The importance of work

For most of my life I fought the notion work was good for you. To me, work was a necessary evil, a way to earn some money so I could spend it.

The Puritanical belief that hard work is its own reward was lost on me. I came to think of that mantra as a way to condone the continued exploitation of the working class in our society.

That feeling embedded itself in me during my final days working for The Naperville Sun. With massive nationwide layoffs crippling the newspaper industry, those of us remaining were made to feel we were lucky to still have jobs. We shouldn't complain about the added workload or the new skills many were being asked to learn. Some places began forcing reporters to become videographers.

When I left the Sun during a round of layoffs last April, I was relieved. My job had become just that -- a job. It was so bad, I could feel my mood change every time I got into my car to go the office. Being unemployed freed my spirit.

Because of Kristin's job, I was in the fortunate position of being able to walk away without having to worry about the mortgage getting paid. We don't have any children, so that wasn't a concern. Kristin's job also takes care of our health benefits, so no worries there either.

But now I'm nearing a full year of unemployment. And I'm surprised to have discovered the importance of staying productive. It turns out work is important, and not just as a way to make sure the bills get paid. As Studs Terkel wrote in his 1972 book "Working," "Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread."

For much of the past 11 months, I've been searching for that meaning. Really, I've been searching for it even longer, probably all my life. Now I wonder if it was right in front of me the whole time.

In recent weeks I've been doing more freelancing for newspapers. I just finished three articles since Friday, including this one published in Sunday's Naperville Sun. Those came a few weeks after I wrote a story about Evan Lysacek's sports podiatrist, also for the Sun, and a feature on a local high school basketball player for the Chicago Tribune.

None of the stories can be considered award worthy, but that doesn't matter. I wasn't writing them hoping to win an award. I was writing them because I enjoy writing those kinds of articles, especially the feature on Ryan Boatright.

What I discovered is that working didn't feel like work anymore. (OK, to be honest, when it came to deadline time and I was staring at a screen with only these words written, "By Paul LaTour," it felt a little like work.)

It felt invigorating. It felt good to be busy, to have a reason to wake up in the morning other than to avoid spending the day in my pajamas.

I have a few more assignments on my docket, including another one for the Tribune. Soon I'll be brimming with work as I try to ride this rebirth of enthusiasm. I'll be covering the high school state hockey semifinals and finals next week for the Tribune. I'll be covering high school girls soccer again, this time for ChicagolandSoccer.net.

And in just over a week I begin a part-time, temporary job with the U.S. Census Bureau. My task will be doing follow-up visits to group homes, nursing homes, shelters and dorms, making sure everyone is counted. I'm excited if only because it could lead to meeting some interesting people. Of course, everything I find out is confidential, so I won't be able share the details. Then again, they could turn up in a short story or two.

This is all to say that I have found my daily meaning. It really was with me the whole time.

I'm a guest star on another blog

My new friend Dan Cote started a great Facebook fan page for the Minnesota North Stars. He's also created fan pages for just about every former North Star you can imagine (Dwight Bialowas? Moose Vasko???).

As part of that he started a blog, North Star Green Preservation Society. A few weeks ago he asked me to share some of my North Stars memories, which I finally got around to today. I have tons of memories, including one I've already shared here.

So if you get a chance, please head on over to Dan's blog to check out what I had to write. And don't be shy about telling him you want to share your own stories. That's what he's looking for.

The Miracle turns 30

It was a Friday evening in late February, and my dream of being a famous goalie remained alive as I skated through hockey practice on my neighborhood rink in Woodland.

The sky above Duluth, Minn., was just beginning to fade into night when our assistant coach came racing out of the warming shack, yelling his head off. He ran to tell us what he had just heard, "We beat the Russians!"

That was Feb. 22, 1980, and I'm sure many people remember exactly where they were when they heard Team USA had defeated the powerful Soviet hockey machine in the Lake Placid Winter Olympics.

Some people mistakenly remember watching the game live. But it was shown on tape delay, the telecast starting about an hour after the game ended. I watched it in our family room, sitting about four inches from the screen the entire time.

I screamed when Mike Eruzione scored the eventual game-winner, and leaped from my seat as the final seconds ticked down, even though I already knew the result. I'm sure I stared in disbelief while watching the celebration because I still do it now when I see it replayed.

