Bob Newton tackles his toughest opponent

     Bob Newton never became the athlete he might have been.
     Yes, he played football with Nebraska the year the Cornhuskers won their first national championship.
     Yes, he played for 11 years as an offensive lineman in the NFL, five years with the Chicago Bears, with teammates like Dick Butkus, Gale Sayers and Walter Payton. Then six years with the Seattle Seahawks.
     But Newton could have done even better.
     “The Chicago Bears, after my first year at offensive guard, thought I had the potential to be an all-pro offensive guard, which means one of the best in the league,” Newton said Friday at Mount Carmel High School. “I never made it. I never reached that potential because what I was doing off the field.”
     What he was doing off the field was drinking heavily. Many men wouldn’t admit that to themselves, never mind to others, never mind to a gym full of high school athletes taking a break from their summer weight training. But Newton, a recovering alcoholic, who went straight from the NFL into rehab, and for the past 15 years has worked at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation in Rancho Mirage, California, is trying to help young people avoid the pitfall of addiction.
      “I speak to patients, families, and high schools, as often as possible,” he said. “Going to assemblies, training teachers, school administrators, to identify signs and symptoms of substance abuse.”
     He told the athletes how, despite the rising tide of legality, marijuana can be addictive and affect cognition. “It saturates your brain cells.”
     Newton said that in addition to hurting his athletic career, his drinking also destroyed his marriage. And that addiction runs in families.
     “How did my problem start, where did it start?” Newton asked. “When I look back on my life, I started drinking alcohol in high school. Back in those days there was not a lot of intervention. I went on to the University of Nebraska, my drinking continued. There were signs I had a problem. My father had a significant problem with alcohol, and aunts and uncles on both sides of my family had a significant problem with alcohol. If people in your family have a drinking problem, I would be very cautious. This problem is handed down.”
     Newton is 65, his hair and beard now snowy white. But he still is a commanding 6’4 presence. He knows he’s going against all the glitz that Madison Avenue can muster, the endless big bucks promotion of alcohol wedded to pro sports.
     “My concern is all the advertisements,” he said. “Young people are bombarded. By the time you’re 18 years of age, you’re going to see 100,000 messages to drink.”
     Football is a team sport, and Newton enlisted a more famous teammate to help get his message across. His last year with the Bears was Walter Payton’s rookie year.
     “I never saw a player work harder in practice,” Newton said. “One of the hardest working guys. A great teammate. I never saw him put a toxic substance into his system. Never saw him drink. Never saw him do any other drugs. He came to practice every day to work. But he felt like it, because he wasn’t putting these toxic substances into his system. We all know how phenomenal he was, one of the greatest football players to every put on a football uniform.”
     Mount Carmel was eager to have Newton speak.
     “We’re not naive to think these kids never drink,” said athletic director Dan LaCount. “A lot of them have aspirations to play Division I football and beyond. It’s important to us to have someone who has been where Bob has been to speak to them at this age. We’re very aware of what can attract these kids, and we do our best as a school, as an athletic department, to be sure they get the right message.”
     I could tell from the players’ faces that Newton had caught their attention. Afterward, I asked a few what they thought.
     “Eye-opening to see an NFL player who went through these problems and to come out and talk about all of it,” said Jake Cirame, 17, a lineman entering his senior year. “Personally, I think it affected me.”
     “Truly eye-opening, to have someone whose been through all of that and have the guts to speak about it,” agreed Logan Brokop, 16, a defensive back entering his junior year. “How he beat it, and he’s still sober and beating it today.”

Kent Week #2: Living swankily among the swells

Kent and Ross, living large at the Grand Hotel, Mackinac Island.

     My younger son Kent turns 18 tomorrow. The official end of childhood. So as he slips into the general anonymity of adulthood, I'm celebrating, if not a most distinctive youth, then one that ended up in a newspaper column more than is average. He was always a headstrong boy, a quality that one day will serve him well, but that growing up, as illustrated below, could pose a challenge to his parents.

