In his zeal to paint a balanced portrait of the 24-year-old business relationship between the reigning lord of the sports world, Jerry Reinsdorf, and the man who plays the executive vice-president for his substantial holdings, Howard Pizer, columnist Ben Joravsky conceded far too much to his subject’s point of view. (“Reinsdorf’s Secret Weapon,” September 20.) The result was embarrassing, I’m afraid. Like the image of the storyteller who at some point in telling his tale realizes that he’s also a character in the story, cut from the same cloth as the greater fiction, Joravsky’s method of letting some of the players around Reinsdorf’s sports empire on Chicago’s south and west sides tell their own tale was no favor to the truth. The rest of the Chicago-area media have been giving the man that kind of pass for years.
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Notice the fingerprints all over the scene of the crime. Pizer says the White Sox had an engineering study, and that it showed the “old Comiskey was in horrible shape”; then for his part, Joravsky trots out “some fans” who don’t believe a word of the “owners’ original engineering report.” And, voila! Balance was achieved. The conscientious reporter has done his job.
There’s only one problem with Joravsky’s account, as far as I can tell: There never was an “original engineering report” for “some fans” not to believe it. In his trying to balance the contentious views of the White Sox and their fans on this particular issue, Joravsky has fixed the game. Arnold Rothstein’s “Black Sox” could have been starters on this team.
You read that right: “reconstruction on this exact site for the sake of historic preservation is not in the best interest of the vast majority of the parties involved.” The rest is history. A political conclusion smuggled into a single paragraph near the end of a bona fide structural engineering study was allowed to overrule the hard data presented in the engineering study proper, and ruled the day.