There are other seminal historical moments marking my lifetime. Nixon leaving the White House (home with my mom). The space shuttle Challenger disaster (in senior hall at Cathedral High School). The 9/11 attacks (in bed in Killeen, Texas).

Those were all negative events. The Miracle on Ice is different. It's one of the few positive moments that will always stick with me and so many other Americans. So on the 30-year anniversary of the greatest game in U.S. sports history, I thought I'd rehash where I was that incredible night.

As an added bonus, I'm also including a column I wrote for the Naperville Sun, which ran Feb. 22, 2005, on the 25th anniversary of the Miracle. Days earlier I had run into former Olympian Ken Morrow and was fortunate enough to get a short interview with him. I turned it into the following column.

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There can be only one Miracle

Naperville Sun, The (IL) - Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Author: Paul LaTour

His hair is thinning and more of his forehead is showing because of it. His grizzly beard -- the one Disney inexplicably sheared off -- has been traded for a more clean-shaven look.

Otherwise Ken Morrow looks about the same as he did when he played for the one hockey team no American will ever forget: the 1980 U.S. Olympic team.

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the "Miracle on Ice" when the United States upset the Soviets, 4-3, at Lake Placid, N.Y. Morrow, a defenseman, was on the ice as the clock ran out and Al Michaels uttered the unforgettable line, "Do you believe in miracles?"

Morrow was soon joined by the entire team on the ice, a swarming mass of overjoyed, exuberant players who could hardly believe what they had accomplished. Two days later, they won the gold medal with a come-from-behind win over Finland.

Most of the players will unite again today in Lake Placid for festivities honoring the 1980 U.S. Winter Olympians. Mike Eruzione, the team captain who scored the game-winning goal against the Soviets, will be there.

Morrow will be there, too. Sadly, Herb Brooks will not be.

Brooks , the U.S. coach and chief architect, was killed in a car accident Aug. 18, 2003. Brooks never saw Disney's adaptation, "Miracle," in which actor Kurt Russell gave a dead-on portrayal of him.

Although Brooks will be missing, Morrow wasn't sure his coach would have come to today's reunion anyway.

"He never really was at any of the other ones," Morrow said. "He was like that as a coach. He stayed away from the players."

Even on that glorious February night in 1980, Brooks let the players celebrate on the ice while he quietly slipped into the shadows, away from the cameras, away from the attention.

The movie, released last February, brought back a flood of attention. Morrow had nothing but praise for the film, even though some of the technical aspects were slightly askew.

One thing in particular caught Morrow's attention.

"I didn't have a beard (in the movie), that was the thing I noticed right away," Morrow said. "But with all the defining moments, they were right on the mark. They did a great job with that."

Of all the members on that team, Morrow can be considered the most fortunate in terms of hockey success. He went from a gold medal to a Stanley Cup championship with the New York Islanders in less than four months.

His championship run continued for three more years as the Islanders won four straight Cups. As rewarding as those titles must have been, beating the Russians still tops his list of accomplishments.

"It's a moment that's stood the test of time and, if anything, is gaining in stature," Morrow said. "People still want to talk about it 25 years later."

People like me, who happened to spot Morrow in the Allstate Arena press box earlier this month. Morrow, now a scout for the Islanders, was watching the Chicago Wolves play the Houston Aeros on Feb. 12.

He comes through this way quite often, actually, and not always on business. His wife's sister lives in Wheaton.

Morrow is still a recognizable figure, even without the beard. A cluster of fans stood ready to greet him between periods in the walkway behind the press box. Included in the group of autograph seekers was a man wearing a 1980 U.S. replica jersey with the No. 80 on the back.

The scene brought back memories of just how meaningful hockey once was in this country. Today, as the Olympians reunite in Lake Placid, hockey could not be on shakier ground. Talk of salary caps, lockouts and canceled seasons dominate conversations.

It is more than a little ironic, then, that a hockey game is considered by many -- myself included -- as the greatest sports moment in U.S. history.

While Morrow talked about the NHL lockout, which had not yet resulted in the cancellation of the season, he joked that if the NHL resumed play this season it would be another Miracle on Ice.

He's wrong, though. There can never be another.

Copyright, 2005, The Naperville Sun. All rights reserved.

Mr. Zero remains my favorite Blackhawk

Somewhere buried in a box stacked in a downstairs closet, a cardboard tribute to my ex-idol sits untouched for years. It's a Tony Esposito hockey card, a ragged-edged memento of my youth.

