Roger Grossman
News Now Warsaw
Teams have slogans they rally around, and the older you get, the less slogans influence you.
But one of the best slogans I have ever heard is “respect all, fear none.”
I think it’s one of the best because it applies so well to sports and to every other aspect of life.
We overlook some things in our lives that we shouldn’t, and we do that because we just don’t think of them as being a realistic threat to us.
Here is an example: A guy’s foot starts to bother him. It’s not a big deal and he’s able to get around fine, but he notices it.
Two weeks later, it’s getting worse. It hurts whenever he’s awake, but he doesn’t want to go to the doctor for it. Two weeks after that he’s really feeling it, but the pain is coming from the bottom of his foot so he can’t see it.
He gets a mirror and positions it so he can see the other side of his foot and realizes that he’s got an infection and it looks nasty.
He goes to the doctor, and the infection is spreading. It’s too late to fix with medication, and the recommendation is amputation.
The man didn’t take the pain seriously, and it cost him dearly.
The proverbial pain on the bottom of the State of Illinois’s and the City of Chicago’s ‘foot’ is an infection, and they have ignored it to the point that they could lose the Bears.
The State of Illinois and the City of Chicago have long been under the impression that “the Bears would never move out of the city, let alone the state.”
And maybe they still won’t, but the events of the past week say otherwise.
A few weeks back, the city of Hammond announced that it was finalizing a proposal to clear up a plot of land on the shores of Wolf Lake that could be used to build a domed stadium for the Bears. The state line runs right down the middle of that body of water.
Chicago collectively giggled at that news, but it turns out the Bears front office wasn’t laughing along.
Then things got “real” last week when the Indiana Senate passed SB 27, which would create an organization whose objective would be to raise money for, build and lease a stadium that would house the Bears and could host lots of other events — sporting and otherwise.
That news had a lot of politicians in Chicago and Springfield spitting their coffee across the room.
Then those same politicians started to gag on their own spit when the Bears issued a statement describing the bill as “the most significant move” in their process of replacing Soldier Field as home of the Bears.
It’s important to note here that no agreement was announced. There is no handshake agreement in place.
But the Bears have turned their attention to Hammond.
The responses have ranged from “they can’t do that” to “What would Papa Bear Halas say?”
Well, they can do that and they just might. And Coach Halas would have put his foot down long before this and said, “Get a deal done in Chicago or find someone who will work with us.”
It’s here in the conversation that I must remind you that the Bears already bought the piece of land formerly known as the Arlington Park racetrack property—326 acres at a price tag of $197 million.
That was three years ago, and the Bears not only haven’t turned a single shovel of dirt in Arlington Heights, but they are still accepting offers.
The Bears are like the prettiest girl in school, who has 8 invitations to the prom but is waiting to see how many others come in before she decides who to go with.
The city of Chicago and the State of Illinois have disrespected their neighbors to the east for too long, and now they can’t do that anymore.
While it’s still hard to imagine the Bears not being in Chicago, the prospects of them not being downtown any longer have been there for a long time, but no one has moved to ensure that they would stay.
The State of Indiana has risen up and punched Illinois and Chicago right in the face, and they deserved it.
And now, the game is on! Indiana’s proposal to bring the Bears across the state line is legit and everyone knows it.
Now, do the Bears really want to move out of the city and the state? Not being in that meeting room at Halas Hall when these discussions are taking place makes it hard to know for sure.
Is Indiana being used in this by the Bears to twist the arms of the Illinois legislature even harder? Quite possibly. But even if it plays out that way and the Bears don’t move to Hammond, the Hoosier State and The Region come out looking like champs.
Other businesses in other industry sectors will most certainly look at our state differently after this. They will investigate us and the business climate here, and they will like what they see. They will ask themselves, “if they were willing to do that for the Bears, what might they do for us to move there?”
Businesses and residents are leaving Illinois and Chicago because of the increasing tax burden and social policy approach they have exhibited.
Maybe it will take losing the Bears for them to start looking at the bottom of their feet.