     Several people have asked me what Mackinac Island was like, and while I intend to write something for the travel pages, I thought, with summer about to wink out, I ought to give a brief report here.
     There is a charming little downtown, with plenty of the famous fudge shops -- fudge is not my favorite sweet, but you get used to it. Most of the island is park, with good trails and hiking. Cars aren't allowed, so transport is by bikes or horses or foot. People seemed enthralled by the horses, though, frankly, in my view, they were a reminder of the utility of cars -- you spent a lot of time waiting for the horse taxi to come around.
     We stayed at the Grand Hotel. A tour guide described it as a "steamship on dry land," which summed it up pretty well. An enormous white wooden structure built in 1887. Meals are included in the price of the room, and, as with cruise ships, there was quite a focus on eating.
     Or maybe that was just me.
     The place is so big and so elegant that I walked around the lobby for a day before I realized it displayed three John Singer Sargent oils and a Childe Hassam. Elegant enough that the hotel charges $10 apiece for non-guests to walk through the lobby, and takes in $75,000 a year from people willing to pay. Its greatest feature is a stupendous front porch -- said to be the longest in the world, holding 100 white rocking chairs. I spent as much time as I could on that porch, staring at the blue expanse of Lake Huron, and I know it's corny, but the phrase "sacred space" came to mind. Put it this way: It's worth the nine-hour drive to Mackinac to sit on that porch for an afternoon.

    Passing along genetic grandiosity

     Vacations are all about forging memories, and I'll share with you the key Mackinac memory for me. The Grand Hotel requires that men wear suit jackets and ties in public spaces after 6 p.m. Even though children are exempt from this -- their outfit of choice seems to be golf shirts and khakis—I used the opportunity to put my boys in their first blazers.
     This demand for elegance infected the mind of Kent, my younger boy, and at one shop in town—the London House—he seized upon a walking stick, black with a blue cobalt glass knob, and announced that he had to have it. He just had to.
    As any sane father would, I emphatically told him: a) I wasn't spending $50 on a walking stick; b) I wasn't about to be the father of a boy who carried around a walking stick, and c) no, no, no.
     Tenacity runs in my family, and we do not give up easily. "I want to die," he said, confronting the disappointment with all the gravity an 8-year-old can muster. Returning to the Grand Hotel—this fabulous swooping vista of Victorian charm—while he whined "die, die, die" was one of those strange, exquisite highlights of fatherhood, along with being thrown up upon.
    This was the first day, with four nights of "die, die, die" ahead of us. At dinner, with the boys safely tucked in the hotel's children's program, I consulted with my wife. Yes, he was spoiled, and getting him the stick would spoil him further. But really, we were on vacation....
    What had softened me was, in the constant rehashing that followed, I asked him where he imagined taking a walking stick.
     "To fancy occasions," he said.
     Did I really want to be the guy standing in the way of a lad being properly decked out for fancy occasions?
     We told him he could get his stick—provided he kicked in the next six weeks of allowance, and behaved for the rest of his life. He enthusiastically agreed.
     The older boy, of course, needed to be bought off, and he chose to go on a spree at Doc's House of Magic, loading up on itch powder and joy buzzers and the most realistic-looking rubber cigar I've ever seen.
     It was all worth it—the expense, the certainty that my lax parenting skills were turning my boys into brats—that night, as we marched into the Grand Hotel's archly labeled "Salle a Manger" (see, I didn't invent pretentiousness).
     The boys strolled in front of me, Kent proudly holding his walking stick -- it was a little big for him, so he had to hold it high, which made him seem like Louis XIV taking the air, Ross wearing a Thurston Howell III yachtsman's cap and brandishing his fake cigar.
     Guests did double takes. I am not exaggerating to say that heads turned in the dining room to see this strange family come rolling in. The maitre d' informed my older son that gentlemen must remove their hats at dinner, and we were shown our seats, my heart bursting with pride.
     "My work on Earth is done," I told myself. "I can die now, confident that I have passed on my qualities to a new generation."
        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 4, 2005

     Postscript: Almost needless to say, he never used the walking stick again. But it is mounted above the door to his bedroom, where it is available, should the occasion arise. 

Why this flag?