I always wanted to be a goalie. But not just any goalie – I wanted to be Tony Esposito. Thanks to that card, which I got when I was around 5 or 6, I noticed he held his goalie stick in the same hand I did – the left.

That was pretty uncommon then. So uncommon the community rink I played for in the late '70s (Woodland) didn’t even have a left-handed blocker pad. So I had to use a regular hockey glove to hold my stick. The catcher glove for my right was this mangled piece of leather that could barely be opened and closed. Thankfully, I played for a great team and wasn’t called upon to make many saves. But man, would my feet get cold standing back in the crease for what seemed like hours at a time.

I watched Espo on TV and saw how he would scrape the snow from his crease and pile it up on the sides of the net, creating a nice inhibitor to the wraparound. I would do the same thing, sometimes piling it so high a puck would get lost in it on those rare times the puck came that close to my net.

I carried Espo’s hockey card around with me all the time. The bottom became pretty tattered because I used it to play marble hockey on the upstairs hallway floor of my parents’ house. All my hockey cards bear the marks of those games, but especially Espo’s, which also had a piece of Scotch tape holding it together after it got torn in half.

Esposito played for the Chicago Blackhawks, a team I came to despise as I got older. Living in northern Minnesota, we were all North Stars fans. And the Blackhawks were our No. 1 rival, at least in the late '70s and '80s.

It was a classic rivalry, highlighted by the battles between Dino Ciccarrelli and Al Secord. So hated was Secord that North Stars fans still cheered “Secord sucks” when the Hawks were in town long after he retired. I've posted YouTube videos of the bench-clearing brawls that punctuated the teams' meetings.

Tonight the Blackhawks are honoring Esposito, as they have with many of their former superstars in the past couple of seasons. I've converted to the Dark Side by cheering for the Hawks now, but I turned away when Bob Probert, Denis Savard and Steve Larmer were given their Heritage Night honors.

It's different with Esposito, even though he played on some of those teams I hated. When he was toward the tail-end of his Hall of Fame career we used to heckle him through the TV. He had a habit of going down for a puck and then just staying on the ice. We laughed and said he was too old to get back up to his feet, or that the Chicago Stadium needed to install a crane to help him.

But I always had a hard time getting into the jeering. I wanted to fit in with my older brothers and their friends, so I pretended I also hated Esposito. Yet, deep down he remained one of my all-time favorite goalies, second only to Cesare Maniago of the North Stars.

So later today I will go digging for my old Espo playing card, the one with a 35-year-old piece of Scotch tape holding it together.* I will scour the Internet looking for articles about Esposito like this one from ex-Tribune writer Bob Verdi.

And I will watch on TV as the Hawks honor the goalie I emulated above all others. Maybe I'll even pile snow on either side of my recliner, you know, just to capture the spirit of the thing.

* -- UPDATE: I found the card, and it turns out I was confused. My Ken Dryden card from the same year is the taped-up one. The Esposito one is in one piece, though the edges are pretty ragged.

Keith Brooking can suck it

My basketball career wasn’t exactly loaded with highlights. I was a bench-warming guard for Cathedral who usually only played when the game was already decided. Because the Hilltoppers weren’t very good, that meant I saw a lot of action when we were losing.

That was the case when we faced Duluth East on our home court my senior year. East, a much larger school with a very good team, featured a 7-foot center who went on to play college basketball. The Greyhounds were rolling over us as usual, so of course, I was on the court in the fourth quarter.

We were trailing by at least 60 points as East inched closer and closer to the 100-point mark. They had either 98 or 99 points with just a couple minutes left to play. I had the ball at the top about 20 feet from the basket when I turned it over (big surprise).

The player who stole it quickly lofted the ball over my head. As I turned I saw for the first time that the 7-foot, college-bound star was standing at midcourt waiting for the pass. He was floating out there doing what is known as cherry picking.

He took the ball, ran down the court ahead of me and went up for a dunk. I had nearly caught up to him. I was close enough to have grabbed him as he jumped. I could have laid a shoulder into him and brought him down.

Instead, I did nothing. The kid slammed the ball home and the Greyhounds hit the century mark in points. Their bench went nuts—it was as if they had just won state.

