, shadowed all the way by a helicopter from the local CBS outlet, cheered by fans on overpasses.

“We’re trying to keep it normal,” an ever-more-disillusioned Coach Phil Jackson said before the game, “but whenever kids are hanging from the overpasses with signs and people at the tollbooths are taking your picture and they’re not charging you tolls along 94, it makes it a little bit different.”

Said one player: “It was like the O.J. Bronco. It was kind of cool.”

The Great Tattooed T-Shirt Case--This recent addition to our judicial backlog came about when a company put out T-shirts emblazoned with tattoos like Dennis Rodman’s.

There was the shark leaping against the sunburst on his left shoulder that shows up so well on TV, the one he calls “She Devil” on his right, the necklace over his collarbones, etc.

Since the company had failed to get Rodman’s permission (i.e., pay him anything), his lawyers sought an injunction barring future sales. A judge agreed and issued the order.

Chicago outlets sold out their entire stock faster than you could say, “I want to be like Dennis.”

The Great Mural Controversy--Showing how fragile and interdependent modern society is, traffic on the interchange in the Loop where two expressways meet approached gridlock when drivers slowed down to look at a giant portrait of Rodman on the side of a building.

Said Jordan, whose picture was already there but was ignored by fans used to seeing it on buildings and posters: “It’s messing up all the traffic. It was fine when I was up there by myself.”

Rodman’s portrait came down. He seemed sad.

“People are making a big deal out of nothing,” Rodman said. “I think they should leave it up. It’s not the fault of the people who put it up. It’s the people who are driving. I guess they have nothing better to do than sit there and watch me. If the people like it, let them look at it. But if they want to take it down I don’t care. It will save some lives, I guess.”

In its place, they painted a portrait of--are you ready for this?--Jack Haley.

Yes, Jack Haley, the UCLA alum, who played one game as a Bull and spent the rest of this season in civilian clothes because of a fake injury.

Haley comes from Seal Beach, where no one ever thought of putting his portrait on a building. But in Hooterville, all things are possible for Bulls.

“There’s no comparison between Chicago and any other city in the United States,” Haley said. “I mean, I’m not even the 12th man. I’m the 15th man and I’m an icon in this town. I’m in billboards, I have fashion deals, car deals, all kind of things.”

Not that it should be taken as a sign of disrespect toward Haley, but traffic again crawls at normal speed through the Loop. If only modern civilization were as easy to fix.

*

What happened can be explained simply enough.

A star-crazed city with a self-esteem problem--it billed itself as the Second City but has now lost even that distinction, having fallen to third in population--used to parsimonious owners and bad sports teams, got not only a champion but a dynasty.

Not only that, it got Jordan, the most popular and transcendent athlete of his time, and zing went the strings of its civic heart.

The irony is that, before Jordan, the Bulls were a sad last in interest among local teams. The Bears owned the town. The Cubs were next, and the White Sox. The Blackhawks had Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita.

The Bulls arrived last, in 1966. Their first home was the Amphitheater, next door to the stockyards.

“It’s been a graveyard for basketball,” says Johnny Kerr, the team’s first coach and now its radio announcer. “They had the Stags, the Zephyrs, the Majors, the Packers, the Gears.”

“All we wanted to do was make the playoffs. It was an expansion team, and they hired a local kid, me, who’d gone to the University of Illinois, to try to get some ink for them.

“The thing is, we won 33 games. No other team has won 33 games as an expansion team. No other team made the playoffs their first year, so it sort of solidified it a little bit. But it was a tough go.”

It was a long, tough go. They were respectable--they made the playoffs in eight of their first 10 seasons--but who cared?

Attendance was low. The newspapers ignored them, covering their games only at home. On the road, Kerr had to phone the papers with the results of that night’s game, dictating a box score over pay phones to bored clerks cursing themselves for having picked up.

“Those were the old stories,” Kerr says. “We used to say instead of introducing the team, we’d introduce the guys in the stands. You know, ‘What time’s the game? What time can you get here?’ All those jokes.

“I used to carry change around in my pocket. After games I would call in and say, ‘I’m giving a late report.’ We had four newspapers. We had nobody who traveled with us.

“I’m calling in and I’d say, ‘Let me talk to somebody in sports.’ Well, hell, nobody was at work at 11 o’clock at night.

“I said, ‘I’ve got a report on the Bulls, I’ll give you a box score. Boozer, B-O-O. . . .’

“ ‘Slow down, slow down.’ ”

“B-O-O-Z-E-R. Ding! Put another quarter in. . . .

“One day we had a parade coming down State Street. John Katz, who was the security officer there, he was a policeman too. They called him and said there was a Bulls’ parade coming down State Street at noon, we want you to stop the traffic.