     I love the American flag, how it looks, what it represents. There's so much history bound up in every stripe; three years ago I set out to mark Flag Day, June 14—which fell on a Thursday in 2012—by answering a basic question about the American flag: Where did it come from?

     Why red, white and blue? Why these colors and not, oh, green and beige?
     Flag Day is Thursday, so it's an apt moment to wonder, and a quick glance into the murky and legend-prone history of our national flag offers a fairly solid answer.
     First, yes, Flag Day is without question a third-rate patriotic holiday, if you consider the Fourth of July as the undisputed No. 1, with the solemn military Memorial and Veterans days tying for second. Nobody gets off work for Flag Day. It's sort of an Arbor Day for flags, almost like one of those made-up Hallmark holidays, like Grandparents Day.
     Except Flag Day actually commemorates something real, June 14, 1777, when the Continental Congress decreed: "The flag of the United States be made of thirteen stripes, alternate red and white, the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation."
     Why those colors? In the 19th century, when people felt free to make stuff up, one patriotic guide suggested red, white and blue were handed down by God at Mt. Sinai.
     The short, factual answer is our colors are red, white and blue because the British flag is red, white and blue. Changes that seem revolutionary in retrospect actually occur in stages, and when George Washington began leading his troops, they saw themselves as British citizens fighting for their rights. Thus his Grand Union Flag, raised over the Continental Army in January 1776, had the British Union Flag where the field of stars is now.
     The British flag at the time was an amalgam of two crosses, the English cross of St. George and the Scottish Cross of St. Andrew The reason George's is red disappears into medieval lore (my guess: he's a martyr; red symbolized blood and courage). The reason Andrew's is white on blue rests on 1340-year-old legend: a sign, the X-shaped saltire cross, that Scottish King Angus MacFergus II supposedly saw in the sky before a battle in 732.
     So the red, white and blue in the American flag represent, originally, blood, clouds and sky, which sounds about right.
     Washington's version might have stuck—other former British colonies, such as Australia, Fiji, New Zealand and, surprisingly, the state of Hawaii, still have the Union Jack (as the British Union flag was called after the addition of the red X of Ireland in 1801) in miniature on the upper corners of their flags.
     But in the 18 months between the time Washington hoisted his Grand Union flag, and Congress codified it, passions had inflamed, the British banner jettisoned, and somebody had substituted a field of stars.
     No one is sure who. It almost certainly wasn't Betsy Ross. Much received flag wisdom is late 19th century whimsy embraced as fact by the ever-credulous public. Nothing suggests Ross had a hand in the creation of the American flag, beyond a paper presented in 1870 by her grandson based on family tradition. She was a seamstress and sewed a Pennsylvania navy flag, but beyond that the few known facts point elsewhere.
     The next time Congress took up the flag was 1793, prompted by the admission to the union of Vermont and Kentucky. Sen. Stephen R. Bradley—of Vermont, naturally—proposed a bill "for altering the Flag of the United States" to reflect the change. It passed the Senate, but the always fractious House bristled at being asked to consider this minor matter.
     One representative called the bill "a trifling business which ought not to engross the attention of the House, when it was its duty to discuss matters of infinitely greater importance." Something Congress ought to keep in mind when debating the next inevitable flag burning amendment—previous Congresses didn't even want to bother talking about the flag's design, never mind fret over those misguided enough to burn one. (I'm glad Flag Day is unofficial; enforced honor loses significance.)
     After complaining, Congress gave the flag 15 stars and stripes. It stayed that way for a quarter century, despite the addition of five more states, until 1818, when the prospect of an ever more striped flag brought about the current scheme of holding steady at 13 stripes, adding one more star with each new state, on the July 4 after that state is admitted.
     Which means, if you are my age—I just turned 52—or older, you can amaze children by informing them that you are older than the American flag, the current version of which became official on July 4, 1960, when executive order No. 10834 went into effect, giving the flag a 50th star to reflect the admission of Hawaii the previous August.
     Have a great Flag Day; fly it if you got it.
     "There is the national flag," Sen. Charles Sumner once wrote. "He must be cold, indeed, who can look upon its folds rippling in the breeze without pride of country."