All these years later, I still regret not taking him down. Sure it would have been a foul and I probably would have been ejected. But I would have prevented the humiliation of having my nose rubbed in it during an already embarrassing night.

All these years later, I’m still pissed East’s coach would leave his best player in the game. And that not only was he still playing, he was cherry picking. It was a blatant disregard of sportsmanship, and it showed an utter lack of class on the coach's part.

To listen to Keith Brooking, he’d have you believing that was comparable to what the Vikings did Sunday at the end of their 34-3 victory over the Cowboys. In case you somehow missed this, Brett Favre threw a touchdown pass on fourth-down late in the game and Brooking, a Cowboys linebacker, took umbrage. He charged to the Vikings’ sideline and began jawing at the players and coaches.

“I just thought what happened at the end of the game was disrespectful,” Brooking said in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “It was classless and all the things that are in that category. I’ll say it to the Vikings organization and whoever is over there calling plays. It wasn’t the right thing to do at that time. Period.”

Here’s the deal though, Brooking, this is professional sports. You get paid a lot of money to do your job, which is to stop the other team from scoring. You failed to do that time and again on Sunday.

It’s possible Brooking’s postgame comments included his admission that the Cowboys were badly outplayed. I don’t know. But what was published and reported made Brooking look bad … really bad. Even without the final touchdown, the game was never close. How much better would he feel if the final had been 27-3? Or 30-3 if the Vikings had kicked a field goal instead of going for it?

In pro sports, you play as hard as you can for the entire game. People pay good money to be there and they deserve an honest effort. Just because the Cowboys quit, doesn’t mean the Vikings had to, also.

That is the fundamental difference between what happened on that basketball court 24 years ago and what took place in the Metrodome on Sunday. In pro sports, there is no running up the score. That’s a term used for situations when amateurs sometimes find themselves badly overmatched through no fault of their own.

A high school coach who encourages his team to keep pouring on points against an overmatched team teaches his players it’s all right to humiliate someone with less talent. A professional coach who does that teaches his players there is no letting up, especially in the playoffs.

The stupid part of this whole thing is how short everyone’s memories are. In Week 17 of the season the Cowboys led the Eagles 24-0 with 2:26 left to play. On fourth down with the game long decided, the Cowboys opted to throw from the shotgun at the Eagles’ 35.

Of course, Tony Romo was sacked on that play, so the Cowboys didn’t have to face accusations of running up the score. Odd, I don't remember Brooking saying anything about that.

It's #&%! Norm Green's fault!

I really forgot how much the North Stars and Blackhawks hated each other. The rivalry even tops anything between the Packers and Vikings, I think.

Yet tonight I'll be cheering for the Hawks as they face the Wild. Believe me, if the North Stars hadn't left Minnesota I never would have become a Hawks fans. But that's not what happened. Norm Green up and stole the team away from Minnesota, leaving me to look elsewhere for a home team.

Still, it's fun to look back on the old days and remember how much we hated the Hawks. For old times' sake, join with me once more in this memorable chant that echoed through the Met Center: Secord sucks! Secord sucks! Secord sucks!

One blog per day all month -- Mission Accomplished!

I did it. At the beginning of December I promised to post something on my blog every day for the entire month. Today marks post No. 31, and although it is coming after midnight I'm still counting it. Thus I have accomplished my goal.

And now that I've done that, I doubt I'll ever try to do it again. The reasons are varied, but mostly because it became increasingly difficult for me to write anything of substance. It was fun digging through YouTube looking for videos about hockey or music or whatever.

But I didn't create anything in those posts that stretched my writing muscle. I started the blog because I want to use this space as if I am writing essays for a newspaper. I wasn't able to do that very often this month because those type of posts usually take me longer to write. Sometimes it takes three or four days for me to get all my thoughts in order enough to share them.

For whatever reason, that didn't happen this month. I spent more time looking for videos or links than I did with the actual writing. I'm glad I tried the daily blogging thing, though. It was an interesting experiment and did keep me from neglecting the blog. I was losing steam with it in October and November, but I didn't want to stop doing it.

I also decided I want to keep blogging. I may not be doing it every day anymore, that's true. But I am hoping to do it at least once a week. That way I'll keep my writing muscle a lean, mean fighting machine.

I remain amazed anybody is reading this at all, but I am thankful there are readers. It makes it much more fun knowing I'm not doing this for nothing.

Happy New Year!