“So John’s waiting, he’s looking, here comes a big old flatbed truck. There’s a live bull. There’s [owner] Dick Klein. There’s Ben Bentley, the PR director, and myself.

“That was it. He lets it go by. He’s looking. There was nothing behind it. That was it.”

Kerr leans back to take in the expanse of the mammoth new United Center, with its 21,711 seats and three levels of luxury boxes--216 suites, all leased for five years. Jerry Reinsdorf owns the building jointly with the Blackhawks’ Bill Wirtz, and they could pay it off tomorrow if they chose.

The Bulls’ coaches no longer phone in stories. If the truth were known, Jackson is dismayed at the intensity and hysteria of the coverage and would appreciate less of it.

“Look,” marvels Kerr, like a man who can never quite bring himself to believe it, “how it’s changed.”

*

Great passion flows from great hardship. Around here, they have a word for the burden they all share.

W-E-A-T-H-E-R.

It’s frigid during the winter, with the wind howling off Lake Michigan routinely dropping the chill factor into the minus teens. It’s hot and humid in summer. Spring may last a day or so. Compared to Chicago weather, New York is almost temperate. Los Angeles, of course, is paradise.

The Bulls play during the winter and their audience is not only captivated but captive.

“My first year, the weather blew my head off,” says Haley, a rookie with the Bulls in 1988. “This year was worse. This is the worst year. I was in San Antonio the last two years and L.A. two years before that and I had forgotten about weather.

“I mean, today we’re going into June and it’s finally sunny. But you can’t play golf because it rained the last two days and everything is muddy and wet. It’s supposed to rain again tomorrow.

“Phil has a classic saying. Every day we come into work, he says, ‘Isn’t it great to live in Chicago? The weather’s so bad outside, there’s nothing else to do. We might as well work.’

“Because every day, it’s gloomy, it’s rainy, it’s cold. I mean, Dennis and I have just been miserable because of the weather. We can’t wait. We want to finish the year and win, but we want to get back to L.A.

“The other night when Utah beat the Sonics [in Game 5], my wife was like, ‘God, I wanted Seattle to win, we could have gone home two days earlier!’

“We have cabin fever. Staying indoors is tough.”

*

New York has Broadway and the TV networks. Los Angeles has “the industry.”

Chicago has . . . zip.

OK, it has some native-born stars, some Second City alumni who went on to fame. But for the most part, it drools longingly at the display window of celebrity.

In that, it is like most other places. Most cities do not have hundreds of movie stars, TV stars, rock stars, et al. Most cities are star-struck and fasten their longing on the local athletes. Said Jay Johnstone, a media-savvy player interested in business opportunities, who had just gone from the Dodgers to the Cubs, “The athletes here are the stars.”

When Jordan came to town in 1984, he went from basketball player to legend.

In the Bulls’ first season, they had averaged 4,772 fans a game. (That is, they announced 4,772; the real number was certainly smaller.)

In 1983-84, the season before Jordan arrived, they announced 6,365. With Jordan, attendance almost doubled right away. By his fourth season, they were selling out every game, and they are on a streak of 435 that dates to 1987.

It’s fun to watch the locals losing their minds, standing candlelight vigils at the Jordan statue in front of the United Center, tossing pennies at it, making wishes. . . . But it seems clear this could have happened anywhere. David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, once called Jordan “the first great athlete of the wired world.” His appeal crosses state lines, mountains and oceans.

“For Japanese people, Michael Jordan is like a god,” says Patrick Marume, president of Los Angeles-based Poppy Tours, which features a special Jordan tour.

“We stay in hotels that are within walking distance of the sights where Jordan is featured, and we give them a map in Japanese to help them find their way around.

“I took a group to Jordan’s restaurant and they were buying the No. 45 jersey, two, three, four pieces. Cost like $1,500. I took them to the Jordan Golf Center, about 20 of them. They spent like $100, $200 per person.”

Yes, there is a Jordan store specializing in golf wear, in tony Water Tower Place. And a Niketown on Michigan Avenue, which Crain’s Chicago Business has called the city’s top retail attraction. And a Jordan driving range in suburban Aurora.

Now, this is Rodman’s town too. Chicago fans made his book No. 1 on the New York Times Book Review list. In local bookstores, they have copies stacked up like bricks in a wall.

It may be the times, not the place, so be warned. It happened here. It could happen in Your Town too.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

NBA FINALS

Chicago Bulls vs. Seattle SuperSonics

* Today’s Game 3: at Seattle

* Time: 4:30 p.m.

* TV: Channel 4.

* Series Standing: Bulls, 2-0

* Coverage: C10