    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 14, 2012

Kent Week #1: "Good day at Wrigley Field"

   

     The only topic I was ever specifically forbidden to write about in my newspaper column was my children, by an editor who had none himself and thus didn't see their utility. So naturally I wrote about the boys a lot, because I found them a source of endless fascination. My older son, Ross, being first out of the gate, got the lion's share of attention. But his younger brother was not ignored either. Since he turns 18 on Tuesday, I decided—with his permission, of course—to dub this Kent Week, and reprise a few highlights from over the years, such as this, when he was seven:

     Second children often get the short end of the stick. The hand-me-down clothes. The old toys. The half-filled photo album. When I try to explain the difference between how we treated our first and second sons, I put it this way: When Ross was a baby, I'd boil his baby bottle nipples, handling them with tongs and setting them out on paper towels to dry. When Kent was a baby, if I dropped a nipple on the floor, I'd pick it up, brush it off on my shoulder, and use it.
     Maybe that's inevitable. Parents get tired, and what at first seemed extraordinary over time becomes routine. Even here in the column. You've read, over the past nine years, of my oldest -- the chess-playing, book-devouring wunderkind. My youngest -- quieter, more athletic, more of a regular kid and less an oddball like his dad -- hardly gets mentioned. That isn't fair, but life isn't fair.
     Every once in a while, however, life compensates, and the overlooked step into the limelight. When my good friends at Harry Caray's asked if one of the boys wanted to throw out the first pitch at a Cubs/Sox game at Wrigley Field earlier this summer, I knew it had to be Kent. He's the ballplayer, the Cubs fan. I measured off 67 feet in the driveway and insisted we practice. The boy has an arm, for a 7-year-old, but it's a long way to the plate.
     The big day finally arrived. We sat together for nearly an hour in the stands in the bright sun, waiting. I yabbered nervously away while Kent squinted silently at the field, as if measuring it. Finally, they called him. He picked his glove up and trotted out to the mound. He never looked back, never glanced at me. He stood at the mound, set himself, looked at the plate for a single moment, and threw a cannon shot to the catcher. A strike. The stands erupted. I shouted myself hoarse. He trotted back to me, the faintest trace of a smile on his lips.
     I couldn't shut up for days; told everyone I know and sent copies of the pictures everywhere. He, on the other hand, never mentioned it again. 
    Well, once. I was marveling, for the 50th time, about him throwing that strike, right over the plate, and he said, softly, "The catcher was standing in front of the plate, Dad," which impressed me even more. The modest hero.
     I hope you'll forgive me sharing this -- I know it's bragging, and I resisted at first. But summer is almost over, and, thinking back over it, I realized that I had once again overlooked Number Two. It's hard to be a little brother and to dwell in the shadows of the first born, and I'm so glad he was able to step up and nail his moment of glory. You have to keep an eye on those quiet types -- they can surprise you. Not that anything he could do would surprise me now. If he is someday elected president of the United States, when the final ballot count comes in, I will turn to my wife and say, "Of course, after that pitch at Wrigley Field, we should have expected this."
                             —published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Sept. 3, 2004

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Okay, these challenges are far too easy. Time to pull out something that strikes me as just a little tougher, maybe stump you guys for an hour, for a change. So I airbrushed out the dead giveaway in this photo, and while I left in one tiny hint, to me this isn't one that should be solved in a minute.
     Of course I could be wrong about that; I invariably am.
     So where is this large rambling white wooden structure? My hunch is that the reader who guesses it won't have actually been there—off the beaten trail, to say the least.  But someone might be able to figure it out. 
      The winner will receive ... not a poster, that's getting old. How about this lovely and inspirational desk flag? I used the line to title my fourth book, and bought dozens of the little flags, thinking they'd be a good promotion giveaway for the book. They weren't, the book sank like a stone, which I suppose is apt. Anyway, the winner takes one away, which will only leave me with 10 or 2o. Place you guesses below. Good luck, have fun. 

"Keeps rainin', all the time...."

     How does God know it's the Blues Fest this weekend in Chicago? And why, knowing that, does He send the rain? Thunderstorms off and on all weekend. Tonight might be merely damp, if we're lucky. A philosophical quandary. Maybe the deity hates the blues, maybe He's just establishing the proper context. I don't have to make the obvious blues/rain connection. Your heart breaks, the skies open up. That's life.
     At least that's my belief. I did not, I admit crunch the numbers to see if it rains more on Blues Fest than other days in mid-June. That's doesn't seem worth doing. Besides, few people confronted with facts contrary to their beliefs change those beliefs—easier to ignore discordant facts and keep plowing forward—and I might as well be one of them, at least in this regard. As this column shows, I've held my Blues Fest=Rain conviction for a long, long time. It also shows how, unlike beliefs, fashions change. I almost never wear a suit today. What would be the purpose? Though I still have that tailor-made blue silk suit that I bought in Thailand, though I' know better than to try it on. 

     I'm writing this on casual Friday, which means that instead of wearing a coat and tie, I'm wearing jeans and a golf shirt. I don't know if that frees me up to soar the empyrean heights; we'll see.
     Frankly, I prefer wearing a suit. First off, there are more pockets. Like many men, I carry a lot of stuff. There is a wallet and keys, pens, sunglasses, my security card, a pocketknife, a handkerchief. It gets quite bulky stuffed into jean pockets -- a suit jacket has room for all that gear, plus whatever newspaper clippings, bar matches and folded letters I pick up through the day.
     There also is a certain feeling of readiness you get from wearing a suit. This is a job where literally anything can happen, and if you're dressed down, well, it can be one of those memories that causes you to flinch for the rest of your life.
     Two incidents come to mind. One was on a Saturday night. I was working the late shift -- 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. Typically, if I'd be sent out, I'd be sent to a fire. So I wore jeans and a T-shirt. No fire that night. But I did get sent to the Palmer House, I believe, for a black-tie dinner for the Israeli prime minister, attended by the brass of the newspaper. Not a good moment.
     Even worse was a black-tie AIDS benefit. The men there really knew how to don a tuxedo. I went to this benefit, again at the last minute, wearing jeans and a ragged linen short-sleeved shirt that had begun to fall apart. I was literally hiding behind plants, scooting up to men dressed like the cast of a Noel Coward play. I would apologize profusely, get a quote while trying to scrunch myself up into a little ball, then hurry back behind a chair to hide until I worked my courage up to sally out again and grab another quote.
     A suit is so much easier. Lots of men grumbled when the word was put out, a few years back, that reporters at the newspaper were expected to dress properly. That was a shock to people used to dressing as they pleased -- I had once come to work in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt.
     But I didn't grumble; I felt liberated. The beauty of suits is that you don't have to think. Just make sure you aren't wearing the same one you wore yesterday, find a tie that doesn't clash terribly, and you're on your way.
     Perhaps because I don't deal with software companies, I have never gotten into trouble with the suit. Yes, I got a few long looks hanging around the dock at Montrose Harbor, chatting with boaters in tank tops and cutoffs. And there was that terrible Blues Fest.
     As you may know, it always rains at Blues Fest. Always. They might as well call it Rain Fest. I drew the short straw one evening, and went over there just as a monsoon of biblical proportions was lashing Grant Park. I happened to be wearing a blue pinstriped suit, tailor-made for me, and black wing tips -- the best outfit I owned.
     Of course I stayed under cover, by the bandshell. Until I noticed, way out in the grass, one lone person -- this goof, sitting all by himself, holding a garbage bag over his head, listening to the music in the driving rain.
     I at first tried to ignore him, tried to pretend that I didn't have to do what I had to do. But duty called. I'll never forget the slow slog through that mudfield, the shiny wing tips sinking into the mire, the rain matting the blue silk against my body.
     I got to the man and flipped open my notebook, the rain instantly soaking the paper, the ink running down the page.
     "I see you're enjoying yourself here at the Blues Fest," I said.
     "Oh yes," he said. "I'm a big blues fan."

              —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Aug. 18, 1998

John Paul Stevens bridges the past, future

    Tuesday morning was quiet, which is bad for a newspaper. My column for the next day was already done, and I was prowling around for something to do. One of our crack editors, John O'Neill, had pity on me, and suggested I might like to go to Harold Washington Library, where former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens was giving a talk. He didn't have to ask twice. Hearing him speak perked me up considerably, and I hope it perks you up too.

     Charles Lindbergh gave John Paul Stevens a bird.
     It was the summer of 1927, a few months after Lindbergh became the most famous man in the world by flying from New York to Paris. He was checking out of his Chicago hotel room, and had more presents than he knew what to do with. So he gave the boy in knickers a caged pigeon.
     “I named it ‘Lindy,’” Stevens told a packed house at the Harold Washington Library Tuesday, during an hour-long conversation hosted by the Chicago Bar Association that quick-stepped through his very long and most extraordinary life, beginning as a privileged child of Jazz Age Chicago — his father built the Stevens Hotel, long since known as the Conrad Hilton, now the Hilton Chicago — hitting its stride in mid-life as the third-longest serving justice on the United States Supreme Court, and, for the past five years, enjoying a vigorous retirement.
     Steven is 95 years old. He still plays tennis and swims in the ocean.
     Here was a man who met Amelia Earhart. Who is certain that Babe Ruth really did point into the stands at Wrigley Field during the 1932 World Series, predicting where he’d hit his homer, the famous “Called Shot,” because Stevens, then 12, was there and saw him do it.
     It was about a half hour into the program, a conversation with Judge Ann Claire Williams, of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, when he was talking about being a Navy cryptographer in World War II, that I began to worry we’d never get to the Supreme Court part of his life, the way that two-thirds of the way through “Moby-Dick,” readers can start to wonder if the White Whale is ever showing up.
     But by the late 1940s, while a top student at Northwestern University Law School, he’s at the Supreme Court, clerking for Justice Wiley Rutledge, an FDR liberal nominee. Stevens was a Chicago lawyer in the 50′s and 60′s — teaching himself to fly and buying a plane in 1967 so he could more easily visit clients. In 1970, a former classmate from his undergraduate days at the University of Chicago, Sen. Chuck Percy — “The Wonder Boy of Illinois,” president of Bell & Howell at 25 — tapped him to be a judge on the 7th Circuit, and five years later Gerald Ford elevated him to the Supreme Court.
     Over the next 35 years, Stevens rendered more than 1,400 opinions in a career that defies summation, at least here. He was liberal and, as such, his beliefs could actually mature and change. Williams highlighted the evolution of Stevens’ thought regarding death penalty, from finding it constitutional in Gregg V. Georgia in 1976, to deeming it “cruel and unusual” — and thus banned by the Constitution — for people with mental handicaps in Atkins v. Virginia in 2002, to finding it morally wrong altogether in Baze v. Rees in 2008.
     “The penalty really does not fit in our society anymore,’ Stevens said.
     His advice to young lawyers ranged from the value of studying poetry — which he found “extremely valuable” on the bench because “it helped me in my work as a judge” — to the best way to counteract a bad day: “drink at lunch” (advice he couldn’t have taken too often, or he wouldn’t have made it to 95).
     Riding the Divvy back to the paper, I tried to synthesize Stevens’ life. Despite the siren call of nostalgia — it’s more pleasant to bask in the glorious past than than figure out the confusing present — Stevens didn’t dwell too much in yesteryear. True, his first book, ”Five Chiefs,” was about the five chief justices he worked under. But unlike many men younger than himself, Stevens throws himself at the future, still, and his second book, “Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution,” urges exactly that. Some of his suggestions are sadly impossible under the current state of political and moral cowardice — he thinks the 2nd amendment should apply only to Americans serving in militias — but some might actually happen, such as a constraint on gerrymandering, the slicing up of electoral districts for political manipulation, a practice perfected in Chicago and one that both parties see is corroding what’s left of our democracy.
     “I hope I’m that sharp when I’m 95,” I said to someone as I related Stevens talk, without too much conviction. Then, recognizing that I’ll be long relegated to a bronze urn in the back of a linen closet by 95, I decided to hope for something perhaps a little more realistic. “I wish I were that sharp now.”